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When the EMBER Program comes back to council for the first reading on March 25, a fourth fire zone will be created.

My takeaways from Fire Chief Sprague’s presentation at the February 11, 2025 4 pm Berkeley City Council special meeting on EMBER short for Effective Mitigations for Berkeley’s Ember Resilience were these statements, “Something is NOT better than nothing” and “wildfire is a recurring feature of our landscape”. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/city-council/city-council-agendas 

The EMBER program adopts Ignition Zone 0 and home hardening as necessary actions starting with Zone 3 Panoramic Hill and the new Zone 4. As compliance with the EMBER program is gained to the new standard in these two fire zones, according to meeting documents other areas will systematically be added until all of the Berkeley Hills within the Very High fire Hazard Severity Zone are included. 

Currently the City of Berkeley is divided into three fire zones with Fire Zones 2 and 3 designated as Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-04/Berkeley-Fire-Zone-Map.pdf 

CalFire published this week updated fire zones. You could almost hear the YIMBYs salivating over hoping to knock out the Berkeley Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones and replacing them with the smaller CalFire designated zones and add even more density to the hills. 

Fire Zone 4 designates at a minimum the areas between Wildcat Canyon Road to the east, Grizzly Peak Blvd to the west, and Berkeley City limits to the south and north. 

The Ignition Zone 0 is the five feet next to your home / structure. Treating Ignition Zone 0 and removing flammable debris and objects are the most important actions in preventing flying embers from igniting a building / your home. Ignition Zone 0 must be free of flammable materials, like vegetation, dead and dying plants, leaves, needles, bark, mulch and filled instead with gravel, pavers, concrete, river rock, etc and paired with home hardening. 

To be an effective barrier, all the properties need to come to the same standard. 

“The resilience of an individual property only increases if done in conjunction with adjacent properties. Thus, successful implementation and enforcement will be more effective if concentrated in one region of the City at a time.” (2/11/2025 meeting documents) 

You can read more about defensible space in the FireSafe Berkeley website. https://www.berkeleyfiresafe.org/dspace 

The challenge for Berkeley in addition to high fire risk in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones is the density of housing and the large swath of mapped landslide zones within the same area, some of which are moving. 

On May 6 the Berkeley city council will hear an appeal of the Zoning Adjustment Board decision in a six to three vote (2 abstentions, 1 no) to approve the project at 1048 Keith which demolishes an existing 2,760 square foot single-family dwelling to construct a 3,600 square foot single-family dwelling on a site that sits on top of the Hayward fault on a slowly moving active landslide in the Berkeley hills Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone. https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/informationwarehouse/eqzapp/ 

When it comes to fire there are four things that frame my thinking (1) the Paradise fire investigative reporting by Paige St. John, Joseph Serna and Rong-Gong Lin II for the Los Angeles Times, (2) my conversation with the former Fire Chief David Brannigan, (3) John Vaillant’s 2023 book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World on the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, and most important (4) regularly attending the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission meetings. 

I don’t remember exactly when I started attending the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission, but after the Tubbs fire jumped the six lane 101 freeway to burn to the ground the residential neighborhood Coffey Park which wasn’t even identified as a high fire risk zone and watching the news from the Tubbs Fire covering the frantic evacuation of two hospitals in Santa Rosa, Kaiser and Sutter, I decided the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission was the most important commission in the City. 

It isn’t that the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission has earth shattering agendas at every meeting, but it is the place where we hear about the work of the Berkeley Fire Department and have the opportunity to express concerns and engage in conversations before and after the meetings. 

The city council meeting on the evacuation study being completed for the Berkeley Fire Department is postponed again. The new date is May 13. 

I don’t have any inside information on the results, but I expect it is going to contain what we can already see, narrow winding streets squeezed down to a single lane create a bottleneck blocking fire fighters from getting in and evacuees from getting out. 

When fire weather comes, if you waited until the fire arrives to grab your bags and leave, the likelihood of getting out is grim. Plus, your late evacuation diverts fire fighters’ attention and work from fighting the fire to your safety and you may well impede fire fighters from getting in to fight the fire. 

In the Palisades Fire just a few weeks ago, bulldozers had to be called to shove abandoned cars out of the way before emergency vehicles could get through. 

I also expect the report to show that narrow roads impeding emergency vehicles aren’t just in the hillside fire zones and all those plans to narrow streets for bicyclists and add bulb outs are going to come into conflict with emergency vehicles. That always reminds me of the article, “Who Put the ‘DIE’ in LA Road DIEts?”. 

What I’ve learned from attending City meetings is it takes consistent attendance to appreciate what is and what is not being addressed, the focus of individual appointees and electeds, where the power lies and where and how to apply pressure. 

From following multiple boards, commissions, and committees, I am continually struck by how we live and work in silos. The singular focus of adding housing means the Planning Commission ignores fire and other hazards like landslides and flooding when sending approvals of zoning code changes to council. The Transportation and Infrastructure Commission ignores emergency vehicle access in recommending road diets. The Zoning Adjustment Board rarely looks to anything beyond the border of the parcel where a project will sit. 

