It was 20 years ago today that a rapidly moving fire in the Oakland Hills east of San Francisco ravaged a community. Here is the way we describe it in our Infamous Fires Around the World document:
The “Tunnel Fire”, commonly referred to as the Oakland Hills fire or East Bay Hills fire, occurred on Sunday October 20, 1991. The fire killed 25 people (23 civilians, 1 police officer, and 1 firefighter), injured 150, and destroyed 2,449 single-family dwellings and 437 apartment and condominium units. Eleven of the fire victims died in traffic jams on Charing Cross Road while evacuating. Eight others died on narrow streets in the same area. The economic loss has been estimated at $1.5 billion.
The fire started when an ember from a grass fire the previous day blew beyond the fire hoses that were still on the fire perimeter and started a new fire. Houses, like the vegetation, have grown back and some of the residents that lived through the 1991 fire are worried when they look around and see that some of their new neighbors are not doing as much as they could to prevent another disaster.
Here is an excerpt from an interesting article in the Mercury News:
As autumn returned and the mercury hovered in the 90s in the Oakland hills, Milt Brown started to feel anxious.
Twenty years ago, on a scorching, wind-whipped day, he lost two houses in one of the nation’s deadliest and most destructive urban wildfires, an inferno that jumped two freeways, destroyed more than 3,800 homes and killed 25 people, including the Browns’ former baby sitter.
Although he tries not to dwell on the horrible memories — or the chance of another devastating blaze — Brown and other survivors of the Oakland hills fire worry that the painful lessons of that day are being forgotten. Or worse, they are being ignored by the many newer residents who didn’t experience firsthand the hell of Oct. 20, 1991. Even the subtlest signs of danger make him nervous.
“I’m looking at the two houses below me and the branches are touching the house,” Brown said from his perch on Buckingham Boulevard — less than a minute’s walk from where the fire erupted on a hot Sunday morning. “I’m in a box canyon. If someone throws a match in there it will set the whole block off.”
But it isn’t just those who lived through the Oakland hills fire who are anxious about what they fear is a growing complacency that has built up alongside the stately homes in these steep, once-woodsy enclaves. Fire officials say that time has not only given rise to dense stands of fast-growing and fire-susceptible eucalyptus on public lands, it has also given vegetation on private property throughout the hills 20 years to mature. It often takes a second notice before residents take heed and clear a defensible space around their homes to protect it from fire.
Thanks go out to Dick
