Lot clearing and brush mowing in North Carson City (89706)

ZIP 89706 covers the north and northeast side of Carson City. Its housing is mixed: the American Community Survey counts about 49% of homes as detached single-family houses and about 23% as manufactured homes, alongside shops, yards and open desert out toward the hills.

At a glance

• ZIP 89706: about 9,200 housing units, about 23% manufactured homes
• Linehan Fire (2006, 5,863 acres) mapped about 3.2 miles from the ZIP's centre
• Tracked loader for open ground, hand crew for tight corners
• About 9 minutes from our Carson City yard

What is different about clearing in 89706?

The parcels are smaller and closer to things. A strip of tumbleweed and dry grass behind a row of homes, a triangle of sagebrush beside a shop, the outside of a chain-link fence: these are narrow jobs with a building, a vehicle or a neighbor a few feet away.

On ground like that the brush mower does the open middle and people do the edges. The crew trims by hand along walls, skirting, posts and meters, so the machine never has to work against a structure.

Manufactured homes and the first five feet

With nearly a quarter of the ZIP's homes being manufactured housing, a lot of the mowing here ends at the base of a home. The University of Nevada, Reno Extension's Living With Fire guide calls the first 5 feet around any home the ember-resistant zone and lists weeds, dead leaves and wood mulch among the things to remove from it.

We clear the vegetation. What sits against or under the home, such as stored items, is the owner's to move, and it helps to have that done before the crew arrives.

Yards, shops and fence lines

A business that has to stay open while the work goes on can read how we schedule around it on our commercial properties page.

How close has fire come?

The National Interagency Fire Center maps the Linehan Fire of 2006 at 5,863 acres, centred about 3.2 miles from the middle of the ZIP, and the Moundhouse Fire of 1983 at 2,345 acres, about 3.1 miles away. ZIP areas have no Forest Service rating of their own. For Carson City as a whole, the Forest Service ranks risk to homes higher than 98.5% of US communities.

A rain gauge on this side of town (Carson City 4.4 N, a volunteer-network station) averages about 15.2 inches of precipitation a year in the NOAA normals, which is enough to bring up a fresh crop of grass and weeds every spring.

Clearing a home site or a shop pad

When the goal is to build, the job grows from mowing to lot clearing: trees removed, stumps ground or pulled with the backhoe, and the debris loaded into our own dump trucks. Tell the arborist where the pad, the driveway and the utility runs will go, and which trees you would like to keep if they can be kept.