Withdrawn from OAL on September 8, 2026. The Board of Forestry approved the statewide Zone 0 regulation on August 19 and filed it on August 28, but OAL now records that filing as withdrawn. It is not in effect, it is not under review, and it has no effective date. What changes, and when.
The Zone Zero Report California defensible space, fencing & gates · tracked and explained

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Zone 0 developments, as they happen

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August 19, 2026: the Board of Forestry approved the statewide Zone 0 regulation. It is not in effect yet. Office of Administrative Law review comes next, with a five-day public comment period, then publication by the Secretary of State. We will post the effective date here the day it is set. Full status.

October 2026

Oct 4: Correction: we told Fallbrook, Ramona and San Marcos they had no Zone 0 rule. All three do, and we had already corrected this once on a single page

We told readers in Fallbrook, Ramona and San Marcos that no Zone 0 rule applied to them. All three have one. Fallbrook is served by the North County Fire Protection District, Ramona by the San Diego County Fire Protection District since August 2022, and San Marcos by the San Marcos Fire Protection District, which is the City of San Marcos's own fire agency and also covers unincorporated land. All three districts are named in the County of San Diego's 2026 Wildland-Urban Interface Code, whose section 604.12.1 requires Zone 0 to be "continuous hardscape or non-combustible materials" and prohibits mulch. North County Fire Protection District has been a row on our own register for weeks, which makes this worse and not better. The error was reading a list of place names as a list of cities: Fallbrook and Ramona are unincorporated communities, so the instrument governing them was never going to be a city ordinance. What survives is the narrower claim we actually checked, that the incorporated cities of Escondido, El Cajon, Chula Vista, Carlsbad and Poway have no Zone 0 ordinance of their own. The worse half is that we found this error once already. On August 24, 2026 we corrected it and published a dated note, on one page. The sentence was on seven, including a frequently-asked question and the JSON-LD copy of that question that search engines read, and the other six went on saying the wrong thing for forty-one more days. A correction that reaches one page of seven is not a correction, it is a note to ourselves. Nothing in our build compared what we had corrected against what we were still publishing, which is a check that never existed rather than a check that was defeated. There is now a CORRECTED-CLAIM-STILL-LIVE guard holding a list of claims our own correction notes say are wrong; if one survives anywhere outside a correction note or a dated archive, the build fails. Tested by reinjecting the old sentence and watching it fail, then removing it again. Adding an entry to that list is now part of making a correction. The find came out of a bigger one. The County of San Diego's 2026 WUI Code, adopted by Board of Supervisors ordinance and effective April 2, 2026, is one document containing the ordinances of twelve named fire protection districts: Alpine, Bonita-Sunnyside, Deer Springs, Lakeside, North County, Rancho Santa Fe, Rincon Del Diablo, San Diego County Fire, San Marcos, San Miguel, Valley Center and Vista. Its Zone 0 section is operative code, not an appendix. Our register lists three of those twelve. The other nine are not absent because we think they have no rule; every row here names an adopting instrument and a date, we have those for three, and the April 2 county code may supersede the January 1 district ordinances we cite for them. We are working through it and will add rows as each is pinned down. A reader in one of the nine should not wait for us: the county's own code names your district and carries a Zone 0 section, so assume it applies and ask your district. Nothing here changes the statewide position, which is unchanged again today: file 2026-0828-03E still reads "Withdrawn, September 8, 2026", no Zone 0 row is under review, and no statewide rule is in effect. Read the full page.

Oct 4: The only account of why the Zone 0 filing was withdrawn is one unquoted sentence in a non-profit's write-up, and the Board has still published nothing

An explanation for the September 8 withdrawal exists, it is the only one anywhere, and it is third-hand. Wildfire Los Angeles, a publication of the fire-safety non-profit MySafe:LA, published a piece on the withdrawal on September 11, 2026 bylined "MySafe:LA PIO". One sentence in it is the whole of the explanation: "Information subsequently provided by the Board indicates that the withdrawal is procedural, allowing the Board to address technical edits and questions before resubmitting." The same piece says no exact timetable for resubmission has been provided, and as of today nothing has been resubmitted; OAL's under-review table still has no Zone 0 row. We are reporting it with its weight attached, because the weight is the point. That sentence is not a quotation. It names no person at the Board, gives no date for when the Board said it, and points at no document. "Information subsequently provided" could be an email, a phone call or a remark at a meeting and we cannot tell which. We have not spoken to MySafe:LA, we are not suggesting they invented it, and a reporter paraphrasing a straight answer from an agency is ordinary practice. It is simply not the same kind of thing as a document, and saying which kind of thing you are looking at is this site's whole method. What we could check, we checked today. The Board has published nothing about the withdrawal on any surface of its own: its News Releases and Announcements page carries a Zone 0 press release dated August 19, 2026 headed "Board Approves First-in-the-Nation Zone 0 Policy at August Meeting" and nothing since, and its Defensible Space page still says the Board continues to work with OAL on "a final review" without mentioning a withdrawal at all. OAL has published the fact and no reason. On September 11 we said the timing was consistent with two things, an agency pulling a package it expected to lose and a defect both sides preferred to fix off the clock, and that we would not guess between them. There is now third-hand support for the second. That moves our confidence slightly and changes nothing about the law: no statewide rule is in force, no clock is running, and a resubmission promised to a third party with no date on it is not a filing. We also have a line of our own to own. That September 11 entry ended "No news outlet has reported the withdrawal as of tonight." The Wildfire Los Angeles piece is dated the same day and we cannot establish whether it went up before or after we published, so we are not claiming we were beaten and not claiming we were not. The sentence was the problem: a negative claim about the entire press that we had no way to verify, and one search four days later would have found the exception. The entry stands as written, because dated entries here are a record and rewriting them to flatter ourselves is the worse offence, but the tracker now carries a note about it and we will not make that shape of claim again. The honest narrower version: three weeks on, coverage of the withdrawal remains very thin, and several pages ranking well for Zone 0 searches still describe the rule as heading for approval. Housekeeping with a point to it. The tracker's dated observations had gone stale and failed the build twice in nine days while the generated status note stayed current, for the obvious reason that one was generated and the others were typed by hand. Both now come out of a single CHECKED constant in build/gen_status_note.py, which also carries the rule that makes it honest: moving that date asserts you re-read OAL's two tables, the Board's Proposed Rule Packages page and the Board's Defensible Space page that day, and it must never be bumped to make a build pass. All four were read today. Read the full page.

Oct 1: The Board has no October meeting. Its next sitting is November 4 and 5, and nothing else moved this week

Nothing moved on the Zone 0 package between September 27 and today, and the reason that is worth a dated entry rather than silence is that the calendar now rules out the most obvious way it could have moved. The Board of Forestry's published 2026 schedule lists "October No Meeting" in terms. Its remaining dates this year are November 4 and 5 and December 8 and 9, both at the Resources Building in Sacramento; September 22 to 24 at Jamestown was the last of the three designated travel meetings. So there will be no noticed public Board discussion of anything next month. We are putting that narrowly on purpose. It does not mean nothing can happen in October: we have not established what the Board would procedurally have to do to put this package back in front of OAL, and we are not assuming it needs a meeting, since the original filing on August 28 followed the August 19 vote by nine days and was an administrative act. Everything else we check was unchanged this morning. OAL's Recent Actions Taken on Emergency Regulations still carries file 2026-0828-03E as "Withdrawn, September 8, 2026". The Emergency Regulations Under Review table has no Zone 0 row and no Board of Forestry row at all; it has in fact shrunk from nine filings to six since last week, none of them ours. The Board's Proposed Rule Packages page still lists Zone 0 Defensible Space under the heading saying the regulations have been filed with OAL, with no mention of a withdrawal. The Board's Defensible Space page still carries the September 2026 guidance document with its effective date left as a blank line, and still carries the paragraph saying the Board continues to work with OAL on "a final review" of a package OAL's own tables show as withdrawn; both are covered on the tracker. No October board binder has been posted yet, and the most recent meeting minutes on the Board's site are still June 2026, so there is no minuted record of the September meeting or of the August 19 adoption vote. No statewide Zone 0 rule is in effect, no compliance clock is running, and the local ordinances on our register and the insurance rule are unaffected. Read the full page.

September 2026

Sep 27: Correction: the tracker's stage table said the OAL comment period was open now and publication pending, nineteen days after the filing was withdrawn

The status tracker's stage table, under the heading "Adopted is not the same as in effect", gave the OAL public comment period as "Open now, closes September 2, 2026" and Secretary of State publication as "Pending". Both were true when that table was written on August 29 and both were false from September 8, when the filing was withdrawn. They were live for nineteen days on the page whose entire subject is other people's stale status claims, which is as bad as it sounds. The table now reads: comment period closed September 2, 2026; OAL decision none, and none coming on this filing, because it was withdrawn on September 8 before OAL approved or disapproved anything; Secretary of State publication not reached; effective date not set. A dated correction note sits on the table itself and the corrections index picks it up. Why it survived the rewrite of September 11, when the banner, the per-page status note on 86 pages and the narrative sections were all corrected: our EXPIRED-COMMENT-WINDOW guard reads sentences, and a table has none. The subject was in one cell, "Public comment period at OAL (five days)", and the predicate in the next, "Open now, closes September 2, 2026", so the joined text put the cell boundary between the words every pattern was looking for. That is the third time this one rule has been beaten by a shape rather than by a fact: a pronoun defeated it on September 11, the social queue was outside it entirely on September 4, and now a table. The rule kept being keyed on grammar when the thing it polices is a date. It now also matches on the printed closing date of any window that has passed appearing near the word "open", whatever grammar or markup sits between them, and the pattern is derived from the window list rather than typed so a future window cannot be added without being covered. Six cases are checked, including the exact table text that escaped, the pronoun sentence, and the deliberately careful Marin grant sentence that must not fire. Read the full page.

Sep 27: The Board has published the Zone 0 guidance document with the effective date left as a blank line, and its website says the package is in "final review" at OAL when OAL says it was withdrawn

The Board of Forestry has published the Zone 0 guidance document, and its title page leaves the effective date as a blank line. "Guidance for establishing and maintaining defensible space for Zones 0-2", forty pages, dated September 2026, is now on the Board's Defensible Space page. It was not there when we checked on August 25 and we cannot say which day it went up. Under the title it reads: "Adopted by the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection on August 19, 2026 / Effective date of updated Zone Zero Regulations: __________, 2026 / (This document will be officially published on the future effective date of the Zone 0 regulations.)" The Board printed the underscores, the comma and the year and left the date out, because there is no date to put in it, and the document says of itself that it is not yet officially published. Its first footnote gives the same mechanism we have: the effective date is the date the regulations are filed with the Secretary of State following approval by OAL. Whether posting it satisfies the Public Resources Code 4291(g)(1) precondition is a legal question we are not answering. We said we would link it the day it appeared, and this is the link. Second, and sharper: the same page carries a paragraph saying "The Board and Board staff continue to work with the Office of Administrative Law on a final review of the Zone 0 Regulations Rule Package. We will update this page when this review is complete and when the California Secretary of State publishes the final regulation." We checked OAL the same morning. File 2026-0828-03E still reads "Withdrawn, September 8, 2026" on Recent Actions Taken on Emergency Regulations, and the Under Review table carries no Zone 0 row and no Board of Forestry row at all. There is no pending OAL review to complete. Both statements can be literally true if "continue to work with" means informal consultation about a package the Board intends to refile, which leaves no trace on either table. It is "a final review of the Zone 0 Regulations Rule Package" that misleads, because it describes a pending official review with a decision at the end, and the paragraph does not mention the withdrawal at all. We are not guessing at intent and we have asked nobody. We are putting the two records side by side with dates on both. Third, a divergence in the guidance itself that we are flagging rather than scoring, because we made the same error and corrected it on August 20. The guidance's appendix gives all three fence and gate rows one compliance date, and it is the Local Responsibility Area formula verbatim: "Within 3 years, or 5 years if local agency/CAL FIRE sets timeline". The adopted rule has two clocks and they are opposite. We re-read the August 19 rule pleading today rather than trust our own note, and the file is byte for byte the one we read on August 20, MD5 58274a85700def2b1e1313d784fb45f7. 14 CCR 1298.04(c)(4), the Local Responsibility Area track, gives three years extendable to five by the local agency. 14 CCR 1299.03(e)(4), the State Responsibility Area track, gives five years, movable only by the Director and never below three. The guidance prints the LRA formula and applies it to both, citing both. For an SRA homeowner that reads as a three-year deadline where the rule gives five, and it inverts who has to act. A third figure appears in the guidance's prose, where the fences section says an attached fence or gate needs a noncombustible gate or panel "within five years of the Zone 0 regulation adoption"; adoption was August 19, 2026, and every clock in the regulation and every footnote in that same appendix runs from the effective date instead. We read that as loose drafting rather than a third rule. Nothing turns on any of it today, because no clock of either length is running. Also settled: ZZRA, which appeared unexpanded in the Board's rulemaking matrix and which we declined to guess at on September 23, is the Zone Zero Regulatory Advisory Committee, a special advisory committee of the Board established in 2025, chaired by Terrence O'Brien with Elicia Goldsworthy and J. Lopez. The legal position is unchanged: no statewide Zone 0 rule is in effect, no compliance clock is running, the Board has not refiled, and the local ordinances on our register and the insurance rule are untouched by any of this. Read the full page.

Sep 23: CAL FIRE has told the Board its staff are updating websites and training "with the new regulations", fifteen days after the Zone 0 filing was withdrawn

Fifteen days after the Zone 0 package was withdrawn from the Office of Administrative Law, CAL FIRE has told the Board of Forestry that its staff are updating materials "with the new regulations". The line is in the Director's Report to the Board for the September 22 to 24, 2026 meeting, binder item FULL 6, page 16 of 19, in the Office of the State Fire Marshal's wildfire risk reduction and preparedness section. It is a Zone 0 heading with a single bullet under it: "Staff are working to update websites, informational handouts, self-surveys, and multiple training curriculums with the new regulations." We are reporting the sentence and not more than the sentence. This is CAL FIRE, the department, and not the Board, which is the body that makes this rule. It names no file number, no effective date and no compliance deadline. The report's enforcement section elsewhere covers August 6 to September 10, 2026, a window straddling the September 8 withdrawal, so we cannot establish when the bullet was written, and an agency preparing training material for a rule it expects to file again is not doing anything inconsistent with that rule not being in force. What makes it worth publishing is that it is new: we pulled the July and August 2026 Director's Reports and searched both, and neither carries a Zone 0 heading or contains Zone 0, Zone Zero, ember-resistant, 1298 or 1299 anywhere. The September report is the first. A second document in the same binder invites a wrong conclusion and we want to head it off: the Board's rulemaking matrix, item FULL 8(e), updated September 16, shows "Ember Resistant Zone 0" with every date column blank and a status of "Within ZZRA Discussion", which looks like a package reset to nothing. It is not a change. The August matrix, published while the filing was live at OAL, says the same thing in the same row, so that matrix has never carried this package's OAL dates and nothing can be read into their absence now. We do not know what ZZRA stands for, it is expanded nowhere in the binder, and we are not going to guess at it in print. None of this changes the legal position, which we re-checked against both OAL tables this morning: file 2026-0828-03E still reads "Withdrawn, September 8, 2026" in Recent Actions Taken on Emergency Regulations, the under-review table carries no Zone 0 row, the Board has not refiled, and the Board's own Proposed Rule Packages page still lists Zone 0 Defensible Space under the heading saying it has been filed with OAL, with no mention of a withdrawal. No statewide Zone 0 rule is in effect and no compliance clock is running. We also refreshed the dated status note carried on 86 pages and the status tracker to today, and rewrote the tracker's section on the September meeting into the past tense now that it has happened. The meeting agenda has since been reposted as a second revision, still dated September 11, and Zone 0 is not in that revision either. Read the full page.

