Two years ago today, Sonoma County residents awoke to fire spreading through urban and wild lands across our county, a dark cloud of smoke covering the sky, and ash blanketing the ground. There continues to be much work for our community to collectively recover from the fires--most of it is hard and heavy work, whether it be emotional work, community work, economic work, environmental work. UCCE Sonoma's Produce Safety after Urban Wildfire: Citizen Science Initiative is just one small piece of that body of work.

The project sought to find out if garden and farm-grown produce exposed to ash was safe to eat, mobilized community in the days and weeks after the fire to collect leafy greens from sites across the county for later analysis, formed a unique partnership between UCCE Sonoma, Petaluma Bounty, and a passionate public health researcher, Vanessa Raditz, and ultimately led to a workshop series, a newly published scientific report, a forthcoming toolkit for other communities affected by wildfire to assess the safety of their own unique context, and a collaboration with researchers from UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine to investigate the safety of backyard chicken eggs in fire affected counties.

Today we honor the terrible toll of the fire on this community, and we welcome your participation in our upcoming Post-Fire Food Safety Workshop as a small piece of recovery and learning for the future. The workshop will be held on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2019 from 6:00pm-8:00pm at the Environmental Center of Sonoma County, 55 Ridgway Ave., Santa Rosa, CA 95401. Refreshments will be provided. RSVP at ucanr.edu/postfirefoodsafety10.17.19