These are quick notes about this critical meeting. Many thanks to Yen Trac, Ruth Ehrenkrantz and Isabelle Gaston for writing up their personal notes. If there are errors in this summary, it is due to us, not to them.
Berkeley Fire Department did a great presentation about why they are making the recommendations. They walked through it and explained:
- why we need to implement Zone Zero
- as well as take steps on the home hardening tasks (class A roof, screens for vents, screens for gutters, covering soffits)
- that doing only some of the tasks means leaving weak points for embers to exploit and cause a fire.
In support of this, BFD made two critical points:
- it makes no difference to the fire to do the measures only in part; fire always finds the weakest link, so if you do one part without the other, fire will use the weakness left out.
- One presenter used the example of water compared to fire. If there is a leak in your roof, your home will take in water. If there is a leak where embers/fire can get in, your house burns. Your home is the largest source of fuel on your property.
- Another slide made the same point in a different way, saying that “something is not better than nothing.” It captures the idea nicely that an ember will find a way into a house unless all the weaknesses are plugged. So screening vents and doing nothing else is a waste of time and effort. Zone Zero is also necessary but not sufficient.
- one person making changes will not have an impact because our homes are sited so close to each other. Statistically, a minimum of 30% of home owners need to makes the recommended changes to make a fire protection difference for the neighborhood. Fire protection increases until 85% of home owners have made the necessary changes leaving the remaining 15% to freeload. It’s herd immunity. This is what makes Firewise work so important.
BFD made a truly compelling case that having individual property owners undertake these measures is not enough to stop a wildfire fueled by strong winds and dry conditions. As each property ignites, it creates more embers that will be the source of fire to those properties closest to the new fires. An ember-driven fire then becomes a structure-to-structure fire, where each structure is an ember source, and where our Berkeley houses, so close together, cannot be stopped from catching fire from their neighbors.
After the presentation, approximately 20 people spoke in person. Susan Wengraf spoke in support of the proposals, as did all the other presenters, except for one person who raised concerns about costs to implement. Neighbors were very supportive of the proposals. Some asked the city to consider implementing one way streets in the hills to facilitate traffic flow.
Approximately ten people spoke from Zoom. Two people opposed the proposal, while the others were in favor .
The concerns we heard were:
- Ability of residents to afford the changes; That was the #1 concern expressed by residents, in particular for residents on fixed income. One council member proposed a special assessment tax to support these costs. It is our understanding, however, that, outside the Zone Zero requirements, the large-value hardening items would be tie as requirement to permits for large remodel projects.
- [expressed by a city council member] Cost of staffing that Berkeley Fire Dept wanted: they want to increase staffing of the Berkeley Hills fire station from 3 to 4 per company on the high risk days which might cost $4,000 per day based on the number of high wind, dry condition days in the year
Staff is coming back with proposal on March 25. Be there!
Links:
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Superset of the EMBER presentation deck (compressed) used at the council meeting, thanks to Chief Sprague:
EMBER-small.pdf (1.8 MB) -
Subset of EMBER slides presented by Chief Arnold on a previous presentation:
Excerpts of BFD’s Ember proposal with notes-compressed.pdf (855.8 KB)
We are still waiting for the slides: we will publish them if we can get them.