County guide, fact-checked August 20, 2026

Zone 0 in San Bernardino County: Redlands requires it, and the state rule would reach 3.6 percent of the county

Fact-checked August 23, 2026·Sources at the end of this article

Two sets of rules, and neither one binds your fence today

Most county guides open by separating a local ordinance already in force from the statewide regulation that is not, and this county now has both. The local one is the City of Redlands', and the section below quotes it. What follows here is the search that came before it, because the shape of the negative still matters for the rest of the county: as of August 20, 2026 we could find no adopted Zone 0 requirement in the county documents we had then read. We ran full-text searches for "Zone 0", "Zone Zero" and "ember-resistant" against the 89-page CAL FIRE San Bernardino-Inyo-Mono Unit 2026 Strategic Fire Plan, six San Bernardino County Fire Protection District pages, the district's Standard SRA-1, the county's abatement and citation pages, the County Policy Plan Hazards Element and Ordinance No. 4489. Every one returned zero hits, and Big Bear Fire Department's ordinance index carries none either. That is an affirmative negative on the documents named, and only on those.

Update, August 23, 2026: the one document that had defeated us is read, and the county's negative now has no asterisk on the district. SBCoFD Fire Code Ordinance FPD 23-01, the district's adoption of the 2022 California Fire Code with local amendments, downloads as a 39.8 MB, 90-page file with zero extractable text, and we previously made no claim about it in either direction. We have now read all 90 pages from images of the signed scan. It was passed and adopted unanimously on February 28, 2023, effective thirty days later, and its amendments cover Fire Code chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11 and 28 plus two appendices: permits, definitions, open flames, fire watches, access roads, water supply, address numbers, sprinklers, responder radio coverage, pallet yards, hydrants, and fifty-one sections of enforcement machinery. No section touches the first five feet, defensible space, or fence materials. The only fence provision in the entire ordinance governs electrified security fences, which must have a labeled firefighter disconnect switch. The only wildland content is a "Wildfire Risk Area" definition, and it exists to require permits for torches, flares and open flames in hazardous areas, not to require anything of your landscaping. Even its section 508 is a fire control room requirement for giant warehouses, nothing like the fence rules other agencies have put at that number in the wildland code.

Adopted, not yet in effect: the statewide regulation, the instrument that would eventually carry fence and gate rules into this county. It cleared the Board of Forestry on August 19, 2026 and still needs Office of Administrative Law review and publication by the Secretary of State, so no compliance clock is running. Our timeline and enforcement guide follows that process, and the register lists the jurisdictions with Zone 0 rules we have verified as in force, at least thirty-five of them. One of them, Redlands, is in this county.

Where the statewide rule will reach in this county

The regulation runs on two separate legal tracks. In the State Responsibility Area (SRA, land where the state carries financial responsibility for wildfire protection) the duty comes through Public Resources Code section 4291 and covers every hazard class. In the Local Responsibility Area (LRA, city and district-protected land) it comes through Government Code section 51182 and covers only mapped Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones. A High-zone house inside a city sits outside the rule; a Moderate-zone house in the SRA sits inside it.

Now apply that to the largest county in the continental United States. CAL FIRE's unit plan publishes responsibility-area acreage here: SRA 342,532 acres, Federal Responsibility Area 10,431,623 acres, LRA 2,093,726 acres. Those add to 12,867,881 acres, about 20,106 square miles against a published county area of 20,160, so essentially the whole county is accounted for. The percentages below are ours, calculated on the agency's table.

Federal land sits outside the Zone 0 regulation entirely, and here it is four fifths of the county. Narrow it further with the Office of the State Fire Marshal's hazard-zone table, which gives the county 342,483 SRA acres in total and 117,516 Very High acres in the LRA. Add the two tracks and the adopted rule would eventually reach about 459,999 acres, roughly 3.6 percent of the county's land area. That sum is our computation from the OSFM table, with a denominator from the CAL FIRE table, not an agency number. The two SRA totals corroborate each other, differing by 49 acres; the two LRA totals do not, and no source we loaded explains the gap, so we take no position on it. To place your own parcel, start with our address lookup walkthrough.

