By Brian Anderson
Valley Times

Oct. 15, 2001

OAKLAND — The blaze was out.

At least by all appearances, firefighters said then, the flames they found on a hot October Saturday in the tinder-dry Oakland hills had been snuffed.

Crews mopping up returned to their stations. Nervous residents stowed garden hoses and put away their fears.

But howling out of Contra Costa were the heated gusts of the Diablo winds, the devil's breath that revived the smoldering ash, unleashing a deadly firestorm. "It spread so quickly that within literally hours it had darkened the sky," former Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris recalled. "It was almost like a nightmare."

Nearly a decade has passed since 25 people lost their lives and thousands lost their homes in an inferno that scarred the hills of Oakland and Berkeley.

But changes have come to Oakland, from the retrofit of thousands of fire hydrants to the undergrounding of power lines and pictures from a heat-seeking helicopter, making fire officials breathe a bit easier when the Diablo winds begin to blow.

The spark

Jabbed into a shallow grave where Tunnel Road bends upward at Buckingham Boulevard, a blackened tree stump remains, an unheralded memorial of the fire's beginnings.

A construction-site spark. A homeless camp barbecue pit. Bins of burning debris. Initial speculation and investigation pointed to different causes. But to this day, none has gotten the official blame.

Amid the coyote brush and sage sucked dry by five years of drought, flames exploded into the 90-degree air Oct. 19, 1991. Eucalyptus, non-native trees that still cover the hillsides, blasted flaming leaves and splinters like exploding cannons.

Firefighters pounced, dousing flame-spewing brush as it charred several acres just up from the Parkwood Apartments west of the Caldecott Tunnel.

Out of precaution and procedure, workers stayed late into the night, pushing their rakes and shovels into smoldering earth to snub out hot spots. They left only to return the next morning for equipment abandoned while fighting the previous day's blaze.

But Saturday's light breezes were replaced by the seething, heated gusts of a new day. Winds plowed in from the east and down the western face of the Oakland hills - a weather anomaly later blamed for spawning fire-breathing whirlwinds that spit flaming embers in every direction.

"The weather conditions were just right," said Oakland Battalion Chief James Williams, adding that the fire roared like an ignited matchbook. "The wind blew with great intensity and speed."

Firefighters were overwhelmed from the beginning Sunday as the relatively restrained grass fire of the day before puffed up into a five-alarm inferno. Flames flooded the box canyon. White-hot prongs pierced dense vegetation and topped trees, catapulting fire several miles downhill in just 15 minutes.

"How are we doing on air support?" former Assistant Chief Don Matthews asked a dispatcher as the fire inhaled the 250 Parkwood units. "The only way we're going to get a head on this is with massive air support."

The problems

But the first helicopter did not come for more than an hour. Miscommunication or the lack of communication between Matthews, Oakland dispatchers and other agencies cost crucial minutes, critics later contended. It was one of many problems fire officials, residents and reports would later blame to explain the destruction.

As word and sight of the fire blanketed the Bay Area, crews from nearly every neighboring city streamed onto the hills' narrow roads. Radio channels crackled with the chatter of firefighters, rescuers and police officers trying to bring order to the chaos of fleeing homeowners.

"What you attempt to do is at least get in front of it to contain the fire," Williams said.

But Oakland's communication system flickered under the added traffic, essentially cutting off the most efficient method of dispatching workers.

Adding to troubles were the fire hydrants. Couplings used to connect the hoses from outside fire companies to Oakland hydrants simply did not fit.

Downed power lines created pumping problems, reducing water pressure to little more than a trickle. Waterless firefighters were nearly helpless as a blizzard of ash and embers swirled. Flames scaled brush-choked chutes or narrow cuts in the hillside, devouring acre after acre.

Tucked into the hills were aging houses with shake roofs and stunning views. Surviving the earthquake in 1989 and previous fires, they were incinerated in 1991, their remains finally scattered about in the fury of nature.

"It became an act of God - a natural disaster," Williams said.

Their homes lost, panicked residents abandoned stalled cars, their arms loaded down with photos, family heirlooms and other near-and-dear items.

The vehicles became deadly corks in roads as narrow as 12 feet. Fire rigs could not move up hills; residents could not come down. Some people stumbled from the flames barely alive; 25 people, in all, did not make it out.

"Losing the lives and seeing the sadness in the faces of the family members, the overall community, was just a very, very devastating experience," Harris said.

