Emergency Preparedness at Crystal Cove
California State Parks and Crystal Cove Conservancy hold emergency preparedness and public safety as our highest priorities. We work together and across the county and state to ensure we’re coordinating efforts and using best practices to address the plethora of threats facing the park and our community. Not only are we well-prepared to respond to fire, but to oil and sewage spills, active shooter threats, and flash flood events, etc.
You may know that Crystal Cove State Park (CCSP) has its own public safety team of law enforcement officers and first responders – part of the largest law enforcement department in the State of California. The CCSP wildfire response team is a well-trained and well-equipped team of rangers and public safety officers that work with us and with a county-wide team that includes city, county, and agency representatives, environmental scientists, firefighters, and other first responders. Like similar teams across the state, they have dedicated funding through a fund set up after the Woolsey Fire in 2018, and the team meets quarterly to review and update plans, discuss threats, and coordinate training.
In addition, each year Crystal Cove State Park, like all park units, creates and maintain fire lines on all property lines, which along with irrigation systems, decrease the potential for fires to move across boundaries. The beach cottages and other structures in the Historic District have sprinklers that are inspected and tested annually, and the North Beach restoration construction project has dedicated fire lines on site as part of strict fire prevention protocols that are in place. In addition to the State Park emergency action plan, we have our own emergency action plan to address guest evacuation, and student and staff safety.
A good example of Parks’ plans in action is the Emerald Fire that broke out in February 2022 in the backcountry at Crystal Cove State Park but was quickly contained burning just 154 acres. Since then, Crystal Cove Conservancy has worked to not only restore the burned acreage, but to create another outdoor learning lab for students to learn about wildfire ecology and recovery as part of our Fire Ecology Internship program where high school students spend an entire year with us cultivating the skills and capacities needed in the next generation of land management professionals.
Over the last 25 years, Crystal Cove Conservancy has invested more than $100M in the restoration of the Historic District and the restoration of the backcountry, beaches and marine protected area, as well as the creation of outdoor classrooms and learning labs like the Berns Environmental Study Loop in Moro Canyon. Beyond that, our team and the CCSP team, each have a deep personal commitment to our work and to this place. For most of us, the work we do is more than a job. It is what we love. We love the cottages, the backcountry, and our neighbors. As protective as you feel about your home, we feel about the park.
Of course, we can’t mitigate all the risks – we live in a dry state that’s getting drier and experiencing extreme weather events more frequently each year. We see the impact of climate change every day at Crystal Cove and throughout Orange County which is why these issues are and will remain our top priority.