As wildfire season approaches, dry brush and debris poses great risk in the Berkeley Hills.
Art illustration by Celeste Edell
April 14th, 2024
Among the Berkeley hills, there is quiet unease. Nestled within the sprawling eucalyptus forests lies a trip wire of potential devastation. The accumulating debris along the forest floor is a tinderbox awaiting a single spark to ignite a blazing wildfire. Foliage that was once lush now stands dry and dense, rustling its leaves that reverberate impending danger.
The threat of wildfire is constantly looming, casting shadows over the picturesque scenery that has long been cherished by residents of Berkeley. Homes stand vulnerable, as their inhabitants acutely remember the devastating Berkeley Hills fire of 1991, a haunting reminder of the catastrophic consequences that can arise.
The overgrown and under-maintained landscape adds fuel to a fire and makes evacuation difficult. However, previous efforts to chop and thin down eucalyptus in the hills have only led to greater issues, said Rachelle Hedges, a project and policy expert for Berkeley Forests. Eucalyptus in the Berkeley hills pose a major fire threat; they are an invasive species that discards significant amounts of dry plant debris. When chopped down for wildfire mitigation without proper herbicide practices, the trees can regrow in groups of trunks rather than one, making them even lower to the ground, tightly packed, and highly flammable. “It’s like 10 small trees where one big tree was. There’s a pretty massive density problem in untreated areas of our hills,” said Hedges. These eucalyptus trees are then “ladder fuels,” which can potentially carry fire from the ground to the top of the canopy of the larger eucalyptus.
Residents’ homes in the Berkeley hills.
Today, with thousands of single-family dwellings occupying the Berkeley hills and cars packing the narrow, winding passages, fire hazards are much more prevalent. Hence, it is all the more important to maintain the dry brush and trees in the Berkeley hills.
The solution is simple: educate, prepare, and mitigate. However, with numerous overlapping jurisdictions – the East Bay Regional Parks District, the city of Berkeley, the University of California, and private residents – there is red tape everywhere. “Inter-jurisdictional collaboration is always important, but it is also very challenging because everybody kind of operates differently,” said Duncan Allard, wildfire mitigation expert for the Berkeley Fire Department. The bureaucratic hurdles keep urgent improvements from being addressed when a fire could spark and spread at any moment.
In order for fire prevention projects to get approved they require studies, and there are research gaps in the hills’ ecosystem such as the eucalyptus forest. Hedges, who works on communicating the research on Berkeley forests to the general public, said there is a lack of peer-reviewed research that tells us what happens when eucalyptus is removed. There remain questions about whether the native eucalyptus trees come back after removing the overstory and how much support they would need.
Overlook from the Berkeley Fire Trails.
According to Allard, fires have history. They tend to travel in the same path and occur every 20 or 30 years. The last fire in Berkeley occurred in 1991.
“So you can kind of do the math,” Allard said. “We’re due.”
In preparation, the Wildland Fire Division has been rolling out educational campaigns, launching internet platforms, and making public appearances to prime residents before conducting defensible space and home hardening inspections. The defensible space is the land surrounding the homes that can be made more resilient to wildfires through maintenance. Home hardening is the process of adding or changing small features of one’s home to make it more defensive to a wildfire.
Warning sign of critical fire area.
One home hardening tactic that Allard’s task force suggests is wire mesh gutter guards that prevent organic debris from collecting in home gutters. The minuscule size of the holes in the gutter guards prevents nearly all embers from touching the dead leaves. Allard’s team is set to begin this year’s round of home assessments to educate residents on fire hazards and home hardening solutions. The education campaign is typically carried out through mailed materials, public speeches, and an online portal where home assessments are provided to homeowners. Fire safe ambassadors and fire interns even go door-to-door to educate residents ahead of the inspections. “Residents, whether they answered the door or not, received an online report that has extensive information specified to the issues at their house and how to address them,” said Allard.
A doe spotted in the forest of the Berkeley hills.
The robust fire prevention campaign is made possible through Bond Measure FF, which was passed in 2020 and allocated $8.5 million to fund “fire services, emergency response, 9-1-1 communication, hazard mitigation and wildfire prevention.” The funding from Measure FF has allowed organizations such as the Wildland Urban Interface Task Force, Firewise Communities, the Hills Emergency Forum, and the Wildland Fire Division to turn fire prevention into a primary mission. Measure FF also helped UC Berkeley gain more wildland firefighting and fuel reduction capabilities. According to Hedges, who is part of the university’s Fire Mitigation Committee, the Hill campus has become an active topic of discussion at their regular meetings.
Allard has the resident voters to thank for helping to pass Measure FF, signaling their support for making the hills more resistant to fire. Private residents teamed up with the Wildland Fire Division to complete thousands of home hardening and defensible space assessments in fire zones and carry out door-to-door education campaigns. Prior to the funding, it was completely in the hands of homeowners to educate themselves about fire risk and carry out their own defense and hardening methods. Today, they have the support from people like Allard to protect their homes from devastating wildfires.
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