Who protects you here, and why the mountains are different

San Bernardino is not a CAL FIRE contract county. CAL FIRE protects the SRA directly, through a unit covering "the State Responsibility Area (SRA) portions of San Bernardino, Inyo, and Mono Counties." Everything else runs through independent departments or the county fire district, which protects 19,293 square miles. The mountain arrangement is recent: per the unit plan, "In 2013, CAL FIRE assumed the direct protection of areas of SRA in the San Bernardino Mountains," on a battalion boundary from Crestline to Angelus Oaks, taking 32,542 acres and "35,000 parcels that are subject to LE-100 inspections." That is the PRC 4291 track, state defensible space law enforced by CAL FIRE, not a Zone 0 ordinance. Big Bear Valley has its own department, which handles AB 38 defensible space inspections in the valley "excluding Fawnskin", sending Fawnskin, zip code 92333, to the County Fire Marshal. Running Springs Fire Department is run by the Running Springs Water District.

The district's one recent ordinance on this ground is a mapping instrument. Ordinance No. 4489 designates the Fire Hazard Severity Zones CAL FIRE recommended on its March 24, 2025 maps; adopted June 10, 2025 on the consent calendar, effective July 21, 2025. All four pages do three things: designate zones, provide for severability, set an effective date. No Zone 0, no ember-resistant zone, no fence provision, no defensible-space standard. The district also notes that "state law prohibits the Fire District from assigning a fire hazard severity zone that is less restrictive than the one recommended by the State Fire Marshal."

The five-foot fence rule that does exist here, and why it is not Zone 0

San Bernardino County has had a five-foot noncombustible fence separation in its Development Code since 2007. It is binding, and it is also not what a Zone 0 headline implies. County Code section 82.13.050(j), in the Fire Safety (FS) Overlay chapter, reads:

(1) Where wood or vinyl fencing is used, there shall be a minimum five-foot separation between the wood or vinyl fencing and the wall of the nearest structure except on those properties where previous construction occurred in compliance with a previous Code. Fencing within the five-foot separation area shall be of noncombustible material or modified one-hour fire-resistance-rated construction.

San Bernardino County Code section 82.13.050(j), enacted by Ordinance 4011 in 2007 and amended in 2008 and 2017; supplement 2026 S-45

Four things control how much that means for you. First, it is a development standard, not a maintenance duty: section 82.13.050 opens "Each proposed development shall comply with all applicable requirements of this Chapter, as follows." Second, it carries the express grandfather clause quoted above. Third, the 50 percent remodel trigger does not pull it onto an untouched house: section 82.13.050(d) requires any addition or alteration to comply with the Chapter, but the whole-structure retrofit it commands at the 50 percent threshold reaches only subsections (h), perimeter access, and (p), building construction. Fences, subsection (j), are not on that list. Fourth, the FS Overlay is mapped only in the unincorporated county, covering "areas within the mountains, valley foothills, and desert region designated by the applicable Fire Authority as wildfire risk areas."

That fourth point needs a caveat, because the language has traveled. The Town of Yucca Valley carries the same requirement in its own Development Code, at section 9.17.050, adopted by Ordinance 253 on December 16, 2014. The wording is materially identical to the county's, down to the grandfather clause:

"Where wood or vinyl fencing is used, there shall be a minimum five foot (5') separation between the wood or vinyl fencing and the wall of the nearest structure except on those properties where previous construction occurred in compliance with a previous code. Fencing within the five foot (5') separation area shall be of noncombustible material or modified one hour fire resistance rated construction."

Yucca Valley Municipal Code §9.17.050(D)(3)(a), Ordinance 253, December 16, 2014

Its scope clause is the same kind of thing: "Development proposed in fire safety overlays shall comply with all applicable requirements of this section." So the analysis above transfers intact. It is a design-stage requirement, it is not a Zone 0 rule, the words "ember" and "defensible space" do not appear in the section at all, and it does not put Yucca Valley on the register.

The reason to say it here is that an incorporated city inside this county is not automatically outside the county's approach. If you are in a San Bernardino County city and building or substantially altering in a fire safety overlay, check your own municipal code rather than assuming incorporation put you beyond it. We found this one by accident and have not checked the others.

Two neighboring provisions are also new-development-only: 82.13.050(n) requires decks "composed of noncombustible or ignition-resistant materials," and 82.13.050(p)(4) that "Gutters and downspouts shall be constructed of noncombustible material." Pricing fence materials against that standard means aluminum, steel, wrought iron, chain link, masonry, concrete and stone; our guide to noncombustible fence materials explains the test behind the word.

