A nice 5 mph breeze whistled through the trees in California’s Oakland-Berkeley Hills on Saturday, Oct. 19, 1991, as firefighters suppressed a 5-acre blaze in about three hours and left the scene that evening.
Firefighters were to return Sunday morning to mop up, but while they slept, two things happened: Although they had extinguished flames on the top part of the decaying plant and tree material (known as duff), the smoldering continued underneath. And the gentle breeze had picked up and was building into a Diablo wind, the dry slope winds that occur in the area. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (now known as Cal Fire, but was called the CDF until 2007) had issued a Red Flag Warning the previous day.
As fire crews cleaned up Sunday morning, sparks burst out of the duff and took flight in 17 mph winds. At 10:35 a.m., a resident notified the Oakland Fire Department of a hot spot. Between 10:40 and 11:00 a.m., the winds picked up and gusted to 25 mph. By 11:15 a.m., the fire was out of control.
“Most of the state was aware that it was going to be a Red Flag day,” said retired Capt. Donald Parker of the Oakland Fire Department. “Frankly we didn’t know that.”
What followed was a conflagration that ended up killing 25 people. The fire consumed 790 homes during the first hour and caused chaos during the first six hours. Several factors on that day combined to produce the tragedy, and firefighting efforts were forever altered as a result.
Wildland Fire Training
When firefighters left the scene of the original fire on Saturday night, they thought they had extinguished the fire. But they didn’t realize, as wildland firefighters might have, that it was smoldering under the duff.
“We didn’t really have the level of training that the wildland firefighters had,” Parker said. “We had a few junior officers at the fire department at the time who had been CDF firefighters prior to coming to the Oakland Fire Department, so they were aware of some of the terminology, but command people hadn’t been exposed to that.”
“At the time, we were very much a suppression fire department,” said Mark Hoffman, assistant fire chief of the Oakland Fire Department. “We had our wool pants that we fought fires in; we would put on a Nomex shell, along with our structure helmets and that meant we were in our wildland fire mode.”
What Changed
Things began to change immediately. “After that, we got a lot more funding, a lot more training and were better equipped. We’re far better prepared,” Hoffman said. They’ve added Type 4 and Type 3 four-wheel drive brush trucks that have water pumping capability and more hose.
“We’ve been part of a regional approach and expanded our mutual response areas to where we train and work with those areas that will respond in the early stages of a fire,” Hoffman said. “And we incorporate CDF into our training more.”
Berkeley firefighters receive annual wildland training with improved equipment, including smaller, more mobile wildland equipment that gets them up and down the narrow hills better than the structure engine.
Berkeley and nearby counties do a scheduled burn each June as a “warm-up” to the fire season. “When we go through six months of really rainy weather where we haven’t been handling wildland concepts, then we put fire on the ground to get ready,” said Gil Dong, deputy fire chief of the Berkeley Fire Department. “We’re trying to get our command leaders to participate more in wildland training so they get experience outside serving at a command function and experience managing large-scale wildland fires.”
The Fuel
After a five-year drought, the grass and brush were bone dry and the place was a tinderbox. Hot winds spread the fires at a clip that destroyed 790 structures by noon, igniting one every 11 seconds, according to estimates.
This was a fire the magnitude of which the area sees every 20 to 30 years and had grown accustomed to just letting burn. But the area had been developed since the last big fire with houses built predominantly of combustible materials like wood shingle roofs. Many homes lay on steep slopes covered with debris, which the fire ate up in its ascent.
Many homes were also connected townhouses and they became fuel, along with the eucalyptus, juniper and Monterey pines that had grown thick. Unfortunately many of the homeowners didn’t create safety zones or fire breaks around their homes.
That combined with combustible roofs on the majority of the homes, made containing the fire almost impossible.
What Changed
Berkeley and Oakland took steps to limit the fuel where possible. The Berkeley City Council enacted $50 assessments and used the proceeds to fund property inspections that ensured residents created defensible space.