Sep 12: Correction: we wrote "we have asked the Board" about the Zone 0 withdrawal, and we had not asked the Board

Two items published earlier tonight, the status tracker's section on the withdrawal of the Zone 0 package from the Office of Administrative Law and the feed entry announcing it, both said that we had asked the Board of Forestry why the filing was withdrawn. That was not true. No one sent anything to the Board. The sentence was written as a statement of what we intended to do and published as a statement of what we had done, which is precisely the move this site exists to catch other people making, and it is not excused by being a small sentence in a long piece. Both instances now say what is actually true, which is that if either OAL or the Board publishes an explanation we will report it. Nothing else in either item changes: the withdrawal, its date, the file number, the ten-calendar-day arithmetic and the absence of any published reason were all read from primary sources and all still stand. We have also edited the earlier feed entry in place rather than leaving the false sentence in the archive, and flagged the edit inside that entry. Dated entries on this site are normally left exactly as written, because rewriting the record to match today is itself a form of dishonesty, but an entry an hour old carrying a false claim about our own conduct is not a record worth preserving word for word. Whether to actually put the question to the Board is the publisher's call and not an automated one, so it has not been sent. Read the full page.

Sep 11: The Board posted its September meeting agenda today, three days after withdrawing Zone 0, and Zone 0 is not on it

Following the withdrawal of the Zone 0 package from the Office of Administrative Law on September 8, the checkable question is what the Board of Forestry has scheduled next. Its meeting notice and agenda for September 22, 23 and 24, 2026 at Jamestown carries a posting date of September 11, 2026, which is three days after the withdrawal and makes it the first document the Board has published since it happened. Zone 0 is not in it. We read the notice PDF rather than the meeting page, which does not list agenda items, searched all eight pages covering all three days including the Resource Protection Committee session, and found no occurrence of "Zone 0", "Zone Zero", "defensible", "1298", "1299", "Office of Administrative Law" or "OAL". The regulations item on September 24 lists four rulemaking actions for possible Board action, and they are the Exam Fee Amendments, the Southern Subdistrict and Santa Cruz County noticing rules, the Silvicultural Amendments and a minor clarity-and-consistency package. Public Resources Code 4291 appears once in the whole document, as a citation to section 4291.5 in the title of a fire prevention report, which is a different statute on a different subject. We are publishing that as a narrow claim rather than a broad one. An agenda can be amended before a meeting, a great deal of agency work never appears on one, and we have not established what the Board would procedurally have to do in order to file again, so none of this is a prediction that nothing will happen this month. What it supports is this: there is no scheduled public Board discussion of Zone 0 between now and the end of September. Separately, we looked for any other Zone 0 development this week and found none. No news outlet has reported the withdrawal as of tonight. A local paper published a piece today headlined "State issues final Zone Zero rule" which is a report of the August 19 Board vote, describes it as having happened last month, and does not mention OAL, a filing or a withdrawal. Read the full page.

Sep 11: The Zone 0 package was withdrawn from the Office of Administrative Law on September 8, 2026. It is not approved, not disapproved, and no longer pending

OAL's Recent Actions Taken on Emergency Regulations table now carries file 2026-0828-03E, Zone 0 Defensible Space, Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, with one entry in its action column: "Withdrawn, September 8, 2026". The package is gone from the Emergency Regulations Under Review table, and we checked that page for the strings forestry, defensible, 1298 and zone 0 and found none of them. So the statewide regulation was not approved and was not disapproved. The filing that would have turned the Board's August 19 vote into an enforceable rule was pulled before OAL decided anything, and as of tonight nothing from the Board of Forestry has reappeared on the under-review table. There is no effective date, no compliance clock, and nothing currently in front of OAL. The arithmetic on the date is worth stating because it is public and it is not a coincidence. Government Code 11349.6 says emergency regulations "shall be reviewed by the office within 10 calendar days after their submittal to the office". The package was submitted Friday, August 28. Ten calendar days is Monday, September 7, which was Labor Day, so the next business day was Tuesday, September 8, and that is the date on the withdrawal. The filing was pulled on the day OAL's decision was due. We are reporting that and stopping there: neither OAL nor the Board has published a reason, a withdrawal letter or a notice of any kind, a withdrawal on the deadline is consistent both with an agency pulling a package it expected to lose and with a defect both sides preferred to fix off the clock, and we are not going to guess in public which it was. If either body publishes an explanation we will report it. (Corrected the same evening: this entry first read "We have asked the Board and will publish the answer". No one had asked the Board. See the correction entry at the top of this feed.) Two corrections to our own record come with this. First, between September 8 and tonight this site told readers on 113 pages that the package was under review and that the decision was pending. That was true when it was written on September 4 and false from September 8, and it stayed up for three days. Second, the reason it stayed up is a hole in our own automation, which we would rather describe than quietly patch: build/watch_oal.py read only the under-review table and asked only whether a Zone 0 row had APPEARED. On the morning of September 11 it fetched that table, saw the package was gone, and printed "OAL table changed, but nothing matching Zone 0" before exiting successfully. A disappearance is not an appearance, and nothing was watching the second table. The watcher now reads both tables, treats an arrival, a departure and a recorded action as three separate kinds of news, and fails loudly rather than reporting success if either page will not load. Our build also now refuses to ship a page describing a withdrawn filing as pending, and refuses a per-page status note more than four days old, which is the check that would have caught this on September 9 instead of September 11. One more thing worth knowing if you are checking this yourself: as of tonight the Board of Forestry's own Proposed Rule Packages page still lists Zone 0 Defensible Space under the heading saying the regulations have been filed with the Office of Administrative Law, with the August notice and rule text attached and no mention of a withdrawal. OAL's table is the only place this is published. A withdrawal is also not the end of a rulemaking: an agency can file again, and the same OAL table shows the California School Finance Authority withdrawing a package on September 8 and a filing from the same agency on the same subject appearing the next day under a new number. That is the mechanism and nothing more; it says nothing about what the Board intends. Nothing in this changes what actually binds anyone today. The local ordinances on our register are adopted by cities and fire districts under their own authority and are untouched by a state filing being withdrawn, and the insurance rule has been binding on insurers since 2022. Read the full page.

Sep 5: The page for journalists now leads with the figures a reporter would lift, carries the register as data, and offers to check your copy before it runs

We read the backlink data for this site and for the sites that rank in its subject. Ours has three referring domains and all three are spam. The strongest site in the wildfire-information space earns its links a particular way: the anchor text on its best inbound links is a number. A national business magazine linked the words "the seventh-largest fire"; a UN disaster agency linked "total economic damage"; an entertainment site linked "destroying over 16,000 structures". A reporter needed one figure they could attribute and linked whoever stated it cleanly with a date on it. By contrast a fence company's profile of several hundred referring domains, almost all of them link networks and URL shorteners, produced almost no traffic. So the asset is a figure stated plainly, dated, with the attribution sentence already written, and this site had the figures and had buried them: the register count in a table, the county coverage inside a graphic, the share of rules that say nothing about fences in a bullet halfway down a page. The page for journalists now opens with those figures in four cards, each counted from the published tables on every build rather than typed, because the guards in this build exist precisely because typed copies of these numbers drifted. Each card carries the sentence we would stand behind if it were quoted. Below the findings the page now links the register's CSV and JSON, gives a paste-ready citation, and makes an offer we have been making privately: send us the Zone 0 paragraph before it runs and we will check the fence and status sentences against the adopted text the same working day, with a citation to the section and no pitch. The three errors we see most are named there. The page is now linked from the contact page's own press section, which had somehow never pointed at it, from the about page, and from the register, and /press and /media now resolve to it. Nothing about the twelve findings changed. Read the full page.

Sep 5: Zone 0 tells you to replace the fence and says nothing about who pays for it. Civil Code 841 does

Every Zone 0 instrument we have read, the state regulation, the local ordinances on our register and the guidance documents behind them, speaks to a responsible person for a structure and says nothing about the second household using the other side of the same fence. The law that governs that is ordinary property law. California Civil Code 841, rewritten in 2013 and effective January 2014, presumes adjoining landowners share equally in the reasonable cost of replacing a fence dividing their properties. So the default answer is half. Two things complicate it. First, the statute requires thirty days of written notice before you incur costs, and it specifies what that notice must contain: the nature of the problem, the proposed solution, the estimated cost, the proposed cost sharing approach and the timeline. Zone 0 work tends to start with a contractor rather than a letter, and that order weakens a claim for contribution. Second, the equal-share presumption is rebuttable, and a fire upgrade fits the rebuttal test unusually well. The statute directs a court to weigh whether the financial burden is disproportionate to the benefit received, and a Zone 0 rule attaches to your structure and its first five feet, not to your neighbor's. A neighbor whose house sits well back from the line can argue they are funding a fire measure for a building that is not theirs. There is a version where the benefit is genuinely mutual, and San Diego's guidelines describe it exactly: a single parallel combustible fence between two property owners, or a pair of them with each owner having their own. We also make the point that usually only a five-foot span at one end is in dispute rather than the whole run, so the shared bill is often much smaller than people price it at. What we could not find, and say so on the page, is any published California decision applying Civil Code 841 to a replacement driven by a fire code. The statute plainly applies and its rebuttal test plainly fits; how a court would weigh it here is untested. Separately, this is the keyword research changing our mind in public. We had "california fence law" on a list of terms to target and dropped it after reading its results page, which is Civil Code 841, property-line attorneys and neighbor disputes. That is boundary and cost-sharing intent, not fire, and Zone 0 content cannot honestly rank there. Reading the wrong search results found a real gap instead. Read the full page.

Sep 4: We re-checked the two registries we had not re-checked, and a fire-retardant wood report sold for fencing turns out never to mention fences

On August 31 we withdrew a claim this site had carried on nine pages: that no fence could hold a state fire credential. The mistake was an inference. We had checked whether a fence CATEGORY existed, found none in three registries, and let no category stand in for no credential; a fence turned out to be listed by the State Fire Marshal as a material instead. That left the other two registries unre-examined and open to exactly the same error, on six pages, with no verification date behind either. We have now read both. Both hold up. ASTM Committee F14 writes standards for fences with a published scope covering security, protection, public safety and privacy, and no subcommittee touching fire, though we state the limit that its fact sheet names six of its forty-eight standards, so we have confirmed the scope rather than every title. The ICC Evaluation Service check produced the more useful result. Fire-retardant treated wood is marketed for fencing as compliant with the wildland-urban interface code per ICC-ES evaluation report ESR-1159. That report is real and current, reissued in May 2026. We read all nine pages of it. The words fence and fencing do not appear once. It evaluates fire-retardant-treated wood under the fire-retardant wood treatment section of the building code, its California supplement places the wood in compliance with Section 704A.3, and both supplements describe use in the exterior design and construction of buildings. So a fence can be sold to you as ICC-ES certified, truthfully, on the strength of a report about lumber that never mentions fences. There is a second finding folded into it. One of the three treated-lumber products we named last week from the State Fire Marshal handbook, Chemco's Thermex-FR, sits inside that ICC-ES report as well. The same product carries two genuine credentials from two separate systems, and neither of them certifies a fence. That is the concrete version of the advice we had only been giving in the abstract: the question worth asking a supplier is not whether they have a certificate, but what the certificate actually covers. Separately, the daily reading of the Office of Administrative Law is unchanged. The Zone 0 package remains on the under-review table as file 2026-0828-03E, the recent actions page still has no row for it, and no decision, approval, disapproval or withdrawal has been published. September 7 remains the published expectation for review to finish. Read the full page.

Sep 2: Last day of the comment window: Zone 0 is still on OAL's table, and the actions page has no row for it

September 2 is the fifth and last day of the public comment period on the Zone 0 package, OAL file 2026-0828-03E. Nothing was scheduled to be adopted today, and nothing was. We read OAL at 11 p.m. Pacific. The under-review table still lists the file, and two filings dated September 2 sit above it, so the page is current and the negative is a real one. We also read a second OAL table we had not been citing until tonight, Recent Actions Taken on Proposed Emergency Regulations, which is where an approval, disapproval or withdrawal is recorded with its date. It has no row for this file. Its newest entry is dated September 2, a Division of Boating and Waterways withdrawal, so that page is current too. No decision, no approval, no disapproval, no withdrawal. The Board's own website and CAL FIRE's defensible space page both refused our requests tonight, which is a block on their host and not evidence of anything. September 7 remains the published expectation for OAL to finish its review. Tomorrow the sitewide banner and the status note on every page change from "comment closes September 2" to "comment closed September 2, decision pending", which is prepared and rehearsed; it does not run tonight because the window is open until midnight and this site does not publish "closed" while a comment can still be filed. Read the full page.

Sep 1: Review of our own August 31 work: the San Diego FRTW allowance is in the City's guidelines, not the ordinance, and carries conditions we omitted

Two things happened on August 31 that this feed did not record, which is itself the first correction: a retraction with no feed entry is not much of a retraction. First, we withdrew a claim carried on nine pages, that no fence product could hold a state credential because there is nothing to certify one against. The Office of the State Fire Marshal's WUI Listed Products Handbook, September 2, 2025 edition, carries a steel fencing product listed in Category 8170 as an ignition-resistant material for fencing. The three registries we cited have no fence category, and we still stand behind that; the inference from no category to no credential was the error. Second, we named the three treated-lumber products in that handbook's Category 2520, because our San Diego page told readers the allowance required wood "listed in the OSFM WUI Products Handbook" without ever saying what was in it. Today we reviewed both pieces of work adversarially, and the second one was built on a paraphrase we had never checked. Our San Diego page, and eight others, said "San Diego's ordinance allows" existing vinyl and new fire-retardant-treated wood within five feet. We read San Diego Municipal Code 512.0604 in full today. It names no fence material; its only fence is a setback-reduction clause about noncombustible block walls. The allowances are in the City's Zone 0 Guidelines for Existing Structures, revised April 22, 2026, a guidance document that says of itself it is not enforceable until February 28, 2027 and is subject to change. The guidelines also attach conditions we had dropped: new FRTW fencing must comply with all requirements for vinyl fencing, so it must run parallel and sit at least four feet off the wall, and it must be approved for exterior use; and the guidelines themselves warn that an insurer or IBHS may not accept vinyl or FRTW within five feet. All nine pages now say guidelines, the conditions are on the page, and a guard fails the build if "San Diego's ordinance" is ever again written within a sentence of a vinyl or FRTW allowance. Smaller findings from the same review: four pages said "one steel product is" listed in the present tense, which a second listing would silently falsify, and now say "at least one"; the materials page described Category 8170 as otherwise entirely siding, soffit and trim, and one of its eleven listings is PVC composite boards; and yesterday's commit message said five pages where the count is four. Things the review tested and found sound: the 237-listing count, the page number, the verbatim quote, both commit timestamps against their labels, and the fragment guard, which fails rather than counts. Read the full page.

