With the cool, damp weather the Bay has seen this summer, the threat of wildfire may be far from most people’s minds. But the city of Berkeley has been thinking about it, and a new study they’ve commissioned says it may take a lot longer for people to evacuate a wildfire zone than they may imagine.
Berkeley was wondering what would happen if they had to evacuate large parts of the city in a large urban wildfire, like Palisades or Paradise?
But they didn’t have to imagine because it actually happened there, a long time ago. On Sept. 17, 1923, high winds drove a grass fire into Berkeley neighborhoods that burned more than 600 homes and made all the national newsreels. That was before the hills were covered with the eucalyptus trees that Henry DeNero, President of the Berkeley FireSafe Council, calls “the line of fire.”…