Need to Get Ready for Fire Season? Mill Valley's Got an App for That

In their quest to spread the gospel of defensible space in wildfire-ready Mill Valley, fire department officials have run the gamut on campaigns over the years, from chipper days and demo homes to a defensibly spaced garden near the fire station.

The city’s latest move is a web-based application that allows residents to calculate the necessary defensible space around a home.

The app solicits residents to click the type of vegetation they have within 30 feet and 100 feet of their home, as well as the direction the home faces and the severity of the slope on which it’s built. With that info, the app spits out a score that correlates to how many feet of defensible space should be cleared around the home on each side, from 30 to 100 feet.

“It’s not perfect – it’s not going to prevent a house form burning down – but it’s a great one-stop shop to get this really useful information about fire prevention and preparedness in one place,” said Battalion Chief Scott Barnes, who has spearheaded the city’s defensible space and vegetation management efforts in recent years and came up with the idea for the app.

Barnes – admittedly “by no means an IT guy” – sketched out what he wanted on paper, piece by piece.

He eventually connected with Sean Mooney, the city’s web librarian who moonlights as a graphic designer and web developer, to turn his vision into a reality.

“Sean was incredibly instrumental – he built everything based on the visions I had on paper,” Barnes said.

As part of the library’s larger efforts to remain vital in an ever-digitized world, Mooney has been given the green light by City Librarian Anji Brenner to take on other City Hall projects, such as digital outreach strategies for the city’s MV2040 General Plan update and a web-based app that helped people find local shopping and dining discounts as part of the Your Library Card Saves You Cash program.

Mooney has been using responsive web design and html5 in recent years to create apps that don’t require users to go through either the Apple or Android app stores and thus own an iPhone or Android phone. 

“I wanted to do that in thinking about the democratic and civically open aspects of this – you don’t want to force people to have a certain kind of phone to use it,” Mooney said.

The calculator is the main feature of the app, though it’s also home to a number of links to fire safety-related subjects that, while on the city’s website, are hard to find in one central location, Barnes said.

The 411: The City of Mill Valley fire safety app is available at: www.millvalleylibrary.net/wildfires.

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