August 2026

Aug 30: Three more Riverside cities, and their adoption dates undercut the idea that Zone 0 rules spread city to city

The register is at thirty-five jurisdictions. The nine added over August 29 and 30 are Temecula (Ordinance 2025-14, adopted November 18, 2025, Municipal Code Chapter 15.17), Lake Elsinore (Ordinance 1521, adopted November 18, 2025, Chapter 15.58), La Quinta (Ordinance 627, introduced December 2 and adopted December 16, 2025, amending Municipal Code Title 8) and Palm Desert (Ordinance 1439, adopted January 8, 2026, Chapter 15.16), each read from the codified chapter at the city's own publisher, or in La Quinta's case from the adopted ordinance itself, rather than from a news report or a staff report. La Quinta is a useful warning for anyone searching: its fence rule does not live in a fire ordinance at all, but inside the city's whole-code adoption for the 2025 cycle, alongside the plumbing and energy codes. All three carry Riverside County's Section 604.11 in full, including the exception that makes it stricter than the state rule: replacing any part of a non-parallel fence run within five feet of the house means the whole run comes back noncombustible. The state regulation expressly allows combustible repairs to a combustible fence, so these cities have reversed it. How they were found matters more than that they were found. We did not guess at city names. Model ordinances keep their wording while section numbers get renumbered from one code cycle to the next, so we searched the operative sentence itself across the code publishers, and the sentence turned up cities we had no reason to suspect. That method has now moved the Riverside cluster from five to eleven, and closed one of the three leads this site had been carrying: Wildomar, Ordinance 258, introduced October 13 and, in the City Clerk's certification, "duly adopted at a regular meeting held on November 12, 2025." Wildomar is the second-earliest adopter in the county. Beaumont came in the same sweep and came with a correction: this site had said Beaumont's publisher recorded Ordinance No. 1196 as adopted December 16, 2025, and that we had only a draft. The codified chapter names a different instrument, Ordinance No. 1190, section 13, adopted November 4, 2025, which is the same day as Moreno Valley and ties Beaumont for the earliest adopter in the county. We had it filed under probably-eventually when it had in fact gone first. Jurupa Valley closed the list the same day, and the same way: we had been refusing to add a row on an October 16 staff report marked DRAFT, and its codified Chapter 8.05 turns out to carry Section 604.11 credited to Ordinance No. 2025-24, section 6, adopted November 6, 2025. All three cities we named on August 24 as probable but unverified are now rows, and every one of them had adopted earlier than we implied. Line all thirteen up by adoption date and the county comes tenth: nine cities adopted this fence rule before the county adopted its own Ordinance 787.11 on December 9. With no leads left we stopped following documents and swept instead: seven Riverside cities on the same code platform that were not already on the register, reading the building, fire, construction and safety titles of each and looking for the sentence rather than the city. One hit. Banning has the rule, at Chapter 15.11, Ordinance 1613, adopted November 12, 2025, the same day as Wildomar. That makes fourteen Riverside jurisdictions, ten of them ahead of the county, which now comes eleventh. Blythe, Coachella, Eastvale, Hemet, Perris and the City of Riverside itself showed nothing. Read those negatives for exactly what they are: we read the titles whose headings mention building, construction, fire, wildland or safety, not every chapter of every code, and Eastvale matched only two. So it is we looked and did not find it, not it is definitely not there. What makes them worth printing is that all six of those codes are codified current through 2026, late enough to contain a late-2025 adoption if there had been one. The conclusion is the useful part: this fire department's model text did not reach every city it serves. It is a family, not a blanket, and the way to find out which one you are in is to read your own city's code rather than the county's. The dates are the reason this is worth your attention. Two councils adopted the identical text on November 18, 2025 and three more adopted it on November 19: five councils, word for word, across two consecutive days. Now read the date on the county's own instrument. Ordinance 787.11, which is the document everyone including this site identifies as the source of the language, was not adopted until December 9, 2025 and did not take effect until January 7, 2026, which is after all five. A rule cannot spread outward from an ordinance that does not exist yet. What is actually happening is that a county fire department's model text circulates ahead of the code cycle and councils adopt it in turn, which means the useful question for a homeowner is not what their city council decided but what their county fire agency's model ordinance says. Two Riverside cities remain on our list and off the register: Beaumont, where the council adopted the 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code on October 21, 2025 and the meeting packet contains the whole fence rule, but the document we can read is headed "ORDINANCE NO." with the number left blank; and Jurupa Valley, where the text appears in a staff report marked DRAFT. Neither gets a row until we can read its adopted chapter. Separately, correcting ourselves: our myths page said six of the register's jurisdictions impose no fence requirement while the register itself said ten. Counting the table settles it at ten, and the page has been fixed. The guard that should have caught the disagreement could not match the sentence, because the page wrote "six of the twenty-six we have verified impose no fence requirement" and the pattern required the verb to follow the number directly. That is the second time this year a count guard failed silently on a phrasing rather than on a number. It now allows a qualifying phrase, and there are tests for it. A note on this entry itself. It began on August 29 covering three cities and we kept adding to it as the search kept returning more, through August 30. It is now dated to the day that work finished rather than the day it started, because several of the cities named in it, Beaumont and Jurupa Valley and Banning among them, were not found until the second day, and stamping them with the first would misrepresent when we knew them. A site that dates every claim has to date its own entries honestly too. Read the full page.

Aug 30: A third model ordinance family, in Marin, and a town that enacted the placeholder

Riverside and San Diego are the two model-ordinance families this site was built on. Sweeping northern California turned up a third, in Marin, and it behaves differently enough to matter. Marin County, the Town of Fairfax and the Town of Corte Madera share drafting that is plainly one document: an added Section 613.3 defining an "Exterior Wildfire Protection System", an amended Section 603.3.1 requiring a vegetation management plan to delineate "Zone 0 (0'-5'), Zone 1 (5'-30'), Zone 2 (30'-100') fuel management zones from all structures and Zone 3 (10' on either side of the road or driveway)", and an added Section 604.6 headed "Fire Hazard Reduction" whose opening sentence is identical in all three. That sentence contains exactly one slot, and the three adopters filled it differently. Marin County wrote "of the jurisdiction of the Marin County Fire Department". Fairfax wrote "of the Town". Corte Madera wrote "of the jurisdiction of the [Local AHJ]", and its codified municipal code still carries the bracket. AHJ means authority having jurisdiction; it is the placeholder an adopting town was supposed to replace with its own name. This is the same class of evidence as San Diego County publishing a consolidated code that says "Insert your fire protection district" sixteen times, and in one respect it is stronger, because San Diego is openly distributing a template whereas here somebody adopted one and enacted the blank. We are not printing it to embarrass a town of ten thousand people. We are printing it because this site has spent a great many words inferring shared authorship from identical sentences and adoption calendars, and an unfilled placeholder in an enacted code is that same argument with the inference taken out. The half that matters if you live there is different and more practical. Unlike the Riverside and San Diego families, this one names Zone 0 and never regulates it. Across all three Marin codes the phrase appears in only two roles: in the list of zones a vegetation management plan must draw, and in the definition of the area an exterior sprinkler system is designed to wet. Neither prohibits any material in the first five feet of a house. The plainest measure is that the word "fence" does not appear anywhere in the wildland-urban interface chapter of any of the three. So a homeowner in Marin who searches the local code, finds "Zone 0" and concludes that a five-foot rule binds their fence has reached the wrong conclusion from a real document, which is a specific and easy way to be misled. If someone quotes you for fence replacement and points at "Zone 0" in the Marin County, Fairfax or Corte Madera code, ask them which section requires it. None of the three is on our register, for exactly that reason. Read the full page.

Aug 30: We read ninety-four California cities looking for Zone 0 rules and found one. The empty space is the finding

A pattern you can only see in its hits is not really a pattern, so we went looking for where these rules are not. We took ninety-four California cities that publish their codes on the same platform and were not already on our register, read the building, construction, fire, wildland, safety and health titles of every one, and searched for both operative sentence families and for "Zone 0" beside any noncombustible or hardscape wording. Fourteen in Los Angeles and Ventura counties: Agoura Hills, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Westlake Village, Rolling Hills, Rolling Hills Estates, Rancho Palos Verdes, Sierra Madre, Bradbury, Azusa, Arcadia, Diamond Bar, Camarillo, Fillmore. Eight in Orange County: Laguna Niguel, Mission Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita, San Clemente, Irvine, Villa Park, Tustin, Laguna Woods. Seven in San Bernardino County: Chino Hills, Big Bear Lake, Apple Valley, Hesperia, Montclair, Grand Terrace, Colton. Then fifteen more around the Bay Area and beyond: Pasadena, Long Beach, Oakland, Richmond, San Rafael, Novato, Vallejo, Redding, Truckee, Portola Valley, Los Gatos, Saratoga, Lafayette, Moraga, Orinda. One city in all of that had a Zone 0 rule in its own municipal code, and it was Banning. Every one of those codes is current through 2026, so this is not a case of reading stale volumes. These are also not low-risk places. Calabasas, Agoura Hills, Rancho Palos Verdes and Sierra Madre are among the most wildfire-exposed municipalities in California, and Oakland's hills carry one of the most consequential wildfire histories in the state. Banning is not obviously more exposed than any of them. So whatever decides which cities have a local Zone 0 rule, it is not how much fire risk the city faces. What it tracks is who writes your fire code. All eight of the Orange County cities are served by the Orange County Fire Authority. The single Orange County city on our register is Laguna Beach, which is one of the ten cities in that county that run their own municipal fire department. Riverside County Fire, the Ventura County Fire Protection District and San Diego County's twelve-district code office each produced model text and the cities they serve carry it, in some cases word for word. Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino county cities are served by agencies that have not, and carry nothing. We also tested and discarded half of our own first explanation. We had written that a city has its own rule either because its county agency wrote model text or because it runs its own fire department, and the second half came from a single case. Oakland, Pasadena and Long Beach all run their own fire departments and all have nothing, so running your own department permits a city to write a Zone 0 rule and does not predict it will. The practical consequence for a homeowner is the reason to publish any of this: searching your own city's municipal code can return nothing while a rule still reaches you, because it lives in your fire agency's ordinance instead. If a county agency or a regional authority runs your fire department, look at what that agency adopted. This is a sweep and not a census, we read fire and building titles rather than every chapter, and a single county agency adopting model text could move a dozen cities at once. Read the full page.

Aug 30: San Diego County publishes its model fire ordinance with the blanks still in it

This site has spent a week arguing that local Zone 0 rules travel as model text rather than as thirty separate ideas, and arguing it mostly from evidence that takes explaining: identical sentences, adoption dates two days apart, a county that adopted its own rule eleventh. San Diego County supplies a version that needs no explaining. Its 2026 Consolidated Fire Code, ninth edition, effective January 1, 2026, is one document written for twelve fire protection districts to adopt, and the findings section is a fill-in template. The phrase "Insert your fire protection district" appears in the effective document sixteen times, as in: "As required by Health and Safety Code section 17958 the Insert your fire protection district Board of Directors does herewith make express findings that amendments to the California Building Standards Code are necessary for the protection of the public health, safety and welfare." That is not an embarrassment and we do not present it as one. It is a template because it is meant to be a template, one county code office drafting findings that twelve boards will each adopt under their own name. It simply happens to be the clearest possible evidence for the thing we have been inferring elsewhere from calendars. The same document carries something more consequential. Our open questions page asks what counts as "home hardening" under the building-code freeze that Assembly Bill 130 imposed on local residential building standards from October 2025 to June 2031, because two of the six exceptions turn on that undefined phrase and nobody has tested it. We had a fire district's recital and a city building official's staff report. This is a county instrument covering twelve districts, and it invokes the exception by name: "To comply with conditions outlined from AB130 citing H&S Code Section 13869.7 the Board of Directors of said fire district cites due to the extreme conditions listed below in findings home hardening and defensible space to protect the public requires local amendments." Three things there are worth separating. It names AB 130 and Health and Safety Code section 13869.7 together, which is the fire-district route through the freeze rather than the general one. It treats defensible space as travelling alongside home hardening through that door, which is broader than the statutory phrase looks on its face. And it was drafted centrally for twelve boards, so it is not one district's view of its own authority. Also today: the register reaches thirty-five with the North County Fire Protection District, whose Ordinance 2025-03 carries the San Diego family's Zone 0 text word for word. And a currency warning for anyone quoting San Diego law. The 2026 Consolidated Fire Code contains no Section 4907 and does not use the phrase "Zone 0" anywhere. The rule did not vanish; the 2025 code cycle moved it out of the fire code and into each district's separate wildland-urban interface ordinance, where the same words sit at Section 604.12.1. If someone hands you a quote citing Section 4907.9.1 of the Consolidated Fire Code as current authority, they are citing a retired edition. Read the full page.

Aug 29: Filed: the Zone 0 package went to OAL on August 28 as file 2026-0828-03E, and the comment window is open now

The waiting part is over. The Board of Forestry's Zone 0 package is on the Office of Administrative Law's Emergency Regulations Under Review table, submitted August 28, 2026, file number 2026-0828-03E, subject "Zone 0 Defensible Space", adopting Title 14 sections 1298.01 through 1298.04 and amending sections 1299.01 through 1299.03, with Jane Van Susteren as the contact person. Two things in that entry are worth reading rather than skipping: the package adopts the 1298 sections, which are the Local Responsibility Area rules, and amends the 1299 sections, which are the State Responsibility Area rules, so the two-track structure is visible in the filing itself; and sections 1299.04 and 1299.05 are absent, consistent with what we concluded earlier about 1299.05. This is not an effective date. Filing starts OAL's review rather than ending it, and the rule becomes effective when OAL approves the package and it is filed with the Secretary of State, neither of which has happened. What did change is that the five-day public comment window is open as we write this and closes on or about September 2, which makes it the last formal opportunity for public input. The Board has also posted the rule text as filed, which retires a caveat this site has carried since August 19: every quotation we published came with the warning that we were reading a pre-meeting deliberative draft and that floor amendments would not appear in it. We read the filed text against our own quotations on August 29. Every fence provision matches word for word, including the attachment trigger, the "whether attached or parallel" parenthetical that appears only on the Local Responsibility Area track, and the repair allowance. Both phase-in clocks match too: three years in the LRA extendable to five by the local fire agency, five in the SRA on a timeline the Director may shorten but not below three, with fences in the last phase on both tracks. Two defects we flagged were not cleaned up on the way and are now in front of OAL as they stand: the potted-plant provisions still use the defined term "Noncombustible" on one track and the undefined "non-Combustible" on the other, and section 1299.02 still carries two definitions both lettered (b). Read the full page.

Aug 25: The Zone 0 comment window opens August 28 and closes September 2, and OAL review is expected done by September 7

A fuller timeline for the statewide rule is now in public, and it comes with something readers can actually act on. The California Special Districts Association, reporting on the August 19 hearing, sets it out as three dates: August 28, regulatory text goes to the Office of Administrative Law and a five-day public comment period begins; September 2, comments close and OAL begins its final review; September 7, that review is expected to be completed. The first two match the Board's own notice of proposed emergency action. The third is new, and it is the first published estimate of when the last procedural step finishes. Updated the same evening, after reading the Board's own Notice of Proposed Emergency Action rather than relying on the secondhand account: the window is five calendar days from OAL's posting rather than from the filing date, a comment must state on its face that it is about an emergency regulation and name the topic (Title 1 CCR sections 55(b)(1) through (4)) or it may not count, and a copy must also go to the Board's specified contact person, named in the notice as Executive Officer Tony Andersen. Comments reach OAL at [email protected], by fax on (916) 323-6826, or by mail to the OAL Reference Attorney, 300 Capitol Mall, Suite 1250, Sacramento. OAL's job is to decide whether the package satisfies the Administrative Procedure Act, so a comment about the rulemaking itself carries further than a general opinion about wildfire policy. The notice adds, in its own words, that the Board is "not required and, in this instance, not likely to respond to comments submitted." We have no stake in what anyone says and we are not organising anything; we are flagging the window because five days is short and almost nobody else will mention it. The same account records that the Board also considered draft guidance on defensible space in Zones 0, 1 and 2 at that meeting. That matters because Public Resources Code section 4291(g)(1) makes an updated guidance document a precondition for the ember-resistant zone taking effect for new structures, and the guidance document the Board currently publishes is still the one adopted in February 2006, which never uses the word ember. We checked the Board's page again on the evening of August 25: no draft is posted, and the only guidance document it links is that same 2006 PDF. We also re-checked OAL's pending emergency table the same evening. The package is still not on it, which is what you would expect three days before the earliest filing date the Board has named. Read the full page.

