Don’t Wait for the Smoke: Top 3 Actions to Prepare for Wildfire Season

Right now, the Bay Area is enjoying an unusually cool stretch of weather. Forecasters expect temperatures to climb in the coming weeks, and with that heat comes the return of wildfire risk across our communities. The good news is that none of us have to face it alone. The best time to prepare for a disaster is before it happens, not while you’re watching a red flag warning scroll across your phone.

We recently asked several Ready Together Coalition leaders, local emergency preparedness volunteers convened by the Los Altos Mountain View Community Foundation (LAMVCF), who spend their free time preparing community members for the worst, to share the top actions every household should take right now. Their answers kept circling back to three simple ideas.

1. Sign up for alerts today. Art Whipple, a Resilient Los Altos volunteer leader, puts it plainly: sign up for AlertSCC and Genasys Protect, and be ready to act the moment they tell you to. Patricia Evans, a Block Action Team volunteer leader, points to a sobering statistic: roughly 70% of the people who died in the Palisades and Eaton fires were elderly, and many didn’t have the information they needed to get out in time. That message feels especially urgent in Los Altos Hills, where only about 28% of residents are currently signed up to receive AlertSCC emergency notifications. Signing up takes just a few minutes, but it could make all the difference when every second counts.
2. Know your neighbors, especially the ones who need extra help. Every volunteer we spoke with came back to this. Evans notes that research consistently shows social connection is the single most important factor in how well a community survives and recovers from disaster. Whipple’s advice is just as direct: know who on your block is frail, elderly, or otherwise more vulnerable, and check on them. A phone tree or a five-minute knock on the door now can matter later.
3. Make a plan, and build it slowly. Whipple recommends a family communication plan that works even if cell towers go down. Dee King Raub, a former fire captain who now serves as a Project Specialist for Risk Reduction at the Los Altos Hills County Fire District, keeps it to three essentials: sign up for alerts, know two ways out of your neighborhood, and keep a go bag by the door. If all of this feels like too much at once, Evans suggests a “Prepare in a Year” approach, tackling one small task a month so preparation never feels overwhelming.

Another way you can help the broader community prepare is to support LAMVCF’s Community Disaster Response Fund. Inspired by the community’s response to the Los Angeles wildfires in 2025, this fund is built to be ready before a crisis hits, so that when disaster strikes we can move resources to local nonprofits on the front lines of relief without delay. And through the Local Impact Collective, we’re proud to include in our Local Impact Collective Teen CERT and Resilient Los Altos, whose Block Action Teams train neighbors, block by block, to prepare, respond, and recover together.

We take our disaster preparedness work especially seriously in Los Altos Hills, which sits closer to the wildland urban interface and carries the highest wildfire risk of any community we serve. We know that when one of our communities is impacted by disaster they are all impacted. That’s why our disaster preparedness partnerships, including our connection to the Los Altos Hills County Fire District, extend fully into the Hills, not just Los Altos and Mountain View. Every neighbor deserves the same level of readiness, regardless of which side of the hill they live on.

While wildfires will become an ever increasing threat, the good news is that none of us have to face it alone. And the same preparations that help during wildfire season, having emergency alerts, a family plan, and knowing your neighbors, also make us better prepared for earthquakes, extended power outages, severe storms, and other emergencies.

Take action now. Sign up for AlertSCC alerts, get to know the neighbor down the street, and take one small step toward a plan this month. When we prepare together, we become more prepared, more resilient, and more united.

Learn more about the Ready Together Coalition, the Community Disaster Response Fund,  Resilient Los Altos, and Teen CERT at lamvcf.org.