The 300-foot-wide Crook Mountain fuel break involves heavy equipment and California Department of Corrections hand-labor crews from Mt. Bullion in Mariposa County.

"It's really thick ... You can't walk through it," Bob Buckles, executive director of the Eastern Madera County Fire Safe Council, said Friday of the dangerous wildfire fuel, which includes quickly erupting manzanita.

Surveying and mapping for the firebreak started 15 months ago, but until a few weeks ago the nonprofit Fire Safe Council's effort to tap California Department of Forestry funding was stalled in Sacramento by environmental and other concerns.

"It was negotiations," Buckles said about the project clearance.

Some of the vegetation on the mountainside has been growing out of control for 150 years, Buckles estimated. Other areas were scorched in the killer Harlow fire of 1961.

"It was never replaced with pines," Buckles said. "It came back all brush."

The clearance work using heavy equipment is best done before next spring's warmth turns the fuel tinder dry.

So far crews have ripped through nearly four miles of brush so thick that not even a deer can walk through it, Buckles said.

Madera County District 5 Supervisor-elect Tom Wheeler of North Fork said he had Thanksgiving dinner in Oakhurst and looked up at the fuel-covered ridge. He said he is glad the project finally is under way.

"It'll be great protection," Wheeler said. "It'll stop most fires."

The area around what is known as the Oakhurst Basin is considered extremely susceptible to wildfire. There are more than 1,700 homes in the Madera County hills around the Crook Mountain firebreak.

In 1961, the arson-sparked Harlow fire killed two people, scorched more than 43,000 acres and destroyed dozens of buildings, including an area that is now downtown Oakhurst.