Redlands: the county's Zone Zero rule, and the widest hazard trigger we have found

On August 23, 2026, searching the code publishers for operative language rather than reading city by city, we found what this page had spent weeks saying it could not: an adopted, codified, mandatory ember-resistant zone in San Bernardino County. It belongs to the City of Redlands, it took effect with the 2026 code cycle under Ordinance 2998, and it had been sitting in the city's municipal code the whole time we were listing Redlands among the places we had not checked.

Chapter 15.30 of the Redlands Municipal Code is the city's wildland-urban interface code, and section 15.30.150 adds a section 604.6 to it. The scope sentence is the one that matters: "All existing habitable buildings and structures within the High and Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone (VHFHSZ) shall maintain defensible space in accordance with sections 604.6.1, 604.6.2, and 604.6.3." Two things in that sentence are unusual. It reaches existing buildings, which most local Zone 0 rules do not. And it reaches High as well as Very High zones, which the statewide regulation on the Local Responsibility Area track will not: the state's own trigger inside cities stops at Very High. A Redlands homeowner in a High zone is covered by their city today and would not be covered by the state rule tomorrow.

Section 604.6.1 is headed "Zone Zero (0-5 feet) - Ember Resistant," and its nine subsections are duties, not suggestions. Organic mulch and wood chips are prohibited outright, and "non-combustible materials such as concrete, gravel, decomposed granite, or other approved materials shall be used within this zone." Firewood may not be stored there. Vegetation is thinned to no more than fifty percent density, grasses kept to four inches, vegetation under windows below eighteen inches, vines limited on the structure. Tree branches need six feet of clearance above roofs, combustible fences and the ground. Chimneys need spark arrestors and ten feet of branch clearance, propane tanks ten feet of clearance from dead vegetation, roofs and gutters kept clear of needles and leaves, and hazardous items removed from firefighter access routes on all sides of the structure.

What Redlands does not have is a fence rule. Nothing in Chapter 15.30 requires a noncombustible fence, a five-foot noncombustible span, or the replacement of an existing wood fence, and the only place fences appear is that tree-clearance line, which treats a combustible fence as a thing branches must stay clear of. So the honest summary for a Redlands homeowner is this: the ground inside your first five feet is regulated, the fence standing in it is not. That makes Redlands the seventh of the thirty-five jurisdictions on our register with a Zone 0 rule and no fence requirement, and if somebody quotes you for a fence replacement because "Redlands requires Zone 0," ask them which section they mean.

The city also carries a hundred-foot fuel modification duty (section 15.30.140), a designated local hazard severity zone map adopted by Ordinance 2986, a fire protection plan requirement for new development, and abatement with a lien for costs. It first adopted local wildland-urban interface regulations in 2008.

Which other cities we checked, and what we found

Added August 30, 2026. Redlands is the city in this county with a Zone Zero rule, set out above. To find out whether it is alone, we read seven more from their codified text, current through 2026 in every case, searching the building, construction, fire, wildland, safety and health titles for both model sentence families, the section numbers they use, "ember-resistant zone", and a five-foot distance beside a noncombustible or ignition-resistant term.

Read and nothing found: Chino Hills, Big Bear Lake, Apple Valley, Hesperia, Montclair, Grand Terrace and Colton. Big Bear Lake is worth naming separately, because a mountain city surrounded by forest having no Zone 0 rule of its own is the kind of thing people assume the other way round.

Three of those, Chino Hills, Grand Terrace and Villa Park in Orange County, did cite Public Resources Code section 4291 in their codes. We looked at each and none is a local Zone 0 rule: the state model fire and wildland-urban interface codes point at section 4291 themselves, so that citation is ordinary adopted language rather than a local choice.

What a negative here does and does not mean. It means these cities have not written Zone 0 rules into their own municipal codes, in either the modern wording or the older one. It does not mean no rule reaches those addresses, because a rule can belong to the fire agency rather than the city. The clearest illustration is in another county entirely: Moraga and Orinda both came back empty, and the fire district that serves them has a Zone 0 rule of its own. The full sweep, and how much it misses, is set out here.

