MENDOCINO CO., 7/30/25 — Local legend Seabiscuit would approve of his home ranch’s newest effort: the Golden Rule Mobile Village, located within Ridgewood Ranch, has become the county’s newest Fire Safe Council, a grassroots community-led effort to reduce fire danger in their vicinity.
Ridgewood Ranch, about midway between Willits and Ukiah, is known for its native and exotic wildlife, white deer, slow-moving miniature donkey, and Seabiscuit, arguably America’s most famous racehorse.
Unfortunately, insurers know it as a fire-prone neighborhood to avoid, leaving residents of the mobile and manufactured home park on the property, who are all over 55, to mostly fend for themselves with the FAIR plan, California’s pricey home insurance of last resort.
Now a few of those residents have organized to start protecting their community from fire with improved defensible space, education, and home-hardening measures. Homeowner Kate Carter went to a two-day Cal Fire training, and knew exactly what she wanted to do.
“In March, I attended the defensible space assessor training put on by Cal Fire,” Carter said. “I became acutely aware of how my present location and the mobile home park in which I live is susceptible to wildfire. Following that training, I was gung-ho to conduct defensible space assessments for all my neighbors in the Golden Rule Mobile Village.”
The village contains just under a hundred units with one or two residents each.
“What I appreciated the most about that training,” Carter continued, “was the importance of preventing fire starts from embers. Those embers will come through the air a mile or more. They are like matches dropping from the sky, falling into dead vegetation or gutters that are clogged.”
“My big focus for this village is, if everybody can just look around their property and think, ‘If a match fell into that pile of dry grass or leaves, would it start a fire?’” she continued. “In this mobile home park, we are all in close proximity to each other. So we’re all dependent on one another to do the minimal amount of cleanup to protect our homes as well as our neighbors.”
Forming a Fire Safe Council means residents get assistance to mitigate risks
By late May, a half-dozen neighbors had formed the Fire Safe Council, in hopes of preventing fires altogether or keeping the damage to a minimum if a fire does start.
Forming a neighborhood Fire Safe Council gives grassroots organizations access to assistance with fire resiliency projects, including grants for emergency water systems, prescribed burns and communication systems. Sometimes, it’s as simple as having a professional crew come out and pitch in on a few hours of vegetation management on a steep hillside.
By mid-July, Carter and her neighbor Bill Pearce were relaxing in her living room as the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council crew did just that.
Mendocino County Fire Safe Council staff had been asked to help reduce the fuel load on a steep slope between temporary mobile home parking and the more permanently rooted park community above, providing a fuel break between the two locations. The crew had just finished cutting weeds and thinning trees and brush on the steep hillside and were feeding the limbs into a chipper.
Carter and Pearce had pitched in as volunteers, though Pearce was attempting to keep his physical activity to a minimum due to a recent knee replacement. The two are more able-bodied than many of their much older neighbors, but they were pleased to leave the heavy lifting to younger people with strong backs, good knees, and well-oiled chainsaws.
Mobile home parks are in particular danger from wildfire and other risks
According to the nonprofit research organization Urban Institute, “More than 5 million manufactured housing units are located in the areas most exposed to one or more climate hazards, including tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, coastal and riverine flooding, and heat waves. Nearly 80 percent of the manufactured housing stock across the U.S. is in areas that are significantly exposed to at least one climate hazard, which we define as census tracts in the top two quintiles of expected event frequency for each hazard. By contrast, less than 20 percent of other housing units are located in these same tracts.”
Building Climate-Resilient Manufactured Housing Stock Executive Summary
Though the residents of the Golden Rule Mobile Village are unlikely to take on extensive home-hardening measures, they hope to encourage a trend of ember-resistant vents and clean gutters on the roofs. And that focus is critical.
According to FireSafe Marin, embers are the most common cause of ignition for both site-built and manufactured homes. “Recent research indicated that two out of every three homes destroyed during wildfires were ignited either directly or indirectly by wind-dispersed, wildfire-generated, burning or glowing embers and not from the actual flames of the wildfire.” Mobile Home Wildfire Safety – Fire Safe Marin
Water is also a major consideration in drought-prone California, something to take into account when landscaping. At the Golden Rule, water is limited during the summer. Plants close to homes on small lots die and dry into kindling.
Close by the mobile home village is the Seabiscuit Therapeutic Riding Center.
One resident of the riding center is the miniature donkey Muffin, a fire refugee who joined the center’s therapeutic programming after losing his home in Potter Valley during the 2017 Redwood Complex Fires.
“Muffin is famous,” Pearce said, “People want to be the donkey-walker. There will be people with disabilities who come in and just walk with Muffin as a therapeutic event. It’s become very popular. Muffin is part of the deal here.”
The property is protected by conservation easements and provides habitat to wildlife, sheep, and a few cattle. The deer are especially bold. “Every morning when I get up, I’m looking at the deer,” Carter said. “They actually live under my decking, and they birth under there, so I get to see those fawns right out the womb. If a wildfire came through here, it would be such a loss of wildlife. It would be so sad.”
It would also be financially ruinous for many of the current residents to rebuild the community.
Like many rural Californians, Carter lost her private insurance and is now on the California FAIR plan. She estimates it’s about triple what she was paying with her former insurance provider.
Pearce added that it’s also not enough to cover the disasters that have become all too common. “Most of us don’t have enough insurance to actually replace the structure,” he explained. “They’ll basically pay for what we paid for it, but prices have gone up. You’re not going to be able to replace this. If the park burns, it’s a big tragedy. Nobody’s coming back. So it makes sense right now to protect it.”
Asked what it took to start her neighborhood Fire Safe Council, Carter said simply, “A desire. That’s all. I thought it was going to be a bureaucratic endeavor, but we just needed guidance and support.”
And not everyone needs to scale a steep slope with power tools. She’s planning to offer defensible space demonstrations to her neighbors, along with a few refreshments.
Chainsaws and lemonade? “Or in this case, probably loppers, clippers, and weed-whackers,” she said. “The very tiny ones with batteries. I have two.”
Sarah Reith writes articles on behalf of the Mendocino Fire Safe Council.
The info in this article is pretty cool. I signed up way back when a free assessment was offered to have a professional come out to our property and do A Defensible space assessment of our property.. We thought it was pretty cool. WE got the assessment via email front the guy who came out and walked around with us going over everything, explaining why, what, if anything needed to be. Changed, upgraded, etc… After I got the email assessment , my husband and I worked on checking off a few issues we needed to address.. Pretty cool… I’ve read about getting a group together. In our own neighborhood, like the Group Highlighted in your article, but until reading this, I wasn’t quite sure if it was worth a shot at seeing if any of our neighbors wanted to start our own group.. Thank you for explaining how easy it seems to be, to go to the next step…Thank God for the Fire Council providing the info, and everything offered to the public to help keep our community’s safe ..