Aug 25: New page: how local Zone 0 rules actually spread, and why it is not city by city

Everything we learned this week pointed the same direction, so we have written it up in one place. Local Zone 0 rules are not being invented council by council. They are model text, written once by a county fire agency and then adopted district after district. One Riverside County fence rule, Section 604.11, sits word for word in the county code and five of its cities, three of which adopted it on the same day in November 2025, and it reverses the state's repair allowance. One San Diego County sentence, requiring the first five feet to be continuous hardscape or noncombustible, has been in that county's Consolidated Fire Code since April 13, 2023 and appears in two independent fire district ordinances besides. The page also covers the step almost nobody mentions: under Health and Safety Code section 13869.7(c) a fire district's building standards do not reach a city until that city's council ratifies them, and when Ojai did so it ratified exactly three pieces, one of which was the fencing section. And it covers why this is all happening now, during a statewide freeze on local residential building-code amendments that runs to June 2031 with home hardening written out of it. The practical payoff is two questions worth more than any amount of searching: what does your county fire agency's model ordinance say, and has your jurisdiction adopted the current code cycle. We end with what we still do not know, including whether other counties run model texts of their own, which we have not swept for. Read the full page.

Aug 25: California froze local building codes until 2031 and wrote home hardening out of the freeze

We went looking for why so many local Zone 0 ordinances landed in the same few months and found something larger. Assembly Bill 130 of 2025 amended Health and Safety Code section 17958 so that, "commencing October 1, 2025, to June 1, 2031, inclusive, a city or county shall not make changes that are applicable to residential units" in the California Building Standards Code. That is a freeze on local residential building-standard amendments lasting nearly six years, passed as housing-cost policy. Six conditions escape it, and two are about wildfire: changes that "relate to home hardening," and building standards that "relate to home hardening and are proposed for adoption by a fire protection district pursuant to Section 13869.7." Every local rule we have added to our register since October 2025 was adopted inside that freeze window, which is to say they exist because home hardening is one of the few things the Legislature left a city free to do. The second exception names section 13869.7 by number, the same statute that requires a city council to ratify a fire district's building standards, which tells you the Legislature was thinking specifically about the fire-district route these ordinances keep travelling. For a homeowner the practical reading is this: until June 2031 your city cannot change most of its residential building standards at all, and a rule about the first five feet around your house is one of the narrow things it still can. One limit we will not paper over is that section 17958 does not define home hardening, so which provisions qualify is untested, though at least one fire district on our watch list already uses the phrase in its own ordinance. Read the full page.

Aug 24: The other document about money: a hazard-map bill vetoed on cost, and what it predicts

In the Local Responsibility Area, Zone 0 applies only inside a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, so the criteria for drawing those zones decide who the rule reaches. Senate Bill 629 would have changed those criteria: it proposed a "post-wildfire safety area" designation and required the Office of the State Fire Marshal to fold new factors into its mapping, including land inside the perimeter of a wildfire that burned 1,000 or more acres and destroyed more than ten structures. It passed the Assembly on September 12, 2025 and the Senate the following day. Governor Newsom vetoed it on October 11, 2025, writing that although he found the intent laudable, the bill "presents new, ongoing, and significant costs to the state not accounted for in this year's budget." The veto was sustained on March 2, 2026. Read that beside Public Resources Code section 4291(h), which bars CAL FIRE from changing its defensible space inspection practices for Zone 0 until the State Fire Marshal posts a written finding that the Legislature appropriated the money, a finding we have looked for and cannot locate. Neither document argues about whether ember-resistant zones work. Both are about who pays, and that is the quietest reliable predictor of how fast any of this arrives at an actual address. One thing this is not: SB 629 was not a Zone 0 bill, and its veto did not weaken the Zone 0 regulation the Board adopted separately on August 19, 2026. Read the full page.

Aug 24: San Diego County has required a noncombustible first five feet since April 2023

Chasing one sentence across San Diego County turned up a date that reorders the story. The County of San Diego 2023 Consolidated Fire Code, eighth edition, effective April 13, 2023, carries Section 4907.9.1, "Zone 0 Immediate Zone 0-5'", and its text is the one we had just read in two separate district ordinances: the zone "shall be constructed of continuous hardscape or non-combustible materials," with mulch and other combustible materials prohibited. That is a Zone 0 rule in force in unincorporated San Diego County more than three years before the Board of Forestry adopted the statewide version on August 19, 2026. The 2025 code cycle renumbered the section from 4907.9.1 to 604.12.1, which is why the same words now appear under a different number, and which is a warning to anyone checking this by section number rather than by sentence. The same search added Valley Center Fire Protection District to our register as the twenty-fifth entry: Ordinance 2025-68, first read September 18, 2025, finally adopted October 16, 2025 on a five to nothing roll call vote, carrying Section 604.12.1 word for word. We note without resolving that its closing clause takes effect thirty days after final passage while its cover page says January 1, 2026. And the 2023 code corroborates something we published earlier today from a City of Ojai resolution: its own recitals state that Health and Safety Code section 13869.7(c) requires a fire district to transmit its adopted ordinance to the county, which may ratify, modify or deny it. A county fire code explaining the rule we found in a city resolution is about as good as corroboration gets. Read the full page.

Aug 24: Register twenty-four: Rancho Santa Fe, and a second county model text hiding in plain sight

The Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District's 2025 California WUI Code ordinance took effect January 1, 2026 in the district's area of unincorporated San Diego County. Its Section 604.12.1 defines Zone 0 as the first five feet from the exterior wall, patio, deck or attachment, and requires that the zone "shall be constructed of continuous hardscape or non-combustible materials," with mulch and other combustible materials prohibited. There is no fence-specific section, which makes it the eighth row on our register with a Zone 0 rule and no fence provision, though the district's own Annex D figure tells readers to remove "fences attachments" from the zone and its fuel-modification definition treats a fence within five feet of a dwelling as a structure. Two limits we publish alongside the row: the ordinance does not answer cleanly whether the Zone 0 duty reaches an existing untouched building, and because this is a fire district, Health and Safety Code section 13869.7(c) means the ordinance waits on ratification by the County of San Diego, which we have not yet read. The pattern underneath it may matter more than the row. "Continuous hardscape or non-combustible materials" is word for word the phrase in Santee's separately added Section 603.5, already on our register, and the district's own code-comparison table cites a "Zone 0 (SDCPFD)" provision from the San Diego County Fire Protection District. That is the same signature as Riverside County Fire's Section 604.11 moving through five cities: a county-level model text being adopted agency by agency. We have not yet swept San Diego County for the rest of that family. Read the full page.

Aug 24: A fire district's Zone 0 fence rule does not reach your city until your own council votes on it

Four rows on our register are fire protection districts, and we had been describing them as though a district ordinance binds everything inside the district's boundary. A City of Ojai resolution sent us to the statute, and the statute says otherwise. Health and Safety Code section 13869.7(a) lets a fire district adopt building standards stricter than the state's, and subdivision (c) sets the condition: "No ordinance adopted by the district shall be effective until ratification by the city, county, or city and county where the ordinance will apply." The city may ratify, modify, or deny, and a modification or denial has to come with written reasons. Ventura County Fire Protection District adopted Ordinance 34 on October 14, 2025. On October 28, 2025 the Ojai City Council passed Resolution 25-37 ratifying, without modification, three specific pieces of it, effective inside Ojai after January 1, 2026. The three pieces are the ones the resolution describes as amendments to building standards relating to fire and panic safety, and one of them is Section 604.11, the fencing section. That is the part of a district Zone 0 package that needs a city council's vote: the fence rule. It also means two houses a mile apart in the same district can be under different law depending on how their councils voted and when. We have corrected the register to say that a district row means the district adopted the rule rather than that it binds every parcel inside the boundary, added the finding to the Ventura County page, and opened a standing question against every district row we carry, because we have read exactly one ratification so far and will not assume the others. Read the full page.

Aug 24: Three cities adopted the same Zone 0 fence rule on the same day, and that changes what the Riverside cluster is

Having found the section number, we stopped searching for city names and searched for the number, which is how a model ordinance is supposed to be found. Menifee carries Riverside County's Section 604.11 as Ordinance 2025-425, passed November 19, 2025, codified in Municipal Code Chapter 8.21. Norco carries it as Ordinance 1135, adopted November 19, 2025, codified as Chapter 15.130. Both are the county's fence text word for word, replacement exception included, and both add the same Zone 0, 1 and 2 scheme. November 19, 2025 is also Indio's adoption date. Three cities in one county adopting an identical fence rule on one day is not a trend spreading outward from the desert, which is how we had been describing it; it is a county fire department's model ordinance moving through the 2025 code cycle with each council taking its turn. The texts say so themselves: Moreno Valley and Norco both add Riverside County Fire Department Guidelines to the list of laws that Section 604.3 requires vegetation to comply with, and Moreno Valley's advisory notice states that the department "has local Zone 0 requirements currently in effect for new buildings and additions to existing buildings." The register is at twenty-three. Three more cities, Jurupa Valley, Beaumont and Wildomar, are named on the county page as leads rather than rows, because so far we have meeting documents for them and not codified text, and we do not add a row on a staff report. Read the full page.

Aug 24: The register reaches twenty-one: Moreno Valley carries Riverside County's fence rule, and the pattern is not a desert one

When we added Indio and Indian Wells to the register we ended that section of the Riverside County page with a warning to ourselves: two cities had adopted word-identical wildland-code amendments within three months, so others probably had too, and we should not let the finding harden into "only two." Searching code libraries for the section number rather than for city names turned up the third. Moreno Valley adopted Ordinance 1033 on November 4, 2025, codified as Municipal Code Chapter 8.84, and it carries Section 604.11 in the same three parts: new fencing and gates noncombustible, fencing installed before January 1, 2026 may remain, and the exception that reverses the state's repair allowance, requiring the entire run within five feet to come back noncombustible when any portion of it is replaced. Moreno Valley is west of the Coachella Valley, where we had expected to look, so this is a county-wide pattern rather than a desert one, and the dates matter: Moreno Valley adopted before Indian Wells did, which means the county's own Ordinance 787 text is the parent and the cities are siblings rather than a chain. Moreno Valley goes further than the other two cities in one measurable way, adding a full Zone 0, 1 and 2 scheme in which fuels are prohibited outright in the first five feet for new buildings, additions and new or replacement landscape, while buildings whose landscape predates January 1, 2026 get a narrower list covering mulch, firewood, under-deck clearance and roof clearance. We also publish the limit of what we can say: the fence section applies in the hazard zones Chapter 6 reaches, and the city did not amend the section that decides which land that is, so it plainly reaches the Very High zone while its reach into moderate and high depends on reading a definition the ordinance placed in a different chapter. That is a question for the fire code official in writing, not for us. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Zone 0's by-reference pointer is pre-printed in the state model code, at section 604.3

We have spent this survey hunting, one code at a time, for local ordinances that impose a defensible space duty and then defer its content to the state, because those are the codes that can start requiring Zone 0 the day the state text takes effect without anyone amending them. We found eight. Then a deputy city attorney in San Luis Obispo pointed us somewhere we had not looked: the state's own model code. Section 604.3 of the 2025 California Wildland-Urban Interface Code requires hazardous vegetation and fuels around all buildings and structures to be maintained in accordance with four bodies of law, and the second of the four is "California Code of Regulations, Title 14, Division 1.5, Chapter 7, Subchapter 3, Article 3, Section 1299.03", which is the section the Board of Forestry's Zone 0 package is being written into. The pointer we were hunting for by hand is printed in the model that California cities adopt by the dozen. Section 604.2 decides who owes the duty, and its third trigger is not a state hazard map but land a city has designated as a wildland-urban interface area in its own ordinance. One qualification is ours rather than the city attorney's: 604.3's duty runs on hazardous vegetation and fuels, and the Board's own guidance document defines fuel so as to exclude fences, so the mulch and litter half of Zone 0 travels through 604.3 considerably better than the fence half. That is the third state document in a week to split Zone 0 along the same seam. We are not adding these adoptions to the register, because the register lists rules in force and a pointer at a section that requires nothing yet is not one, but the honest statement of the silent-flip number is no longer eight. It is eight plus every 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code adopter in California, and nobody has counted those. Read the full page.

Aug 23: The guidance document Zone 0 waits on is from 2006, and it says fences are not fuel

Public Resources Code 4291(g)(1) says the ember-resistant zone requirement does not take effect for new structures until the Board updates both the regulations and its guidance document. That guidance document is posted where the statute says it should be, and it is the General Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space, adopted by the Board on February 8, 2006 and approved by OAL that May. We read it: no occurrence of "ember," none of "Zone 0," none of "five feet," and a definition of Fuel stating that "for the purposes of these guidelines, it does not include fences, decks, woodpiles, trash, etc." It also explains something our fifty-eight-county survey kept finding, because Fresno, Alpine and Monterey all excluded the same four things from fuel in their own codes. The fence's exemption from the definition of fuel was not local eccentricity; it was state guidance, and the Board has up to a year from adoption to rewrite it. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Who is actually exempt from Zone 0, and the bargain the statutes offer for an all-noncombustible house

Asked to exempt cultural institutions, Board staff answered that the Legislature already set the exempt categories and the Board "does not possess independent authority through this rulemaking to create additional exempt categories." So there are three, and they are narrow. Government Code 51184 exempts land managed as habitat, kept predominantly natural, environmentally sensitive parkland or declared scenic, with the catch that improved land next door still carries its own duty. Government Code 51183 and Public Resources Code 4291(c) both allow a structure with an exterior built entirely of nonflammable materials to be exempted or its requirements varied, on one condition: the occupant files written consent to inspection of the interior and contents, to confirm compliance at all times. Mariposa County has been running that same formula since 1980. Being outside a mapped zone is not an exemption, and a local alternative practice is not one either. Read the full page.

Aug 23: In CAL FIRE's own model inspection guide, clearing Zone 0 is a criterion and replacing your fence is advice

The Office of the State Fire Marshal's Model Defensible Space Program, the guide cities and counties use to enforce defensible space, already has a section headed "Inspection Criteria for Zone 0" in its 2023 edition. Those criteria are fuel removal: items within the first five feet, fuels under decks and stairs, no combustible bark or mulch, chimney clearance, dead vegetation, firewood relocated. Fences are not among them. They appear under a separate heading, "Suggestions and Education in Zone 0," which tells inspectors to advise replacing combustible fencing, gates, trellises and arbors attached to the structure. Clearing the zone is a criterion; replacing the fence is advice. And this is the layer PRC 4291(h) freezes until the State Fire Marshal certifies the money, so it is not a historical curiosity, it is the framework in force. Read the full page.

Aug 23: The statute sets two more conditions before Zone 0 bites, and one of them is a written finding about money

Everyone, us included, has described what happens next as Office of Administrative Law review then Secretary of State publication. Public Resources Code 4291 as amended by AB 1455 adds two conditions nobody is counting. Subdivision (g)(1): the ember-resistant zone requirement "shall not take effect for new structures until the board updates the regulations... and the guidance document," and subdivision (e)(2) gives the Board up to a year after adoption to update that guidance. Subdivision (h) is the one we did not expect: the department "shall not change defensible space inspection practices and forms or enforcement to implement the requirement for an ember-resistant zone until the State Fire Marshal makes a written finding, which the State Fire Marshal shall post on the department's internet website, that the Legislature has appropriated sufficient resources to do so." We searched for that finding and could not locate it. The existing-home three-year clock also runs from the new-structure effective date, so it depends on the same chain. Read the full page.