What the first five feet actually requires here today

Strip out the new-development code and what remains is vegetation and litter abatement, most of which never reaches five feet. County Code section 23.0301 works off PRC 4291 and requires a firebreak "for a distance of not less than 30 feet on each side of the building or structure or to the property line, whichever is nearer," plus a fuel break from 30 to 100 feet. Section 23.0304, the Mountain Area standard, keys ten categories of hazardous vegetation to 100, 30, 15 and 10 feet. Its tightest distance anywhere is ten feet, and neither section carries ember language or a fence provision. Running Springs Fire Department's Mountain Defensible Space Guidelines has exactly two columns, 15 feet and 100 feet, and the county district's Ready, Set, Go! flyer, dated November 2023, works in A, B, C and D zones rather than the Zone 0 framework.

Big Bear is the exception. Its Wildfire Defensible Space Compliance Checklist requires, "Within 0-5 ft. of a structure: abate pine needles, forest litter, dead vegetation, and mulches," with high-energy-release vegetation abated within 0 to 15 feet, and its Priority Defensible Space Requirements handout says the same for weeds, grasses and needles. So the first five feet must be cleared of needles, litter, dead vegetation, mulch, weeds and grass. Nothing there requires noncombustible ground cover, prohibits live plants, or mentions fences. Big Bear's fence line sits instead under the heading "Firewise Structure Hardening Recommendations" and reads "Replace wood fencing within 10' of structure with non-combustible type fencing." Advisory, and ten feet rather than five. And as of August 23, 2026 the enforceable instrument behind the checklist is read too: Big Bear Fire Authority Ordinance BBFA2023-001, adopted April 11, 2023, long an unreadable scan, reached us through an Internet Archive copy and was read page by page. It confirms the checklist at ordinance level. Amended section 4907.3 requires abating forest fuels within one hundred feet of structures, and its item (i) is the five-foot rule itself: "All pine needles and leaves shall be removed from within five (5) feet of a structure." Added section 4907.4 bars native brush and highly flammable vegetation within fifteen feet of any building, deck or patio. Amended section 4906.2 is the quiet headline: it classifies every area the Authority protects as a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone. And across all twenty-seven pages there is no fence provision and no noncombustible-materials requirement. The five-foot duty in Big Bear is a fuel-removal duty, exactly as the checklist presents it.

What help exists, and what it will not pay for

Mountain assistance runs largely through Mountain Rim Fire Safe Council, which serves "the communities of Rim of the World area, Big Bear, Angelus Oaks, Forest Falls, Mountain Home Village, Devore Heights, Wrightwood, Lytle Creek and Waterman Canyon." Its abatement program answers notices to abate and may pay "5 to 100% of the cost of bringing the property into compliance, based upon household income and other information," subject to unpublished maximums. Involve the council before hiring anyone: "If you have the work done prior to MRFSC involvement there is no reimbursement." Its dead tree program contributes 10 to 100 percent for qualifying trees, and free curbside chipping has three deadlines left this season: August 30, September 13 and September 27.

The limits matter more. MRFSC states plainly that "Structural home hardening funding is not currently available." The California Wildfire Mitigation Program has no project area in San Bernardino County and rejects applications from outside its project areas. Big Bear Fire Department says it has no grant funds for weed abatement and routes residents to MRFSC. We found no county district homeowner grant on any page we loaded. The only Zone-0-labeled money here is a $15,000 award MRFSC received from the California Fire Foundation in November 2025 "for its Zone Zero Campaign", plus a "new grant for Zone Zero Demonstration sites and Home Assessments. More info will be available spring of 2026." No homeowner application, amount, eligibility rule or opening date is published anywhere we loaded, and that spring promise had not been followed up as of August 20, 2026.

Two things do cost nothing today: MRFSC's free home assessment, whose intake form submits despite a stale July banner, and the county district's Residential Assessment Program, promising "no charge or fees, and no punitive action taken." Our guide to who pays sets this in statewide context.

Who inspects, and what it costs to ignore them

Abatement runs through Land Use Services rather than the fire district, on an uneven cadence: "Valley & Desert Regions get two surveys per year during early spring and early fall," while "Mountain Regions receive one survey in the summer." Owners get 30 days. Citations start at $100 per violation, rise to $200 for a second within a year for the same offense, and reach $500 for third and subsequent violations, with a 100 percent penalty if payment is not received within 60 days; paying "does not relieve the responsibility to correct the violation(s)." For extensions and payments, 909-884-4056.

