Over the holidays I visited the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. This is not too distant from the northern edge of the deadly and destructive Palisades Fire.

Something I studied walking the grounds is just how much planning and effort is taken clearing the expansive, hilly library property of dry brush, all the way to the base of the hill where you drive up to the library, and all around the base perimeter to the crest. There are also wide buffers of developed gardens, fountains, walkways, etc. where wild vegetation isn’t allowed to take root. Even the parking lot at the crest and the long driveway up to the parking lot is an engineered firebreak.

This is the exact same terrain and habitat where the LA fires are raging, no more than few tens of miles away from the closest of the fires. And it’s this planning, preparation, and maintenance that will save the Reagan Presidential Library from wildfires. The same strategies are in place at the Getty Villa and Getty Center, both very closely threatened by the Palisades Fire and both saved from the fire in the past week where neighboring structures were lost.

To say there was nothing the residents could have done to prepare for the threat of wildfire is disempowering. While individual homes don’t have hundreds of acres as a buffer between structures and wildlands, similar preventative dry brush clearing and creating “no burn zones” around structures help mitigate the threat. And entire neighborhoods collaborating in these preventative wildfire strategies is proven to be more successful than spotty negligent inaction.

Here’s a selection of photos from the Reagan Presidential Library grounds illustrating their preventative wildfire engineering.