Aug 23: The Board's own summary of the adopted package: Phase 2 is a local deadline capped at five years, and the noncombustible zone flexes with your eaves

The Board of Forestry published a plain-language summary alongside its August 2026 binder materials, and it is more precise than the coverage on the two questions homeowners ask first. On timing: "Local jurisdictions may assign a timeline of up to 5 years (from the effective date) for completing the remainder of Zone 0 regulations," which reconciles the regulation's two differently-worded clocks into one outer bound with a local decision inside it. On geometry: the noncombustible "safety zone" next to the house flexes with the eave, so "if the structure has 12-inch eaves, the safety zone is 12 inches in width. If the structure has 36-inch eaves, the safety zone is 36 inches", which is not the flat five feet of hardscape most quotes assume. The summary also adds a definition of "Noncombustible" drawn from the Wildland-Urban Interface Code, requires noncombustible roofs and walls on sheds inside Zone 0, and spells out the local-variation machinery that makes the patchwork permanent. It is a summary, not the certified text, and we say so. Read the full page.

Aug 23: The register reaches twenty: Redlands mandates Zone Zero for existing homes, in High zones the state rule will not reach

The City of Redlands wrote an ember-resistant zone into its wildland-urban interface code by Ordinance 2998, in force with the 2026 code cycle, and we had it listed as an unchecked city until a search for operative language turned it up. Section 604.6 binds "all existing habitable buildings and structures within the High and Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone": existing buildings, and High zones as well as Very High, which is wider than the statewide rule's own trigger inside cities. Zone Zero there prohibits organic mulch and wood chips and requires noncombustible ground cover. It has no fence rule, which makes it the seventh of the twenty with a Zone 0 rule and no fence requirement. Our San Bernardino page led with "no local rule we could find" until today; the correction is logged. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Kensington wrote the state's next rule into its code on purpose: the eighth silent-flip ordinance, and the most explicit

Kensington Fire Protection District's Ordinance 2025-01, adopted July 16, 2025, requires every building to be maintained in conformance with the state's defensible space law: PRC 4291, Government Code 51182, 14 CCR 1299.01 through 1299.05, "and any other state regulations adopted pursuant to" either statute, "as each is amended from time to time." Its recitals say the district intends to adopt "measures that include Zone Zero standards," and it attaches a point-of-sale inspection certificate. Eight local codes now point at the places the state's Zone 0 text will land; Kensington's is the only one that answered the dynamic-incorporation question in its own drafting. It is not on the register, because a pointer is not a rule in force, and we apply that test evenly. Read the full page.

Aug 23: A city attorney answered the question nobody else was asking: yes, adopting the WUI code imports Zone 0

We have tracked seven local codes that may change meaning the day the state's Zone 0 text takes effect, and flagged the dynamic-versus-frozen question as one the ordinances do not answer. The city of San Luis Obispo's staff report for its 2025 WUI code adoption, prepared by a deputy city attorney, answers it: because the WUI code "references and requires compliance with Section 1299.03," adopting it means the city "will also adopt, by reference, the Zone 0 requirements as issued by the state (including any future amendments)." One city's lawyer, not a court, and it concerns the model code's machinery rather than a hand-written pointer. But on that logic, every 2025 WUI code adopter in California is in the same silent-flip position, and there are many. Read the full page.

Aug 23: The register reaches nineteen: Fremont's new fence rule asks for six feet where the state will ask five

A rumor we carried as unverifiable resolved from Fremont's current code: Ordinance 12-2025 (September 16, 2025) adopts the city's WUI code and, as part of the ordinance, a Fire Department Defensible Space Inspection Guide drafted with inspections, penalties and cost liens. Its fences subsection requires any new combustible fence to keep six feet of separation from a structure unless the connecting six feet are noncombustible, one foot more than the statewide rule will ask, and bans bark or mulch fencing within 100 feet in Very High zones. Its Zone 0 vegetation list, by contrast, is expressly headed RECOMMENDATIONS, the same pattern as Amador. Existing wood fences are untouched. Fremont is the register's nineteenth row. Read the full page.

Aug 23: The county survey is complete: all fifty-eight California county codes read for Zone 0

The last five counties, Alpine, Amador, Glenn, Sacramento and Solano, sat behind publishers whose bot-detection refused every tool, with no usable archive. On August 23 all five were read from current text: two turned out to be phantom hosts (Glenn publishes its own code as PDFs; Sacramento's code lives with a publisher its county counsel points to), one had moved publishers entirely, and two were read live. All five are negative for Zone 0, every verdict now rests on current text, and no California county is unread. Each has its own page, and the register carries the ledger. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Amador County's is the only county code in California that says "Zone 0", and it says "recommended"

Amador's 2022 defensible-space ordinance, in a chapter no archive ever captured, names Zone 0, draws it at five feet around every structure including attached decks, and makes it the chapter's only recommendation while the thirty-foot and hundred-foot zones are enforceable year-round duties. The county re-adopted that wording verbatim in March 2026, five months before the state made the same five feet mandatory. A recommendation is not a rule in force, so Amador stays off the register, and the survey's Finding Four now counts three modes of the five-foot idea in county law: a mandate, a bargaining chip, and a recommendation. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Alpine County verified: the seventh local code wired to the state's defensible space law

We carried Alpine's remarkable sentence as a verify-first watch item because our only copy was a 2008 archive. The current code, codified through July 7, 2026, resolves it: the chapter was rewritten in 2018 and kept the sentence, requiring defensible space per Public Resources Code 4291 "as currently exists and as may be amended in the future." The ember-resistant zone was later written into that statute, so Alpine joins Calaveras, Contra Costa Fire, Morro Bay, Mono, Inyo and Tehama as the seventh code that may change meaning the day the state rule takes effect, and the only one whose dynamism is drafted rather than interpreted. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Correction: an audit pass caught five smaller factual errors, now fixed and logged

A full-site audit on August 23 caught five factual errors, all now fixed: Mono County's Mountain View Fire burned in November 2020, not 2021; La Habra contracts with the Los Angeles County Fire Department rather than running its own (Placentia belongs on Orange County's ten-department list); the Tubbs Fire's destruction was in Santa Rosa, not Windsor, whose event was the 2019 Kincade Fire evacuation; our Santa Barbara page contradicted our own register on Montecito; and our Riverside FAQ still carried a sentence the body of the same page had already corrected. The corrections page names each one. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Correction: three county pages briefly carried inspection superlatives our own table contradicts

For a few hours on August 23, we called Lake County's 52 percent inspection pass rate "the worst we have recorded" when Santa Cruz's 39 percent and Tuolumne's 42 are lower, called San Benito's 99 percent "the best" when Alameda passed 402 of 402, and said only Calaveras exceeded Siskiyou's third-inspection count when Ventura's is higher too. Each claim was written from memory of recent table rows instead of from the full table, which is exactly the mistake this site tells readers to watch for in others' coverage. All three pages, and the feed entries that repeated them, now state ranks the table supports, and the corrections page carries the entry. The rates themselves were always correct; the rankings around them were not. Read the full page.

Aug 23: The print-endpoint break: Mariposa and Del Norte surveyed from live text, fifty-three of fifty-eight

Hours after we hardened Mariposa and Del Norte as partials, their publisher's own architecture opened the rest of the way: the login gates the reader, but the print endpoint serves full section text to anyone who asks for it by name. We read both counties' operative fire chapters from the publisher's live pages, current text, not archives. Del Norte runs the 1991 fire-safe model re-enacted in 2016, new-development-only with existing structures exempt, and "noncombustible" returns zero results in its entire code. Mariposa's Ordinance 550 of 1980 imposes a genuine ongoing countywide clearing duty, thirty feet around every structure with the fire warden able to require one hundred, and its September 2025 ordinance adopts the state's WUI code unamended; its fire warden may exempt buildings made entirely of nonflammable materials from clearing, the survey's neatest inversion of the Zone 0 idea. Both counties get their own pages, the count moves to fifty-three of fifty-eight, and five remain: Alpine, Amador, Glenn, Sacramento and Solano. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Mariposa and Del Norte hardened: the publishers' own indexes say no five-foot rule

The two counties whose publisher gates its text behind a login still expose its search index, so we swept it systematically. Mariposa's fire architecture is now fully enumerated by section title: hazard severity zones, controlled burns, fireworks, a mandatory brush-clearing chapter with a fire-warden exemption, and the 2025 wildland-urban interface code adoption, with "defensible" returning zero results anywhere in the code. Del Norte's Title 19 carries the 1991 fire-safe model with section names identical to neighboring Humboldt's, and "noncombustible" returns zero results in the entire code. Both counties stay partial because the texts remain unread, and the register says exactly what a search index can and cannot prove. Read the full page.

Aug 23: San Francisco gets its page, and the surveyed-county set is complete

San Francisco's guide is live, and with it every one of the fifty-one surveyed counties now has its own page. The city is the survey's urban control case: we read its 2025 fire code in full and the words defensible space, wildland and ember-resistant appear nowhere, because a city of stacked buildings has other fire problems and its code is about those. As the state's one consolidated city-county there is exactly one code to read, and we read it. Whether any San Francisco parcel carries a designated hazard zone is a question the state's own maps settle in minutes, and the page hands readers that check instead of an assertion. The statewide insurance credit for noncombustible fencing applies here as everywhere, which in unmapped territory is the one Zone 0 fact with money attached. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Imperial County gets its page: the least to burn, said plainly

Imperial County's guide is live, and it refuses to manufacture urgency. The county's fire chapter is a Uniform Fire Code adoption from a code generation California retired long ago, and this is the county where that matters least: irrigated desert with almost no wildland-urban interface as the state's maps understand one. The statewide Zone 0 rule will reach very few parcels here, and the page says so, pointing instead at the one Zone 0 fact with money attached in low-hazard counties: the statewide insurance credit for noncombustible fencing that has existed since October 2022. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Kings County gets its page: the valley-floor pattern in its plainest form

Kings County's guide is live. The county's whole fire layer is weeds and fireworks, and its one brush country is the Kettleman Hills along Interstate 5, grass and scrub with few homes, carrying the county's only State Responsibility Area track. The page is honest about scale: for most residents the statewide Zone 0 rule will arrive through their city's hazard maps if at all, plus the insurance credit for noncombustible fencing that already exists statewide, and nobody here should buy anything for a county rule that does not exist. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Sutter County gets its page: burn piles, spark arresters, and one small mountain range

Sutter County's guide is live. Its fire chapter is farm-country law, open-burning distances and spark arresters, for a county that is levee and rice flat almost end to end, except for the landmark rising out of the middle of it: the Sutter Buttes, whose grass and blue-oak slopes are the county's one patch of true wildland. Around the range, the state's hundred-foot duty is today's law and the Zone 0 rule follows once effective. Nothing county-made touches the first five feet or fences anywhere. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Yolo County gets its page: administrative amendments, and the Capay hills on state law

Yolo County's guide is live. The county's only fire text is a set of administrative amendments to the 2019 state fire code, who hears appeals and how districts review plans, with no defensible-space ordinance anywhere. That leaves state law doing all the work in the one part of Yolo that burns: the Capay Valley grades from Esparto through Guinda and Rumsey and the canyon country behind Winters, the hills the LNU Complex reached in 2020. The page explains what applies there today and what the statewide Zone 0 rule adds once effective, which for this county is everything. Read the full page.

Aug 23: San Benito County gets its page: no fire chapter, top-tier pass rate

San Benito County's guide is live, and it carries the survey's cleanest counterexample to thick-code thinking. The county has no fire or vegetation chapter anywhere in its code, runs county fire protection on a CAL FIRE contract, and posts top-tier defensible-space compliance: 482 of 485 inspected parcels passed, 99 percent against 82.6 percent statewide, with only Alameda, Contra Costa and Kern higher among sizable programs. The agency that writes the state's rules is the one inspecting against them here, and the result outperforms most counties with thick local ordinances. From the Gabilans to the Panoche country, the statewide Zone 0 rule will be the first five-foot standard ever to apply, arriving on the state's own force. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Merced County gets its page: the thinnest local fire layer in the survey

Merced County's guide is live, for the thinnest local fire layer in our fifty-one-county survey: searches of the code for fire prevention, weed abatement, hazardous vegetation and defensible-space provisions came back nearly empty, with the vegetation language defining garbage and wetland terms for other chapters. That leaves state law doing everything, from the Merced River canyon and the rangeland above Le Grand to the Diablo grass over the San Luis Reservoir, and the page explains why a county with no fire ordinance ends up in the same place on effective day as one with a thick code: the difference is who answers the phone. Read the full page.

Aug 23: San Joaquin County gets its page: the January twin of the February adoption

San Joaquin County's guide is live. In January 2026 the county adopted the state's 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code with administrative amendments only, the who-and-how of enforcement rather than any new standard, one month before Stanislaus did the same thing unamended. The page explains what that adoption wave does and does not change: nothing for existing homes, no five-foot rule, no fence provision, in a county that is delta and valley floor almost end to end with one grassland edge above Tracy. The dashboard posts no inspections here for its current month, which the page calls what it is. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Stanislaus County gets its page: the newest fire code in the survey changes the least

Stanislaus County's guide is live, built around a distinction that cuts the other way: the county holds the newest local fire enactment in our survey, a February 3, 2026 ordinance adopting the state's 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code by reference, and it changes almost nothing, because an unamended adoption puts state construction standards into county law exactly as written, with no ember-resistant zone in them. A homeowner told "the county just adopted a new wildfire code" would be right to ask what changed, and the honest answer is: for existing homes, nothing. The page explains why, from the Diablo Range grasslands behind Patterson to Knights Ferry, and points at the instrument that will actually bring the five-foot standard. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Colusa County gets its page: fire law from another economy

Colusa County's guide is live, sourced the honest way: the publisher blocks direct access, so the operative chapters were read from Internet Archive captures of its own pages, the fire chapter as served in March 2024, and the page says its claims are dated rather than current. What the code contains is agriculture's fire law: fireworks-stand clearances, seasonal smoking rules, and a three-foot firebreak required around fields carrying inflammable grain or hay, a rule about protecting crops from each other rather than homes from embers. The building chapter adopts the 2016 California Fire Code without local amendments, and the weed chapter clears vegetation away from fences rather than regulating them. On the west side, where the August Complex reached the county's coast-range corner, the state's hundred-foot duties are today's law, and the statewide Zone 0 rule will be the first five-foot standard ever to apply. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Modoc County gets its page: a routing chapter, and the difference between a duty and a declaration

Modoc County's guide is live, for California's far corner. Its one wildfire chapter, from 2008, adopts the state's hazard maps "as amended from time to time" and declares which state requirements attach where, without adding any county standard of its own. That makes it the cleanest teaching example for our effective-day watch list: a chapter that declares applicability has nothing in it to flip, unlike the six codes that impose duties deferring to state law, and the page explains the distinction rather than padding the list. The dashboard posts no Modoc inspections at all for its current month, which the page calls a reporting gap rather than a clean bill. From Alturas to Surprise Valley, the statewide Zone 0 rule will arrive on the state's own force, the way everything else here does. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Tulare County gets its page: the sequoias burned, and the code got a debris chapter

Tulare County's guide is live. The county has no defensible-space ordinance of its own at all: its fire prevention article regulates burning, and what the SQF Complex added to the code is a disaster recovery chapter about debris, the same recovery-not-prevention pattern we found in Plumas after the Dixie Fire. In Three Rivers, Springville, Camp Nelson and Sequoia Crest, all unincorporated, the operative defensible-space law is entirely the state's hundred-foot rule, and the inspection numbers carry one of the state's largest repeat-offender counts: fifteen properties have failed three inspections running. The statewide Zone 0 rule will be the first five-foot materials standard these mountain communities have ever had. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Yuba County gets its page: the building official signs off on your firebreak