The recovery

Three days after a windswept spark chiseled a new face on the Oakland and Berkeley hills, exhausted firefighters gained the upper hand.

Ground Zero became a walking tour of a new Oakland as politicians, insurance adjusters, reporters and thousands left homeless stumbled through a blackened forest of decimation.

Many vowed to rebuild; other homeowners promised to sell. Politicians pledged support and changes. Like the proverbial phoenix, Oakland, they said, would rise from the ashes.

Moving on meant cleaning up. Towering chimneys - reduced and blackened by 2,000-degree flames - had to come down. Power had to be brought back up. Steel husks of cars had to be hauled away and scrapped.

As workers scraped the landscape, officials plowed through legislation, pounded out a new tax district and bonded public support for $50 million for emergency readiness.

Wooden roofs, which had topped many homes in Oakland's forested hills, were outlawed. They caught the embers and much of the blame for destruction of 3,276 homes.

By law, hillside homes today are tucked beneath metal roofs or composition shingles.

Hills homeowners also rallied behind a $75 annual charge to fund brush-clearing teams of city workers, promising to raise nearly $2 million a year to thin vegetation. Approved in 1992, the measure was ditched in 1995.

The city's Vegetation Management Unit now works out of the Fire Services Agency. City inspectors and fire officials eye properties, issue warnings, hand out tickets and finally bills for brush clearing to landowners who ignore warnings.

"I think we play a very crucial role," said Leroy Griffin, Oakland's assistant fire marshal, who oversees the unit. "Clearing vegetation slows it up, lessening the fire so we can react, put enough resources on it and put it out."

But with memories still fresh, some area residents believe much more could be done. Joe Whitehouse, who helped battle the 1991 fire with a garden hose, and whose house survived, said he worries about another outbreak.

"What they're doing here is helpful, but there are people who would like to see them remove more trees," he said, pointing to a city-contracted crew clearing brush last month on Grizzly Peak Boulevard. "Eucalyptus are like cockroaches: They keep coming back."

Horrifying in the days and weeks following the blaze were stories of victims sucked into the flames after being trapped on the narrow asphalt strip of Charing Cross Road. Eight people - a third of the total fatalities - lost their lives on the 12-foot-wide street.

While Charing Cross was widened, a trip into the hills 10 years later still follows the skinny, winding paths that proved deadly for some that October day. Cars and trucks park on either side of already narrow roads, making passing a slow, precarious and, in some cases, nearly impossible task.

There are tighter parking restrictions and some broadened roads, said Amit Kothari, transportation services manager for Oakland's Public Works Department. Better signs, guardrails and road markings and improved communication between city agencies have helped as well.

"It does work to a certain extent," he said. "But enforcement is not available late in the evening."

The most change came to the fire department.

An 800-megahertz radio system, which allows many rescuers to talk over just a few channels, replaced outdated equipment that bogged down when firefighters from dozens of agencies flooded Oakland.

Oakland is now using automated weather stations and the Weather Information Management System, which allows better reading of temperature, humidity levels and other climate indicators.

There has been better training in attacking wildland blazes. Additionally, a new fire station was built in the hills, another previously closed firehouse[KPG12] was reopened and smoke patrols have increased.

One of the most significant changes occurred in the state Assembly. While firefighters from around the Bay Area rushed to help fight the blaze that ultimately caused more than $1.5 billion in damage, they could not fit their hoses to hydrants.

State legislators created a uniform standard for fire-hydrant fittings, allowing any department to pump water from any California roadside plug.

"We alone retrofitted 6,500 hydrants throughout the city," Williams said.

Most of the miles of power lines that crashed to the ground when the fire felled 1,000 poles were later buried to protect electrical systems as well as people. The city and local utilities spent $48 million on the project.

A thermal-imaging camera on a police helicopter now provides overhead pictures that alert fire officials to remaining hot spots before they leave an incident.

Even with new weapons, Williams said, the danger of urban blazes is always there. The city has been "lucky" in the past decade, he said, because conditions just have not been as ripe as they were in 1991 for the wind-enraged flames that consumed Oakland's hills.

But people forget about lives lost, Williams said. They forget about destruction. Complacency sets in, potentially bringing about the hell that descended on Oakland that day.

"You can never say never," Williams said. "The possibility does exist. But if it does happen again, we can limit the damage it causes and the lives it could claim."