In some areas, the departments of parks and forestry provide chippers and bags for residents to cut down and bag debris, which the departments pick up. Building permits are now issued only after the landowner provides an adequate vegetation management plan.
“If they’re putting new green stuff in the ground, they’re going to have to tell us how they’re managing it,” Dong said. “If the species of plant or whatever they’re putting down acts as fuel, we’ll tell them to change their plants.”
There are now also very strict vegetation management standards in Oakland, and large landowners and residents are billed for inspections. “We manage it proactively and never did before,” Hoffman said. “There are huge defensible space requirements.”
New building codes were adopted in both Oakland and Berkeley. Combustible roofs were largely to blame for the spread of the fire. New codes require Class A roofs and specific noncombustible siding.
The Wet Stuff
The wind was so strong on that Sunday that it bent water hose streams 90 degrees, rendering air attacks ineffective. But that wasn’t the only problem with water. Hydrants in Oakland have a three-inch thread outlet, while the state’s standard is two and a half. Most of the local departments had adapters so they could fit with the Oakland hydrants, but the CDF didn’t. And some of the local departments that had the proper adapters got overrun by the fire and left their adapters behind.
Many of the hydrants went dry anyway. The exploding fire caused numerous power failures and ruptured water service lines, draining the local reservoirs. Additionally eight pumping stations and 10 residential reservoirs were lost in the first half hour of the fire because of power disruptions. By 5 p.m. Sunday, 10 of the reservoirs were dry.
“The fire had gone from a heavily mixed area of vegetation and homes to a more tightly, densely built neighborhood, and when those houses caught fire, we couldn’t stop it because we didn’t have the water,” Parker said.
What Changed
“We’ve refitted all the hydrants in [Oakland] and added more pump stations and underground utilities and created more protection for them from heat damage,” Hoffman said. “Some of our pump stations had above-grade power lines into them. When the power lines fell, we lost power to the pumps. That’s been addressed.”
Much has been done in Berkeley, but water is still an issue. “Water will always be an issue,” Dong said. He said some of the underground corridor is non-reinforced piping that cracks and breaks daily. “They’ve worked on a plan to upgrade and update all the mains, but you can’t do all that in a 10- or even 20-year period,” he said. “That’s why a key issue is having everybody storing water for five to seven days.”
One Berkeley area reservoir went dry during the fires because power lines were disrupted, so the city purchased an above-ground water supply system with pumps that generate 6,000 gallons of water per minute.
Communications
The fire had spread quickly and violently, and people panicked, abandoning their cars and running. The communication system was soon overwhelmed by the volume of phone and radio traffic. Coordination of mutual-aid companies was difficult if not impossible, because of disparate radios and frequencies. The Oakland Dispatch Center had no phone lines for outgoing calls and incoming lines were inundated with callers.
“We only had two channels for our radios and nobody else had those channels,” Parker said. “It was a huge problem.”
“We were on a very old VHF radio system that had limited channels,” Hoffman said. “We weren’t able to speak. We were not practiced in going to the different channels that were available [such as the CDF system] that we actually could have switched to but didn’t. We were very awkward in our use of radio communications — that’s the bottom line.”
What Changed
“We’ve added repeaters; we’ve gone to a system that gives us interoperability in terms of a communication band that gives us a lot of ways to communicate,” Hoffman said. “We have a cache of radios, more talk groups, more bandwidth.”
Dong said Berkeley obtained a license for one additional frequency that’s used as a tactical channel. “We worked on providing frequencies for each agency to use as a possible tactical channel. We have four or five backup radio channels that fire agencies can work off,” he said.
“One of the things that we found over the last couple of years is that some of the agencies have switched over to 800 MHz and some have not,” Dong said. “Because of some of the changes, we’ve identified tactical channels that can be used on 800 or 700 frequencies and also the ones that are available in the VHF range some of the agencies have.”