Yuba County's guide is live. The county writes the state's firebreak duties into its own code twice: once as an ongoing obligation with the volunteer fire district confirming violations and county code enforcement abating, and once at building-permit time, where the building official must certify from the site plan that a new foothill home will meet the firebreak requirements before construction begins. Most counties inspect vegetation after homes exist; Yuba also checks the drawing. Because both chapters restate the duties rather than defer to the statutes, they were tested for our effective-day watch list and excluded, with the reason published: a restatement does not flip. From Loma Rica, burned in the 2017 Cascade Fire, to Dobbins and Camptonville, the statewide Zone 0 rule will be the first five-foot standard these foothills have had. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Trinity County gets its page: no city halls, four megafires, fire law facing the federal forest

Trinity County's guide is live, for the county with no incorporated cities at all: Weaverville, Hayfork, Lewiston and the 299 canyon towns answer to the county code and state law with no municipal layer anywhere. The code holds the 1991 fire-safe model and a 2006 vegetation management chapter built around the state's hundred-foot standard, with the survey's most distinctive orientation: it defines its wildland-urban interface through federal at-risk-community lists and requests abatement on federal land under the Healthy Forest Restoration Act, in a county that is mostly national forest. Helena, Carr, August Complex, Monument: four megafires since 2017, and nothing in the code about the first five feet. The chapter's state-law reference was tested for our effective-day watch list and excluded, with the reason published. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Tehama County gets its page: the Park Fire's county, on 1991 law and one wired sentence

Tehama County's guide is live. The Park Fire, California's fourth-largest on record, burned through this county's east side in 2024, three years after the Dixie Fire crossed its corner, and its fire safe regulations still date to 1991, the same model Trinity adopted the same year. The consequential text is in the abatement chapter: firebreaks on rural and agricultural lands "shall be created and maintained in accordance with" Public Resources Code 4291 and Government Code 51182, the statutes the ember-resistant zone was later written into. That sentence makes Tehama the sixth code on our effective-day watch list. From Mineral and Mill Creek to Manton and the Ishi foothills, the page explains what is law today, what flips later, and why nobody should buy a fence for a county rule that does not exist. Read the full page.

Aug 23: The pointer sweep: Tehama makes six, and five near-misses are named

Finding Mono and Inyo made us ask the obvious question: how many other surveyed counties carry a duty that defers to the state's defensible space statutes? We re-read every candidate with one uniform test: a local duty verb plus an unqualified pointer at the statute or regulation, outside the code-adoption machinery every county runs. Tehama passes: its fire hazard abatement chapter directs that rural and agricultural firebreaks "shall be created and maintained in accordance with" Public Resources Code 4291 and Government Code 51182. That makes six codes on the effective-day watch list. Five near-misses failed the test and are named on the register with reasons: Trinity, Yuba, Lassen, Tuolumne and Monterey, each a restatement, an applicability declaration, or a reference that describes the statute rather than deferring to it. We would rather under-count than pad the list, and the test is published so you can apply it yourself. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Mono County gets its page: the 2008 sentence the Eastern Sierra's codes are wired with

Mono County's guide is live. Its 2008 defensible space chapter enforces the thirty-and-one-hundred-foot model as county law, from Walker, where the Mountain View Fire burned into town, to June Lake and the Long Valley tracts. Its first operative sentence points property maintenance at Government Code 51182 and Public Resources Code 4291, the statutes the ember-resistant zone was later written into, and Inyo County copied that sentence verbatim in 2020. Mono wrote the model that may make two Eastern Sierra codes carry Zone 0 the day the state's regulation takes effect, seventeen years before the question could arise. Mammoth Lakes, the one incorporated town, keeps its own code we have not read, and the page says so. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Inyo County gets its page: the whole county is a WUI Fire Area, and the code is wired to flip

Inyo County's guide is live, built around the boldest sentence in any county code we surveyed: "All of the unincorporated areas of Inyo County are hereby designated as a Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Area." The 2020 ordinance requires construction to the most recent state WUI standards, makes violations a nuisance per se, and points property maintenance at Government Code 51182 and Public Resources Code 4291, the statutes the ember-resistant zone was later written into. Today the enforceable list is the thirty-and-one-hundred-foot model, chimney clearance and roof litter and firebreaks, with nothing about the first five feet. On the day the state's Zone 0 regulation takes effect, Inyo is one of the five codes statewide that may begin requiring it silently, and the page explains what that means for Lone Pine, Big Pine and the Bishop Creek canyon. Read the full page.

Aug 23: The incorporation club grows to five: Mono and Inyo point at the statutes

Alpine's 2008 archive find sent us back to two codes we had already surveyed, and both turn out to carry the same sentence in verified current text: property "shall be maintained in accordance with the defensible space requirements contained in Government Code Section 51182... and Public Resources Code Section 4291, as applicable." Mono County wrote it in 2008 and its code stands current through a 2025 ordinance; Inyo County copied the model in 2020, in the ordinance that designates every unincorporated acre a Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Area. The ember-resistant zone was later written into both statutes, to activate when the state's regulation takes effect. That makes five local codes wired to the state's defensible space law by reference: Calaveras, Contra Costa Fire and Morro Bay at the regulation, Mono and Inyo at the statutes. On filing day all five may begin requiring Zone 0 through their own municipal codes, with no new vote and no announcement. The survey page, the register, the status tracker and our effective-date checklist now say five, and Alpine remains the unverified sixth. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Lake County gets its page: failing inspection numbers, and money for fences anyway

Lake County's guide is live, for the county California's fire years hit hardest. Its 2019 Hazardous Vegetation Abatement Ordinance is a real defensible-space law with abatement teeth, and it is a thirty-foot law: no five-foot band, no mention of fences or gates anywhere. The current inspection figures are among the worst we have recorded, with 52 percent of inspected parcels compliant against 82.6 percent statewide; only Santa Cruz and Tuolumne post lower rates in our table. And in the Kelseyville Riviera, a state-funded hardening program pays up to forty thousand dollars per qualifying home, expressly including replacement of combustible fencing and gates: the money for Zone 0 work exists here before any rule requires it, though the program's application status was unclear when we checked and the page says to call first. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Sierra County gets its page: a 1928 fire law and twenty-three inspected parcels

Sierra County's guide is live, built from the same archive method as Humboldt's and honest about it in the same way. The code's entire thirty-eight-title structure, mapped from captures dated through December 2023, contains no fire-safe, wildland-urban interface, or weed-abatement chapter. Its one fire chapter runs from a 1928 ban on smoking while traveling through flammable vegetation, the oldest county fire law in our survey, to a Dixie-summer emergency ban that expired in November 2021 and still sits in the code. One hardening rule is real: every roof, new or replaced, must be Class A fire-rated, since 1980. CAL FIRE's defensible-space program here covers twenty-three parcels, among the smallest in the state. In Downieville and Sierra City, two of the most fire-threatened towns in California, the statewide Zone 0 rule will be the first five-foot standard ever to apply. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Humboldt County gets its page: read through a blocked door, with inspection numbers below the state's

Humboldt County's guide is live, and it opens by telling you how it was made: the county's code publisher blocks direct access, so we read the operative chapters from Internet Archive captures of the publisher's own pages, dated by its own banners through October 2025, and the page calls itself dated rather than pretending to be current. Inside the code: a fire prevention chapter from 1946 and the 1991 fire-safe model, which binds new development in the State Responsibility Area and exempts existing homes. Three unarchived sections are named so readers can check us. The inspection numbers carry the sting: 76 percent of inspected parcels passed, below the 82.6 percent statewide rate, and seventeen properties have failed more than once. From Shelter Cove to Willow Creek, the statewide Zone 0 rule will be the first five-foot materials standard this county has ever had. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Amador and Alpine read from stale archives, and a 2008 Alpine sentence joins the watch list

The last two blocked counties with usable archives are Amador and Alpine, and both were read in depth, but their newest captures are 2015 and 2008, so neither counts as surveyed: we will not call a county checked on text that predates the Butte Fire. What the old captures show is still worth publishing. Amador ran the 2006 fire-safe model for new development, plus a 1905 thistle ordinance. Alpine's 2008 fuels reduction chapter contains the day's most interesting sentence: defensible space must comply with "Public Resources Code Section 4291 as currently exists and as may be amended in the future," enforced by county nuisance abatement. The ember-resistant zone was later written into that statute, so if the chapter still reads this way, Alpine's code carries Zone 0 the day the state rule activates it, the same silent flip we track for Calaveras, Contra Costa Fire and Morro Bay. A seventeen-year-old capture proves nothing about 2026, so Alpine goes on the watch list as a verify-first item, and both counties stay in the unread column. In both codes, the five-foot idea appears exactly once: as the clearance around a campfire. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Colusa makes fifty-one, and Solano is half-open: the archive method keeps paying

Two more blocked counties opened from the Internet Archive. Colusa's fire chapter, read in full as served in March 2024, is fire law written for rice country: fireworks stands, seasonal smoking rules, and a requirement that anyone holding land with inflammable grain or hay maintain a three-foot firebreak around its boundary. The building chapter adopts the 2016 California Fire Code without fire amendments, and the weed chapter treats fences only as things to clear around. Nothing about the first five feet: Colusa is surveyed, a dated negative, the fifty-first county. Solano we could only half-open: its building chapter adopts the 2022 Fire Code and the 2021 International Wildland-Urban Interface Code unamended, but the one chapter titled "Abatement of Fire Hazards" has no archived copy anywhere, so Solano stays partial, and we say so instead of guessing. Seven counties remain. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Sierra County makes fifty: the survey's oldest fire law is from 1928

The archive method that unlocked Humboldt works even better for Sierra County: the Internet Archive holds its blocked publisher's pages in depth, dated through Ordinance 1129 of December 2023. We mapped the code's entire title structure and found no fire-safe, wildland-urban interface, or weed-abatement chapter anywhere. The county's one fire chapter, read in full, holds five sections: a 1928 ban on smoking while traveling through flammable vegetation, now the oldest county fire law in our survey; a 1952 fireworks ban; and an emergency open-fire prohibition from the Dixie Fire summer, written to expire in November 2021 and still in the code. One real hardening rule exists: every new roof and every roof replacement must be Class A fire-rated, since 1980. Nothing about the first five feet or fences. In Downieville and Sierra City the operative defensible-space law is entirely the state's. Fifty of fifty-eight counties surveyed; eight remain. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Humboldt cracked from the archive: forty-nine counties surveyed, and a fire law from 1946

Humboldt County's code publisher blocks every tool we have, and we had listed the county as unreadable. It turns out the Internet Archive holds the publisher's own pages in depth, with banners dating the code precisely, the newest codified through Ordinance 2774 of October 21, 2025. We read the operative fire chapters from the archived copies: a fire prevention chapter enacted in April 1946, the oldest county fire law in our entire survey; the 1991 fire-safe model, refreshed in 2015, whose scope section applies only to new development in the State Responsibility Area with existing structures exempt; and a nuisance-abatement procedure. Nothing regulates the first five feet or fence materials. Three sections had no archived copy and the register names them rather than guessing. The count moves to forty-nine of fifty-eight counties surveyed, nine remaining, and Humboldt's entry is honest about being dated rather than current. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Fresno County gets its page: a defensible-space chapter for exactly eighteen parcels

Fresno County's guide is live, built around our favorite cautionary chapter title in the survey. The county's one "defensible space" chapter, adopted in 2010, applies to eighteen enumerated Assessor's parcels along the San Joaquin River bluffs, requires a thirty-foot seasonal firebreak, and defines fuel to expressly exclude "fences, decks, woodpiles, or trash." Even where this county wrote defensible-space law, it wrote fences out of it. Meanwhile the county's real fire country, Shaver Lake, Auberry, Prather and the Creek Fire's southern flank, is unincorporated, governed by a modern but infrastructure-only fire-safe chapter amended as recently as June 2025 plus state law. The statewide Zone 0 rule will be the first five-foot materials standard those mountains have ever had. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Mendocino County gets its page: a modern ordinance that stops ninety-five feet short

Mendocino County's guide is live. Unlike the counties still running 1968 or 1991 fire law, Mendocino legislated recently: a February 2021 hazardous vegetation ordinance with a purpose section that names the fire years and abatement powers with real teeth. What it never does is draw the five-foot line. Its standard is a general fire-hazard test applied parcel by parcel, and a homeowner can satisfy it completely while keeping a wood fence bolted to the house with juniper against it, because the ordinance was never asked that question. The statewide Zone 0 rule is the instrument that will ask it, arriving in the Redwood Complex rebuild country on the State Responsibility Area's five-year clock. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Siskiyou County gets its page: fire rules from 1968, pilot crews from 2024

Siskiyou County's guide is live, and the dates tell the story. The county's fire control regulations were enacted in 1968 and govern burn permits and flammable material, while a few miles away state pilot crews are hardening Mt. Shasta homes to standards that include the ember-resistant first five feet, a concept the local code has never contained. The county's inspection numbers add a quiet standout: twenty properties found non-compliant on a third inspection, a count only Calaveras and Ventura exceed in our records. Weed, which lost neighborhoods to the Mill Fire, is the city we would read first if its code were reachable, and the page says so plainly instead of guessing. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Madera County gets its page: the southern Yosemite gateway runs on state law alone

Madera County's guide is live. Oakhurst, Bass Lake, Coarsegold and the rest of the southern Yosemite gateway are unincorporated Creek Fire country, and the county code that governs them turns out to be about fire code adoption and livestock grazing permits, with a standard weed chapter. The local layer is thin, state law does nearly all the work, and the statewide Zone 0 rule will be the first five-foot standard these mountains have ever had, arriving on the State Responsibility Area track with its five-year clock. The page says what that means practically: the hundred-foot duties are today's law, the free first-five-feet work is where to start, and nobody should buy a fence for a county rule that does not exist. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Plumas County gets its page: the code the Dixie Fire amended twice, neither time about fire rules

Plumas County's guide is live. The county the Dixie Fire devastated regulates wildfire with a fire-safe chapter from 1992, fuel storage rules from the 1970s, and a page and a half of weed abatement. What the 2021 fires added to the code is recovery machinery: an urgency ordinance for debris removal and a chapter easing owner-built dwellings inside the burn perimeters. The county rebuilt its housing rules for survivors and has not yet rebuilt its fire rules. The page's most useful observation is for the people who rebuilt: their houses carry ember-resistant construction because state building standards required it, while the five feet around those houses is governed by nothing until the statewide rule takes effect. The structure is hardened; the zone is not. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Lassen County gets its page, built around the best sentence in forty-eight county codes

Lassen County's guide is live. The county the Dixie Fire crossed has no Zone 0 mandate, but its fire hazards chapter contains the only appearance of the five-foot noncombustible band we found in forty-eight county codes outside the register's jurisdictions: where a new structure cannot meet the thirty-foot setback, the county may accept noncombustible block walls or fences, or five feet of noncombustible material around the structure, as alternatives with the same practical effect. Zone 0 as a bargaining chip, years before the state made it a rule. The page also answers the question that provision creates: if a neighbor's noncombustible perimeter looks code-required, it may genuinely be, parcel by parcel, through a permit condition rather than an ordinance, which is the one situation in this county where "the county required this fence" could be true. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Tuolumne County gets its page: pilot crews harden the zone the local law never names

