Berkeley enacts strict wildfire home hardening rules

By John Ramos

The State of California is finalizing a new set of regulations for hardening homes against wildfire. But the city of Berkeley has already created rules that exceed what the state is proposing. For Berkeley, there are plenty of reasons to take fire safety seriously, but perhaps the most important one is history.

Those who live in the Berkeley hills don’t have to imagine the danger of wildfire. The 1991 Oakland/Berkeley Hills firestorm wiped out thousands of houses. Decades before that, a fire in 1923 that took out more than 600 homes in the city.

“So, we do have an extensive history of fire here, certainly an influential one,” Berkeley Assistant Fire Chief Colin Armold said. “What we have done here in the city is, as of last year, take the best available information as to prevent homes from igniting.”

Arnold is in charge of wildland interface fire protection. He said efforts to harden homes are essential when a wildfire breaks out, something that was dramatically captured in a viral video of firefighters using open space to save a home.

“The owner of the house was obviously paying attention when someone told him, hey, you really do need defensible space between vegetation and your structure!” said the firefighter as flames roared in the background.  “You go out here to our north there’s just house after house after house that’s just getting beat to crap right now!”

That’s something Eric Weaver and Sara Sanderson would like to avoid. They live in the Berkeley Hills off Grizzly Peak Boulevard in an area designated as a high fire danger zone. So, they’ve taken the city’s regulations to heart, starting with the bushes in their front yard.

“It used to be all the way down, but we’ve trimmed it up,” Sanderson said. ‘You can see we removed some of the branches.”

In fact, they’ve removed a lot of vegetation from their front yard, and Weaver admitted it wasn’t an easy decision.

“This was actually quite a painful transition,” he said. “We had some beautiful trees up here, a lot of plants. At first, we were quite upset at having to do it, but to be honest, now that we’ve done all this work, we realize our yard was pretty overgrown before. We here in fire country, we have to develop a new aesthetic, that develops gardens that are more in tune with the risk from wildfires.”

The outdoor wall vents have been covered with a mesh screen to block flying embers. They bought steel door mats and a metal garden hose and even swapped out their wooden patio furniture for metal. There’s a lot fewer plants in the backyard now, but Sanderson said it just took some getting used to.

“I think it’s been good because we see our backyard in a new way. And look at the view!” she said, pointing to a vista of Wildcat Canyon from the backyard. “We didn’t know we had this good of a view because … there was a privacy hedge.”

The Berkeley regulations prohibit anything flammable within five feet of the home’s structure, but the rules the state is considering are more lenient, only requiring one foot of clearance. Weaver, who has become a local advocate for fire safety, thinks that simply isn’t enough.

“Our position is that the state’s regulations are a great first step, but we’re hoping they’ll go further in the future,” he said.

Arnold agreed. Under the law, cities have a right to adopt more stringent fire protection codes if they choose to. As such, the homes currently under Berkeley’s restrictions would remain so, regardless of the proposed changes to state law.

“When that does become law, and we’re looking at those rules together, I think we can evaluate whether there’s going to be confusion or not,” Arnold said. “But our job right now locally is to make sure we’re giving our community the best chance that we can offer.”

Under the new California rules under consideration, more homes would be included but with less stringent requirements. For its part, Berkeley is sticking with its own mandates because it has a history that it would rather not ignore – or repeat.