Take one intersection in Berkeley: Scenic and Virginia, northeast corner.
Right now it looks like this:
Eighty-four years ago, it looked like this:
That was shot after The Great Berkeley Fire of 1923, which happened on September 17 of that year. It burned 640 structures on the north side of the university, and would have burned to the sea, had the wind not reversed. The shot above, from a Berkeley Public Library collection, is in the 94709 area code. If you live there, chances are your house was built after a preceding house burned down. You can see a newsreel of the fire at the Internet Archive (stills for that movie start here.) And if you’d like to dig further, go here, here, here, here, here, here — or visit the Berkeley Historical Society. (It’s a bummer that that many of those sources are newspapers that bury archives behind paywalls, but at least the archives exist.)
Many more locals remember what was officially called the Tunnel Fire, but is better known as the Oakland Firestorm of 1991. While the fire’s area — just 1520 acres, or 2.375 square miles — was small as wildfires go, it killed 25 people, injured 150, and destroyed 3,354 single-family homes plus 437 apartments and condominia.
I came to the Bay Area from the east coast in August of 1985, more than six years before that fire. I was new to this part of California. The evening I arrived, I was driving to the home of friends in the Montclair district of Oakland. All the way across the Bay Bridge, and then east on 24 and south on 13, I stared in amazement at the houses on the hills. On the East Coast these hills would be called mountains, and none would have cities on them. Here we build on everything, it seems. No site was more impressive to my astonished eyes than Hiller Highlands, which seemed perched on a cliff overlooking the intersection of highways 24 and 13. I could hardly believe that one could look up at such a steep angle and see houses that are still on the ground. I fantasized about living up there, where the view was surely panoramic and spectacular.
If I had moved there, I would have lost my house.
My daughter worked in Rockridge at that time of the Tunnel Fire. I remember driving across the Bay Bridge to pick her up. Hiller Highlands was ablaze. Houses were blowing up at a rate of one every four seconds. It looked worse than a war, because it was here, and it was out of control. Before winds reversed and gave some advantage to firefighters, the fire had leaped across the 24/13 intersection, plus the Temescal Reservoir, and burned much of Piedmont. It also went south, as if following a GPS down upper Broadway, and burned much of Montclair as well. Had it continued burning West, it would have hit a grove of highly flammable eucalyptus trees before reaching the Claremont Hotel, one of the largest wood structures in the world. Had that hotel caught fire, it would have rained flaming debris across much of Oakland and Berkeley. Widespread destruction of both towns was not hard to imagine at the time, and should be widely imagined today. Because fires will happen again.
I was on the Palo Alto Red Cross board at the time of the fire, and privileged to get a guided visit to the area, along with other Red Cross folks, a couple days after the fire was out. It was the most amazing scene I had ever witnessed. At the center of the fire zone, the heat was so extreme that even chimneys were gone. Cars were puddles of metal. The whole top of the hill was bald and gray.
The scene was not just a matter of history, but of prophesy. Fires will happen again. These hills are made to burn. So, for that matter, are houses. Wood has enormous sums of stored combustive energy. It also has a flash point of just 300°C, or 575°F. That’s less than a restaurant uses to cook a pizza. Stick a hunk of wood in a pizza oven and see what happens. This means a house can catch fire if it is heated from the outside to a temperature exceeding the flash point of pine. A house can explode in flames without a flame touching it. Burning debris, lifted high by fast-rising heat, drops to rooftops thousands of feet away. This is how Hiller Highlands ignited Piedmont. Burning bark lands on a shake roof and the house below burns down like a candle, only much faster. Debris from that fire drops on other houses, and the fire spreads.
Why don’t we pay more attention to these facts?
The answer is a term used more by technologists than by architects or civil engineers: The Principle of Least Astonishment. It says that when things are working best, we don’t notice them. Least astonishment is also a principle of livability. Most of the time we are not astonished by the stability of our houses, our communities, our civil infrastructure. In fact we depend on not noticing. And most of the time we are right not to care, because nothing goes wrong.
Yet it does. In some places more than others. Near the top of those “some places” is Berkeley. The danger isn’t just of fire. The city also straddles the Hayward Fault, which is long overdue for an earthquake. Here’s an ABAG map that shows what will happen when an earthquake hits the north end of the Hayward Fault:
Note that the fault goes right under the University, and the areas that burned in 1923 and 1991. The beautiful hills of Berkeley and Oakland, like every other surface feature of the Bay Area, are products of geology in motion. The back side of Berkeley and Oakland is a fault scarp. While less famous than the San Andreas Fault, the Hayward Fault is no less active and in some ways far more dangerous. Dozens of schools and hospitals are right on top of it. Plus thousands of stores and homes.
Emergencies, Environment
1923, 1991, ABAG, Berkeley, fire, Hiller Highlands, hills, Oakland, Tunnel Fire
peggytownsend: Times are a’changing: Cal Berkeley held a military enlistment ceremony during halftime at its football game.
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