Tuolumne County's guide is live, built on an irony the survey surfaced: the county hosts three of the state's wildfire mitigation pilot communities, where crews retrofit homes with public money to standards that include the ember-resistant first five feet, while the county's own hazardous vegetation chapter and Sonora's defensible space ordinance never mention that zone at all. The inspection numbers carry their own message, with 246 properties found non-compliant a second time, forty percent of everything inspected. The page's advice: in a pilot community, ask the program first, because the work this site is about may be done for you before any deadline exists, and everywhere else, start with the free work the current hundred-foot rules already require. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Calaveras County gets its page: the code wired to rules the state has not finished writing

Calaveras County's guide is live, built around the most complete version of the incorporation pattern we track. A February 2017 ordinance adopted the state's defensible space regulations, Title 14 sections 1299.01 through 1299.05, into the county code by reference, county-wide, which means the county may effectively receive a Zone 0 rule in its own code the day the state text takes effect, with no new vote and no announcement. The page also carries the starkest inspection numbers we have recorded: 290 properties found non-compliant with today's hundred-foot rules more than once, including 117 on a third inspection, in Butte Fire country. The practical advice writes itself: get compliant with today's rules first, because the first five feet of that work is free and it is where the state rule is headed anyway. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Kern County gets its page: Frazier Park and Kernville answer to a code read fresh

Kern County's guide is live. The county readopted its fire code and its Wildland-Urban Interface Code in November 2025, and both were read from the current codified text: the WUI chapter's local amendments are purely administrative, and nothing regulates the first five feet or fence materials. The page explains why that matters more here than in most counties: Frazier Park, Pine Mountain Club, Kernville, Wofford Heights, Bear Valley Springs and the rest of Kern's fire-exposed mountain communities are unincorporated, so the county code is their entire local layer, and they will move directly onto the state rule's five-year State Responsibility Area track when it takes effect. Tehachapi's code is unreadable behind a blocked publisher and Bakersfield's host could not even be located, both recorded as unchecked rather than clean. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Shasta County gets its page: checked end to end, a hundred feet, not five

Shasta County's guide is live, and it is one of the few counties in California we can call checked end to end: the county's post-Carr-Fire defensible space chapter, read from the codified text as amended in 2025, plus all three cities. The county ordinance is a thirty-foot and one-hundred-foot clearance regime whose single five-foot reference makes a fence near a dwelling an improvement so clearance duties run around it, without regulating the fence itself. Anderson adopted the 2025 Fire Code plainly this February, Redding's amendments are access roads and open burning, and Shasta Lake carries nothing. CAL FIRE runs over a thousand parcels here in its inspection program, among the larger county programs in the state, and none of it checks Zone 0, because no Zone 0 duty exists here until the state rule takes effect. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Monterey County gets its page: Big Sur answers to a code with no five-foot rule

Monterey County's guide is live. The county code, current through April 2026, carries subdivision-era wildfire development standards and a hundred-foot defensible-space deferral to state law, which matters because Big Sur, Carmel Valley and the county's other fire-exposed communities are unincorporated and answer to it. Salinas's fire code excludes fences from its fire protection requirements by definition, and Soledad's fence-materials chapter turns out to be a 2001 aesthetics rule that permits wood and bans razor wire. The page also names the gap nobody else will: the city of Monterey and Carmel-by-the-Sea sit behind a publisher that blocks every tool with no archive coverage, leaving two of the Central Coast's most fire-conscious communities dark to anyone who wants to read their law. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Santa Cruz County gets its page, and its inspection numbers are the worst we have recorded

Santa Cruz County's guide is live. No jurisdiction there has a Zone 0 rule we could find: the county fire code, current through December 2025, is access roads and water supply, and the chapter titled Urban-Wildland Intermix Enhanced Safety Provisions is a repealed shell. Scotts Valley, Watsonville and Capitola read negative; the city of Santa Cruz sits behind a blocked publisher with nothing newer than 2016 readable, which the page says plainly. The number that stands out is compliance: of the parcels CAL FIRE inspected in the county in the current reporting month, thirty-nine percent were compliant, the weakest figure we have recorded in any county. In the county the CZU fire burned through, the hundred-foot duties on the books are not being met, and the five-foot rule is not on the books at all. Read the full page.

Aug 23: San Luis Obispo gets its page, built around the ordinance that changes meaning on filing day

San Luis Obispo County now has a full county guide. No jurisdiction there has a Zone 0 rule in force, and the page says so from the codified text of the county, Atascadero, Paso Robles, Arroyo Grande and Morro Bay. The centerpiece is Morro Bay's Ordinance 672 of September 2025, which made the state's defensible space regulation the controlling standard for the city's weed abatement chapter, citywide, across every hazard designation. Today that means thirty-foot and hundred-foot duties. The day the state's Zone 0 text lands in the regulation the chapter points at, Morro Bay's own municipal code may carry it, on parcels the state rule would never otherwise reach, and the page tells Morro Bay owners the one question to put on their calendar for that day. The gaps are named too: the city of San Luis Obispo's publisher blocks every tool, and Pismo Beach and Grover Beach are unreachable with no archive. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Santa Clara County gets its page: four cities adopted the wildland code, none adopted the zone

Santa Clara County, the largest county in today's survey, now has a full county guide. No jurisdiction there has a Zone 0 rule in force: the county's fire division, reenacted in December 2025, is sprinklers and access roads, and San Jose, Saratoga, Los Gatos and Monte Sereno all adopted the 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code within six weeks of each other without adding an ember-resistant zone. What San Jose and Monte Sereno did add is reach, redefining their interface areas down to Moderate hazard zones, which means the statewide rule will land on more parcels there than its own trigger suggests. Los Altos Hills still runs its hazardous-fire-area rules from 1965. The page names the nine cities and three fire districts nobody has read, carries CAL FIRE's inspection numbers for the county, and says what a homeowner should actually do, which is mostly nothing that costs money. Read the full page.

Aug 23: New analysis: what forty-eight county codes actually say about wildfire

The county survey now has its own page, consolidating what a day of reading codified law actually found. Four findings: county wildfire law was written in the thirty-and-one-hundred-foot era, with adoption dates like 1968, 1991 and 2008, so the state's Zone 0 rule will be introducing a concept most county codes have never contained. Three jurisdictions, Calaveras, Contra Costa Fire and Morro Bay, wired their own codes to the state's defensible space regulation by reference, and their local law may begin requiring Zone 0 the day the state text lands, silently. Three cities amended the same wildland-code section in late 2025 to widen where fuel rules reach while adding nothing about the first five feet. And in forty-eight county codes, the five-foot idea appears exactly once outside the register, in Lassen, as an optional trade for a setback nobody could meet. Ten counties stay unread behind blocked publishers, named so that unread never masquerades as clean. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Forty-eight of fifty-eight: two more counties whose codes barely mention fire

San Benito and Yolo take the survey to forty-eight counties. San Benito's public health and safety title runs from emergency alarms to fireworks to body art without a fire or vegetation chapter anywhere. Yolo's only fire text is a set of administrative amendments to the 2019 Fire Code covering appeals and conflicts. Neither regulates defensible space at all. Ten counties remain, every one behind a blocked or unlocated code publisher, and the register names them so that unread never masquerades as clean. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Forty-six counties read: Inyo declared itself all interface, and still no five-foot rule

Tulare, Inyo and San Francisco take the survey to forty-six of fifty-eight counties, three negatives from three different Californias. Tulare, which carries the SQF Complex burn scar, keeps a fire prevention article about burning and a recovery chapter about debris. Inyo went further than any county we have read: a 2020 ordinance designates every unincorporated acre a Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Area, binds construction to the state's WUI building standards as they update, and ties property maintenance to state defensible-space law, and even that ordinance never regulates what the first five feet is made of. San Francisco's 2025 fire code contains zero occurrences of defensible space or wildland anything, which is what a county with no wildland looks like. The twelve counties that remain all sit behind blocked or unlocated publishers, and the register names them, because unread and clean are different things. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Lassen's code holds the five-foot idea as a bargaining chip, and the survey reaches forty-three

Lassen, Stanislaus and Merced take the survey to forty-three of fifty-eight counties, and Lassen contributes the most interesting sentence yet found in a county without a Zone 0 rule. Its fire hazards chapter, built on the modern fire-safe model, allows a new structure that cannot meet the thirty-foot setback to substitute alternatives including noncombustible block walls or fences and five feet of noncombustible material horizontally around the structure. That is the ember-resistant zone concept, present in a county code as an optional trade for a setback nobody could meet, years before the state made any of it mandatory. Stanislaus adopted the 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code unamended this February. Merced barely regulates fire at all. Fifteen counties remain, and the register now names each one still unread. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Forty counties read, and the register's eighteen still stand alone

San Joaquin, Sutter, Kings and Imperial take the survey to forty of fifty-eight counties. San Joaquin adopted the 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code this January with administrative amendments only. Sutter regulates open-burning distances, Kings regulates weeds and fireworks, and Imperial still runs a Uniform Fire Code adoption from another era. After forty counties read from their own codified text, the pattern has not broken once: no county-level Zone 0 rule exists anywhere in California outside what the register already lists, and the eighteen jurisdictions on it remain the complete verified set. Eighteen counties remain unread, most of them small, rural, or on publishers that resist every tool we have, and the register says exactly which ones they are. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Six more counties, six negatives, one era: the survey reaches thirty-six

Trinity, Tehama, Yuba, Fresno, Mono and Modoc take the survey to thirty-six of fifty-eight counties, and together they date-stamp an era. Trinity and Tehama run fire safe regulations adopted in 1991: road widths, hydrant markers, thirty-foot setbacks. Mono and Modoc adopted theirs in 2008, mirroring the state's thirty-foot and hundred-foot framework. Fresno County's defensible space chapter turns out to be a 2010 rule for eighteen named parcels along the San Joaquin River bluffs, and its fuel definition expressly excludes fences. Yuba makes a building official certify firebreaks at site-plan stage. Nothing in any of them regulates the first five feet, which is the whole point: California's counties wrote their wildfire law in the thirty-and-one-hundred-foot era, and the five-foot idea exists almost nowhere in local code outside the eighteen jurisdictions on our register. When the statewide Zone 0 text takes effect it will not be tightening local rules, it will be introducing a concept most county codes have never contained. Read the full page.

Aug 23: The survey passes halfway: thirty counties read, and Calaveras joins the incorporation club

Five more counties read in one pass takes the survey to thirty of fifty-eight, past the halfway mark. Plumas, the county the Dixie Fire burned through, regulates fuel storage and post-fire debris with a fire-safe chapter from 1992. Siskiyou's fire hazard regulations date to 1968. Madera's fire prevention chapters govern code adoption and livestock grazing. Mendocino runs a 2021 hazardous-vegetation nuisance ordinance with no five-foot band. In all four, the fire-exposed communities are unincorporated, so these county codes are their law, and none mentions the first five feet. The find is Calaveras: a February 2017 ordinance wrote the state's defensible space regulations, Title 14 Sections 1299.01 through 1299.05, into the county code by reference, the same dynamic incorporation we track for Contra Costa Fire and Morro Bay, adopted earliest and most completely. Today those sections contain no Zone 0. The day the state text lands there, three jurisdictions' own codes will carry it, and the register's watch list now names all three. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Kern surveyed: the mountain communities answer to a county code with no five-foot rule

Kern becomes the twenty-fifth county surveyed. The county readopted both its fire code and its Wildland-Urban Interface Code in November 2025, and both are read from the current codified text. The WUI chapter adopts the 2025 state code with administrative amendments only, and the fire code's local touches are sprinkler attics, fireworks stands and oil wellheads. No ember-resistant zone, no fence rule, no five-foot band. The negative carries unusual weight here because Kern's fire-exposed mountain communities, from Frazier Park and Pine Mountain Club to Kernville and Bear Valley Springs, are unincorporated: the county code we read is their law, and it says nothing about the first five feet. The gaps are Tehachapi, whose code sits behind a blocked publisher with no archive coverage, and Bakersfield, whose code host we could not even locate. Both are recorded as unchecked rather than clean, because a page that fails to load and a page with no fence provision produce identical search results. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Tuolumne surveyed: the county with the Zone Zero pilot homes has no Zone 0 law

Tuolumne County becomes the twenty-fourth surveyed, and its shape is an irony worth recording. The county hosts three of the communities named in the state's wildfire mitigation pilot program, where crews are hardening homes with state money. Its own Hazardous Vegetation Management Ordinance, now read from the codified chapter the county posts itself, is a hundred-foot defensible space regime built on state law, with no five-foot band, no ember language, and no fence provision. Sonora, the county's only city, rewrote its defensible space chapter in 2019 as the familiar thirty-foot and hundred-foot zones, citing CAL FIRE's standards, and its only occurrence of "five feet" is a setback for gold dredging. The pilots are hardening the first five feet of real houses while the local law never mentions that zone at all, which is precisely the gap the statewide regulation will close when it takes effect. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Santa Clara surveyed, and three cities across the state share the same quiet amendment

Santa Clara becomes the twenty-third county surveyed, all of it negative, and the reading surfaced a pattern worth naming. San Jose, Saratoga, Los Gatos and Monte Sereno adopted the 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code in a six-week window at the end of 2025, and none added an ember-resistant zone or a fence rule. But San Jose and Monte Sereno both amended the model code's Section 604.2, the section that says where hazardous vegetation and fuel management applies, extending it to Moderate hazard zones and city-designated interface areas, and Santa Monica did the same thing four hundred miles south in October. Three cities, one amendment, zero new requirements: they are widening where fuel rules reach while adding nothing about what the first five feet must be made of. The consequence arrives later. When the statewide Zone 0 text takes effect, its footprint inside these cities will be broader than the state rule's own trigger suggests, and nobody who read only the state regulation would know. Los Altos Hills, the county's most fire-exposed town, still runs its hazardous-fire-area rules from 1965, spark arresters and firewood distances, with nothing about the first five feet. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Monterey County surveyed: a hundred-foot county, an aesthetics fence rule, and two unreachable cities

Monterey becomes the twenty-second county surveyed, read through its code publisher's data service to an April 2026 codification. The county's wildfire chapters are development standards from the subdivision era: road widths, water supplies, thirty-foot structure setbacks, and a fire code whose defensible space section defers to Public Resources Code 4291 or the county code, whichever is more restrictive, at one hundred feet. Nothing regulates the first five feet. Salinas expressly excludes fences from its fire protection requirements, Soledad's fence-materials chapter turns out to be a 2001 aesthetics rule that permits wood and bans razor wire, and Pacific Grove's archived fire chapter adds the county's hundred-foot standard and gives the monarch butterfly its own chapter while Zone 0 goes unmentioned. The gaps are named plainly: the city of Monterey and Carmel-by-the-Sea sit behind a publisher that blocks every tool with no archive coverage at all, which puts two of the state's most fire-conscious communities in the same unreadable class as Oroville. Read the full page.

