These schematic notes come from a 02/10/25 XyloPlan Zoom presentation.
To our understanding (which may be faulty), Alameda County and the City of Berkeley contracted with a company that specializes in fire propagation studies, XyloPlan. XyloPlan just delivered its study and made a first presentation on a Zoom call.
The presentation discussed fire propagation into the whole of Berkeley. These notes focus specifically on North Berkeley, near, around and downhill of Proposed Fire Zone 4. They are a summary of notes taken by Ruth Ehrenkrantz—any inaccuracies and comments are due to us, not to Ruth. Thanks so much Ruth! Please note that screen shots are not in the order provided in the presentation.
Clearly, fire propagation largely depends upon wind direction. Here are fire pathways in a South/West wind:
Obviously, the most worrying situation is during Diablo winds. Here are fire pathways in a North/East wind:
The rest of the slides will always assume a North/East wind. The following slide shows fire resulting from ember castings only, from an ignition source near Lake Anza, over 120 minutes:
In the following slide, we see fire pathways (it is really a risk rating) for all of Berkeley (in following slides we will look solely at our area in North Berkeley):
This interesting slide shows fire pathways (again, really a risk rating) for all of North Berkeley, but is the only one that goes down to a resolution with smaller granularity:
Below are fire pathways (again, actually a risk rating) focused on Zone 4, and further down the hill. Because of house density the communication of fire from one structure to another is frightening.
Here is a zoom over Creston, Park Hills, Firebreakers, GLaM, Grizzlies, Grizzly Pack Firewise Neighborhoods:
This interesting slide shows the protective effect of the golf course. [Comment: it makes you wonder why we couldn’t do a similar thing North of the golf course.]
Finally it is interesting to see the effect of population density. In Strawberry Canyon, some structures will burn too, but they are isolated enough that they will not be a danger to each other.
These fire pathways appear to outline clear directions for Creston and Park Hills, and, to a lesser extent, Berkeley Woods Firewise neighborhoods.