In the SRA, CAL FIRE runs the LE-100 program across roughly 35,000 mountain parcels, where "Non-compliance on 3rd inspection results in legal action (citation)." Big Bear inspects year-round across zip codes 92314, 92315 and 92386, and warns that "The notification letter is your warning. A notice of violation is not guaranteed to be issued in advance of a citation." An inspection on your own terms costs $95 in Big Bear; the county district's is $250 effective July 1, 2026, rising to $257 and then $264.

Claims we could not verify

• Resolved in full, August 23, 2026: the contents of the two adopted fire codes. Both were previously listed here as unread image-only scans. SBCoFD Ordinance FPD 23-01, the 90-page county district fire code, was read from page images of the signed scan and contains no Zone 0 provision; the update near the top of this page has the findings. Big Bear Ordinance BBFA2023-001, whose host now refuses our tools, reached us through an Internet Archive copy and was read the same way; the Big Bear section above has its findings, and its five-foot rule is pine-needle removal, with no fence provision anywhere in it.
• Resolved for Redlands, August 23, 2026, and it was a yes. Redlands sat on this list as unchecked, and its municipal code turned out to carry a mandatory Zone Zero; the section above quotes it. What we did not verify is the ordinance's own effective-date clause: the signed copy sits behind an image viewer we could not read, so we date it from the city's codified text, its ordinance number, and the city's own newspaper reporting the December 2025 adoption of standards that took effect January 1, 2026.
• Whether roughly eighteen still-unchecked cities and independent districts have Zone 0 ordinances, among them Apple Valley FPD, Chino Valley IFD, Rancho Cucamonga FPD, Loma Linda, San Manuel FD and Arrowbear Lake FD. Our negative is verified for the county district, CAL FIRE's unit, Big Bear and Running Springs only, and Redlands is now a verified yes.
• Whether City of San Bernardino Municipal Code section 15.10.030 still runs off a 2008 map. Search snippet only; the city code would not load.
• The gap between the two LRA acreage figures, 2,093,726 and 1,763,446. No source we loaded explains it.
• MRFSC's dollar caps, and which assistance range applies: its pages say 5 to 100 percent on the abatement and home assessment pages and 10 to 100 percent on the tree page. We report both rather than reconcile them.
• Whether MRFSC can obtain an extension on a County abatement notice. One page says it cannot and sends you to the County, then later says it can. Facing a 30-day notice, call 909-884-4056 yourself.
• Published homeowner terms for the Zone Zero campaign or the demonstration sites, the utilities' hazardous tree programs at Edison and Bear Valley Electric, and any county or regional community wildfire protection plan. None found, or not loaded.
• Whether the county or the district has said anything about the August 19, 2026 statewide adoption. Nothing on any page we loaded. What we are tracking statewide sits in our open questions log.

What this means for you

• Nothing we found in force here requires you to replace an existing wood fence. Not the county code, not Big Bear's checklist, not CAL FIRE's inspections. If a salesperson says otherwise, ask which section says so.
• Find out which track you are on first. SRA parcels answer to PRC 4291 at every hazard class; LRA parcels answer to Government Code 51182 only in mapped Very High zones. Use our address lookup, then confirm with the agency that actually inspects you.
• Clear the first five feet now, because that part is free. Needles, leaf litter, dead vegetation, mulch, weeds and grass. In Big Bear it is already required. Our self-assessment walks it and the checklist keeps score.
• Building in the unincorporated county? Section 82.13.050(j) is live at plan check, and decks, gutters and downspouts carry their own material requirements. Price it at design, not at inspection.
• Want the fence work anyway? Do it on your timetable. Read what the adopted state rule asks in our fence requirements guide and our explainer on the five-foot transition, and treat the insurance side as a credit rather than a requirement in fence insurance discounts.

How often CAL FIRE inspects here

CAL FIRE has 1,823 parcels in San Bernardino County in its defensible space inspection program in July 2026, the month the dashboard is currently reporting. Of the 1,812 inspected, 1,582 were compliant, which is 87 percent. 9 properties have already been found non-compliant more than once.

Two things this does not tell you. These counts cover inspections by CAL FIRE and Contract Counties inside the State Responsibility Area only, so work done by local fire agencies in the Local Responsibility Area is absent entirely. And none of these inspections is checking Zone 0: they are inspections against the defensible space rules in force today, which reach from the structure out to one hundred feet and contain no ember-resistant zone requirement. See the full inspection figures and what they mean, read from CAL FIRE's public dashboard on August 23, 2026.