I am worried about the Claremont colleges and these frightening wildfires. Do the campuses have sprinklers or something to protect from these (if that is even possible)?
Throughout most of Southern California wildfires are a concern. The campus does have sprinklers for lawn maintenance but brush fires are usually too strong to be battled with a system like that. What the campus does have is set procedures for fire and evacuation. The City of Claremont PD and Fire Department have experience battling fires and learn from the experiences they have in the past. Increased fire danger is an unfortunate side effect of climate change and while there’s nothing that can be done to absolutely prevent these fires, what Southern California does particularly well is learn from fires past in terms of building codes/fire prevention/evacuation and other safety measures. That’s why we have plenty of stories like these, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-fire-claremont-20170518-story.html, where the damage is great but there’s little to no structure or human loss.
I hope this was helpful! I know that it can be scary to see the headlines about these wildfires (I live downwind of about two of them at the moment, so I know it’s scary), but these are definitely protective measures Pomona and the Claremont Colleges take to secure their campus!
Thanks.
Excellent response above, but another thing to add is that the Claremont Colleges are quite some distance away from the especially wildfire prone areas of the city. The highest risk areas are in the mountains and hills in the north side of Claremont. This is a visual map: http://www.fire.ca.gov/fire_prevention/fhsz_maps/FHSZ/los_angeles/Claremont.pdf The Claremont Colleges are the big grey blocks on the south and center.
There was an article posted this year on the school paper, which you might be interested in reading: http://tsl.news/news/7026
There were two days in my four years at Pomona in which a wildfire occurred nearby. One is the 2013 article in the previous article. There was some mild smoke but it dissipated pretty quickly. The other was in June 2016 with the fires in the mountains of Asuza and Duarte (about 15 miles away). That was a major one burning nearly 5000 acres, and the resulting smoke blanketed the sky even in Claremont. It was quite terrifying, actually.
Wildfires are unfortunately unpredictable, but the Claremont Colleges are shielded, in less prone areas, and have a very thorough emergency system in place to protect students and staff. There hasn’t been a major wildfire itself affecting the college campuses directly in the last decade.
This is very helpful. Thanks.
I’ll also add that as a parent of a Pomona student, it’s pretty easy to follow info on wildfires on twitter. There are good twitter accounts for CA FIRE and local fire departments and wildfires are each given a name which you can then follow for updates and incident maps. For example, right now there are multiple fires including Thomas Fire, Creek Fire, Skirball Fire, Rye Fire, Liberty Fire, Lilac Fire, etc.