Most commission meetings are poorly attended until an agenda item hits right next door as they did at the Design Review Committee and the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission Thursday night February 20, 2025. Then a neighborhood shows up for that agenda item and leaves when it is over. 

As the LA Times journalists covered so thoroughly in their investigative report, “Must Reads: Here’s how Paradise ignored warnings and became a deathtrap” it was these statements that brought it home to Berkeley, “A state fire planning document warned in 2005 that Paradise risked an ember firestorm akin to the one that ripped through Berkeley and Oakland 14 years earlier killing more than two dozen people and destroying more that 2,000 homes…” and 88 year old Mildred Eselin’s, statement as the lone speaker at the 2014 council meeting warning against giving final approval to road narrowing of Paradise’s main evacuation route to improve pedestrian safety said this, “The main thing is fire danger. If the council is searching for a way to diminish the population of Paradise, this would be the way to do it”. https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-camp-fire-deathtrap-20181230-story.html 

In Berkeley, it was Margot Smith, in her 90s, who informed the public and everyone she could reach within the City of Berkeley administration that Hopkins Street was a City of Berkeley identified emergency evacuation route and therefore the bicycle plan would narrow the evacuation route and impact emergency evacuation and services. 

For more of this debacle read “What Has Happened With Hopkins and Why”. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-04-09/article/50248?headline=What-Has-Happened-with-Hopkins-and-Why--Kelly-Hammargren 

I heard third hand that the Kensington Fire Chief said in a fire spreading from the wildland to Kensington, Kensington could burn in eight minutes. I took advantage of seeing Fire Chief Brannigan at the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission and asked what he thought about that comment, he said, “that sounds about right, Berkeley could burn in an hour”. 

I went back to Brannigan at the next commission meeting and asked when he said that Berkeley could burn in an hour was as far as Sacramento Street or to San Pablo Avenue. His answer was to the Bay. (Brannigan left Berkeley for Piedmont in 2021.) 

With climate change, global warming, our invasion into what used to be wildland with structures that become the source of ignition conflagration, the behavior of wildfire has changed to fast moving and explosive. 

When someone talks about wildfire or we see news clips or pictures of the devastation, or hear presentations, we are so numbed with the constant deluge of media that the ferocity of wildfire seems to get lost. What Valiant does so well in his book Fire Weather, is that he brings us into weather conditions that set the stage for wildfire, the speed and intensity with which the wildfire spreads with each building exploding into fire and igniting the next, the plight of the firefighters trying to stop it and people trying to escape from it. 

Each time I drive up into the hills to meet a friend who lives in what will be Fire Zone 4, I can’t help but think it looks like a tinder box. We walk in Tilden Park and talk. This time it was about fire, ignition zone zero and the cost of home hardening. It is a lot to take in. 

On Thursday there were two meetings and an event that I wanted to attend all running at the same time. At the Design Review Committee, they were scrounging up more chairs for all the people who showed up for the use permit modification of the group living project at 2147 San Pablo at Cowper and an 8-story mixed use project at 2655 Shattuck at Derby. I haven’t heard back what happened, but when I saw who was attending, I knew the audience of attendees was in good hands. 

At the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission it was the presentation on three public restrooms that drew the crowd with the Portland Loo planned for San Pablo at University on the northeast corner that had the neighborhood in an uproar. The concerns from the neighborhood revolve around the fear that placing a public restroom at this location will become a magnet for drug use and sex trafficking which is already a problem in this area. 

The neighborhood residents and businesses suggested moving the location down University near the public library. The building next to the site has been vacant for months. I didn’t hear any attendee speaking in support of the San Pablo University site. 

The Adeline neighborhood supports the Adeline/Alcatraz public restroom site. 

I suggested to a member of the Beautiful San Pablo group that they check out how the Portland Loo is working at Channing and Telegraph. If there were problems they would have experience /evidence on their side and if it was working well maybe some of their concerns would be alleviated. That suggestion fell flat, so needing an exercise break I did my own limited investigation. 

The artwork on the Loo both inside and outside to blend with the mural is very cool. 

I heard at the Transportation Commission that the ultraviolet light in the Loo prevents drug addicts from finding veins to shoot up. I stepped in to see if the prominent veins in my hands were less visible. Maybe I was there at the wrong time of day, but the lighting certainly didn’t do anything to make my veins disappear. 

The Loo was clean. 

One employee at the Framer’s Workshop was free to answer questions, the other was with a customer. I heard so far there were no problems, it was nice to have a public restroom and the ribbon cutting with Mayor Ishii and the big scissors was great. 

Talking with people on the street and the Ambassador on Telegraph brought similar comments. One person worried that a homeless person might camp out inside the Loo and use it as a shelter. That has not actually happened. There is funding for daily maintenance that includes periodic monitoring throughout the day and night. 

When I stopped in at Revolution Books on the other side of the block to ask what they thought I got an earful of how terrible the bathroom was, but with further pressing on details, the bathroom that earned all those negative comments was the bathroom within the parking lot, not the brand-new Portland Loo on Channing. Funny how we stay in our same routines and miss the changes around us.