Aug 23: San Luis Obispo surveyed, and Morro Bay has quietly wired its code to the state standard

San Luis Obispo becomes the twenty-first county surveyed, and it carries the day's most interesting negative. The county's fire prevention title adopts the 2025 Fire Code and Wildland-Urban Interface Code plainly, with a hundred-foot nuisance regime for Cayucos as its only defensible-space ordinance. Atascadero, Paso Robles and Arroyo Grande read negative from current codified text. The find is Morro Bay: an ordinance adopted September 23, 2025 retitled the city's weed chapter "Weeds, Rubbish and Defensible Space" and made Public Resources Code 4291, Title 14 Section 1299.03 and the Board of Forestry's guidelines the controlling standards citywide, across every hazard designation. Today that incorporates a regulation with no Zone 0 in it. The day the state's ember-resistant-zone text takes effect, the same sentence may carry it into Morro Bay parcels the state rule's own trigger would never reach. That question now sits on our effective-date watch list beside Contra Costa's identical clause, which is exactly where a status-tracking site earns its keep: the rules that change meaning on filing day are already on the list before the filing. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Santa Cruz County surveyed end to end, and the chapter that sounds like Zone 0 is an empty shell

Santa Cruz County had sat outside our surveyed count because a web search that finds nothing is not the same as reading the code. The county turned out to have moved its code to a reachable publisher, and the fire code chapter, current through a December 2025 ordinance, is now read in full: access roads, water supply, sprinklers, and no ember-resistant zone or fence rule anywhere. The chapter titled Urban-Wildland Intermix Enhanced Safety Provisions, which sounds exactly like a local Zone 0 rule, turns out to have been repealed outright, and knowing that a promising-sounding chapter is an empty shell is worth as much as reading a full one. Scotts Valley adopts the 2025 state code suite with no local wildfire amendments, Watsonville and Capitola read negative from recent archived codifications, and the city of Santa Cruz is the honest gap: its publisher blocks every tool and the newest readable text is a decade old. Twenty of fifty-eight counties are now surveyed, and the register coverage graphic has two more filled squares. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Shasta County's current text is finally read, and the survey reaches nineteen counties

Shasta County's defensible space ordinance had a frustrating shape: we could read the 2019 enacting version in full, but the current text as amended by Ordinance SCC 2025-03 sat behind a dead county link, a code publisher page that renders nothing, and a second publisher that blocks every tool. The publisher's own data service turned out to carry the codified text, current through February 2026, and the whole chapter is now read. The in-force rule is a thirty-foot and one-hundred-foot clearance regime with vegetation-management duties and misdemeanor-grade enforcement. It contains no ember-resistant zone, no five-foot band, and no materials rule; its only five-foot reference makes a fence near a dwelling an "improvement" so that clearance duties run around it, without regulating the fence itself. The same route then closed the county's three cities in one pass: Anderson adopted the 2025 Fire Code plainly this February, Redding's local amendments are about access roads and open burning plus a construction manual for its WUI areas, and Shasta Lake carries nothing at all. With county and cities read end to end, Shasta becomes the nineteenth county surveyed of fifty-eight, and the register's checked-and-nothing-to-report list gains its plainest entry: a post-Carr-Fire county whose defensible space law never mentions the first five feet. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Big Bear's fire code is read at last, and its five-foot rule is about pine needles, not fences

Big Bear Fire Authority Ordinance BBFA2023-001, the last unread fire code on our San Bernardino page, sat behind a site that refuses every fetch tool we have. The Internet Archive held a copy, and after reassembling the twelve-megabyte scan in pieces and reading all twenty-seven pages from images, the checklist we had been quoting is confirmed at ordinance level. Amended section 4907.3 requires abating forest fuels within a hundred feet of structures, and its item (i) is the five-foot rule itself: all pine needles and leaves removed within five feet of a structure. Added section 4907.4 bars native brush within fifteen feet of any building, deck or patio. The quiet headline is amended section 4906.2, which classifies every area the Authority protects as a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone by ordinance. And in twenty-seven pages there is no fence provision and no noncombustible-materials requirement. Both of the county's long-unread fire codes are now read, and neither contains a Zone 0 rule. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Larkspur's flagged section turns out to be about spark arrestors, courtesy of the Internet Archive

Larkspur has sat on our unreachable list because its code publisher blocks every fetch tool we have. The Internet Archive turned out to hold August 2024 captures of the city's entire fire prevention title, then current through Ordinance 1075 of June 5, 2024, and they close most of the question. The section our search had flagged as a possible fence rule, 14.10.040, is a requirement for spark arrestors on existing structures. The title's four chapters cover the 2022 California Fire Code plus Appendix A of the 2021 International Wildland-Urban Interface Code, fire-trail vehicles, hazard abatement and street access, with zero occurrences of fence, ember, defensible space or five feet anywhere. So Larkspur carried no Zone 0 rule as of its June 2024 codification. The honest limit: anything adopted since is invisible until the publisher unblocks, so the Marin page records this as a dated negative rather than a current one, which is exactly the distinction between a page that fails to load and a rule that does not exist. Read the full page.

Aug 23: San Juan Capistrano's WUI chapter is read, and the fence rule the search hinted at is not there

San Juan Capistrano surfaced months ago in a search for noncombustible fencing language, which was weak evidence a fence provision existed in its 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code adoption, and the chapter would not load in any tool we had. It has now been read in full from the codified text. The city's complete amendment list is four items: enforcement responsibility, an application section, and two sections requiring fuel modification plans for new construction to Orange County Fire Authority Guideline C-05. No fence provision, no five-foot materials rule, no ember-resistant zone. The scope detail worth knowing is that the city's code reaches additions and remodels within one hundred feet of a fuel modification zone even where the parcel sits outside any mapped hazard zone, if wildfire construction methods were previously required at the property. That is a construction-standards trigger, not a defensible-space duty. Laguna Beach remains the only Orange County jurisdiction with an adopted Zone 0-style rule, and the county page now says all of this from the adopted text. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Santa Monica's stalled amendments finish loading, and there was almost nothing left to load

Santa Monica adopted the 2025 California Wildland-Urban Interface Code in October 2025, and for months we could confirm only that its local amendments existed and began at Section 604.2, because the code publisher's page stalled partway through loading in every tool we had. It has now been read in full from the codified chapter, and the suspense resolves to almost nothing: the complete local amendment list is one section. Amended 604.2 extends the code's hazardous vegetation and fuel management duty to State Responsibility Area lands, to High as well as Very High severity zones, and to locally designated WUI areas, a genuine broadening of where fuel management applies. And that is the entire package: no fencing section, no five-foot materials rule, no Zone 0 anywhere in the chapter. A headline reading "Santa Monica adopts wildfire code" would tempt any reader to assume a fence rule followed. It did not, and the Los Angeles County page now says so from the adopted text. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Pinole's unreadable WUI chapter is read, and its fence section is not the county's

Pinole's Municipal Code Chapter 15.22, the city's adoption of the 2025 California Wildland-Urban Interface Code, had defeated every fetch: its code publisher serves navigation without rule text. The block turned out to be depth, not access: the publisher renders full text only at individual section pages, and reading both sections that way closed the question. Pinole's amendments are drawn from the county and fire district ordinance so directly that the city's own code still carries a title clause naming Contra Costa County and two fire protection districts. But its section 508, the noncombustible fence rule for new subdivisions of thirty or more units, is a condensed variant: it reaches perimeter lots within thirty feet of a structure, and the county version's separate five-foot-of-a-structure trigger does not appear in Pinole's codified text. Two documents that look like copies of each other diverge exactly where a fence contractor would price the difference. No Zone 0 provision either way, so the register is unchanged, and the Contra Costa page now states all three adoptions and the divergence. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Chico read in full: the city next to the strictest fence rule in California has none at all

Butte County produced both the strictest fence rule on our register, in Paradise, and a county Zone 0 with no fence rule at all, so what its largest city requires was worth answering precisely rather than guessing. We read every section of Chico's fire regulation chapters and the standards chapter they point to, which adopts the 2025 California Fire Code as amended through the city's January 6, 2026 ordinance. The complete local amendment list covers permits, explosives, storage tanks, open fires, fireworks, hydrant spacing, rear addressing and a prohibition on combustible upholstered furniture visible from the street. Nothing touches the first five feet, defensible space, or fences, and the city's only vegetation chapter is a standard weed abatement regime. Chico is now a verified negative on the register's checked-and-nothing-to-report list. Oroville is the honest contrast: its code publisher returns an access block to every tool we have, and no archive exists, so Oroville remains unverified rather than negative, because a page that fails to load and a page with no fence provision produce identical search results. Read the full page.

Aug 23: The site's largest unread document, San Bernardino's 90-page fire code, contains no Zone 0

San Bernardino County Fire Protection District's Ordinance FPD 23-01, the district's adoption of the 2022 California Fire Code, was the one place a local Zone 0 provision could still sit in the county and the largest unreadable document on this site: ninety pages of image-only scan. It has now been read page by page from images of the signed document, with every amendment subsection mapped. Adopted unanimously on February 28, 2023, it amends eight Fire Code chapters and two appendices: permits, definitions, open flames, fire watches, access roads, water supply, address identification, sprinklers, responder radio coverage and pallet yards, plus fifty-one sections of enforcement machinery. Nothing in it touches the first five feet, defensible space, or fence materials. The only fence provision governs electrified security fences, and the ordinance's Wildfire Risk Area definition exists to require open-flame permits, not to regulate landscaping. The county page's negative now carries no district-sized asterisk, and the register's checked-and-nothing-to-report list grows by one. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Truckee Fire's unread ordinances are read, and the program named a zone the rules never created

Nevada County's one remaining hiding place for a fourth local rule is closed. Truckee Fire Protection District's two ordinances, posted as image-only scans no tool could extract a word from, have been read page by page from images of the signed documents. Ordinance 02-2012 is a hundred-foot defensible space requirement, most intense in the first thirty feet, that supplements and supersedes Public Resources Code 4291 across the district's Nevada and Placer County territory; it defines fuel to include lumber and firewood and never mentions the first five feet, a fence, or a materials standard. Ordinance 01-2019 adds a buyer disclosure and a point-of-sale defensible space inspection against the 2012 standard, with condo sales and foreclosures exempt. The finding worth carrying: the district's rebate program requires a clear Zone Zero before applying and pays toward the five feet of fence closest to the house, so readers reasonably assume a Zone 0 rule exists here. It does not. The program names a zone the district's ordinances never created, and an incentive is not a mandate. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Marin's last unread ordinance is read, and the county's answer is still no

Our Marin page carried one gap it could not close: Novato Fire Protection District's Ordinance 2025-4, adopting the 2025 California Wildland Urban Interface Code with local amendments, was posted as an image-only scan from which we could not extract a word, and we wrote that if a Marin Zone 0 rule existed anywhere, that was the likeliest place. All 33 pages have now been read from images of the signed scan. The ordinance's own amendment index lists every changed section, and none is an ember-resistant-zone rule or a fence provision. The words "Zone 0" do appear, twice, with nothing required of the first five feet: a fuel-zone boundary inside vegetation management plans, and a definition of an exterior sprinkler system that hydrates the zone. The companion Ordinance 2025-1 turned out to be the district's adoption of the state-recommended hazard severity maps, passed June 4, 2025, which resolves a second open item. Marin's negative now stands with no open gap behind it, and one new trap is on the register page: Novato's amended section 508 governs wall coverings while Contra Costa Fire's section 508 in the same model code governs fences. Read the full page.

Aug 23: Riverside County was on the register all along, and we said it was not

The register reaches eighteen with unincorporated Riverside County, and the entry is a correction of our own work twice over. We had written that Ordinance 787 was not a Zone 0 rule, sourced "as reported," and later that the county itself had adopted none. Reading the consolidated ordinance replaced both claims: 787 as amended through 787.11, adopted December 9, 2025 and effective January 7, 2026, adds the same Section 604.11 fencing regime as Indio and Indian Wells, whose identical text it turns out to be the source of, plus a broader Zone 0 maintenance list barring artificial grass, vines on near-house fences, combustible mulch and firewood. The same day, Contra Costa Fire's WUI ordinance was read in full to ask the same question, and its exclusion from the register held: no 604 amendments, no Zone 0 provisions, fencing rules confined to new subdivisions of thirty or more units. One adoption hid a Zone 0 regime and one did not, which is why "we read the text" is the register's only rule. Read the full page.

Aug 23: The statute under the SRA clock says three years, not five

Zone 0's legal history is usually told as AB 3074 (2020) straight to the 2026 rulemaking. The statute in between is SB 504 (Dodd, Chapter 982, 2024), which amended both defensible-space statutes and created the existing-home phase-in. Its words: the ember-resistant zone requirement "shall take effect for existing structures three years after the effective date for the new structures." Three years, both tracks. The adopted regulation matches that in the Local Responsibility Area and gives the State Responsibility Area five years, a number that sits on top of a statute saying three. Probably nothing bad for a homeowner, since the regulation is more generous than the statute's lag, and the readings can be harmonised, but the harmonising reading is our construction rather than either text's. Until something official reconciles them, the SRA five-year clock should be described as the regulation's number, not as statutorily compelled. Verified from the chaptered text on leginfo. Tracked as an open question. Read the full page.

Aug 23: The register reaches seventeen, and two desert cities reverse the state repair rule

Three additions, each verified from the codified text. Santee adopted the 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code with a local amendment requiring all fencing in a Very High zone to be ignition resistant and the closest five feet to any structure to be noncombustible, with no attachment trigger. Indio and Indian Wells adopted identical local additions whose exception clause is the exact inverse of the statewide rule: where the state text permits combustible repairs to an existing combustible fence, these two cities require that replacing any part of a non-parallel run within five feet brings the entire run back noncombustible. A homeowner relying on national coverage of the state repair allowance would get this backwards in both cities. Also recorded: negatives and unresolved checks for Fairfax, Atascadero, Shasta County and four unreachable WUI adopters, kept separate from verified entries because a page that fails to load and a page with no fence provision produce identical search results. Read the full page.

Aug 22: How far you must clear inside Zone 0 is set by your eave depth

The inner vegetation-free buffer in Zone 0 is not a fixed number. Section 1298.04(b)(6)(A), and its identical State Responsibility Area twin, require a buffer running from the wall "out at least one (1) foot or to the eave (whichever is farthest, up to five (5) feet)". A house with no overhang clears one foot; thirty-six inch eaves mean three feet; eaves at five feet or deeper make Zone 0 vegetation-free wall to edge. Two houses on one street can owe different amounts of work. Now drawn to scale, alongside the two-foot clearances at windows, doors, posts and vents and the five feet out from an attached deck. Read the full page.

Aug 22: The draft rule restates Public Resources Code 4117 with its permissive wording made mandatory

Section 1298.03 lets a Local Responsibility Area fire agency develop alternative Zone 0 practices, subject to governing-body approval and a finding of substantially similar practical effects. It supports that floor by citing Public Resources Code 4117 as a section "which requires" local ordinances that "shall be as protective or more protective than state statutes". The statute as enacted says a local agency "may adopt" such ordinances and that they "may be more restrictive". The closing clause is word-identical in both, so the sentence was clearly worked from. Probably no change for a homeowner, since the "shall" sits in the regulation itself, but anyone following the citation will find permission rather than a mandate. Logged as an open question pending the certified text. Read the full page.

Aug 22: Paradise and Butte County take the register to fourteen, and disagree about fences

Two Butte County jurisdictions were added to the register of local Zone 0 rules already in force, and they answer the fence question in opposite directions. The Town of Paradise, rebuilt after the Camp Fire, requires all fencing within five feet of any structure to be noncombustible, attached or not, new or existing, with no grandfather clause and a certificate of compliance before a sale closes: stricter than the statewide rule the Board adopted on August 19. Unincorporated Butte County, under Ordinance 4199, has a five-foot vegetation rule and never mentions fences at all. Both verified from the adopted text and added to the register, which also now records Lake County, where we looked and found a thirty-foot ordinance with nothing in the first five feet. Read the full page.

Aug 19: California adopts Zone 0: approved August 19, 2026, not yet in effect

The Board of Forestry approved the statewide Zone 0 ember-resistant zone regulation. It is not in effect yet: Office of Administrative Law review with a five-day public comment period comes next, then Secretary of State publication, and no compliance deadline runs until an effective date exists. Fence provisions are unchanged from the July draft. One detail most coverage misses: the LRA and SRA fence texts are not identical, as the parallel-fence clause is LRA-only. Read the full page.