Fire district offers free curbside chipping along evacuation routes

The Moraga-Orinda Fire District and the Lamorinda Fire Safe Council launched a four-week late-autumn curbside chipping sweep on Friday morning, deploying three mobile forestry crews across hillside neighborhoods in Orinda, Moraga, and western Lafayette. Designed to clear seasonal leaf litter, wind-downed eucalyptus branches, and pruned juniper or broom vegetation before November offshore Diablo wind advisories, the no-cost program prioritizes parcels bordering designated primary evacuation arteries including El Toyonal, Miner Road, Bear Creek Road, Canyon Road, and Upper Happy Valley Road. Through Friday, November 20, homeowners who stack cut woody material along their property frontage can reserve a scheduled pickup window without paying green-waste hauling fees.

Under the district's fuel-reduction guidelines, residents may pile branches and brush up to eight inches in diameter in neat rows up to ten feet long and four feet high, with all cut ends pointing toward the roadway and free of roots, nails, wire, or poison oak. Rather than hauling the biomass to regional landfills, MOFD forestry crews either blow the chipped mulch back onto bare hillside slopes to prevent winter soil erosion or transport it to East Bay Regional Park District trail-bed staging yards.

Fire Marshal staff emphasized that clearing the immediate zero-to-five-foot noncombustible ember zone around home foundations, wooden decks, and roof valleys remains the single most effective safeguard against wind-driven ember cast. During the first three weeks of October, district defensible-space inspectors logged a 94 percent compliance rate across 1,800 inspected hillside parcels and awarded micro-grants of up to $1,000 to income-qualified seniors needing professional arborist assistance.

Property owners across Orinda, Moraga, and Lafayette can reserve a curbside chipper pickup slot—requiring at least five participating households per neighborhood street segment—by submitting an online request at least seventy-two hours before their zone's scheduled collection Monday. Full zone calendars, pile-stacking diagrams, and senior fuel-mitigation grant applications are available on the MOFD Chipper Program Portal.