Berkeley study warns wildfire evacuations could take hours, gridlock streets

CBS News

5 days ago

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."
"Depending on where the fire starts, if the eucalyptus canopy gets ignited in the wind, we're going to have an ember storm that is, I think, very different than the ember storm we've seen in some of these other fires," he said. "A fire today in Tilden Park with a 40-mph Diablo wind would send hundreds of thousands, if not tens of millions of embers into the city. And it wouldn't just be the Berkeley hills. They will go all the way down. They will go miles into the city."
DeNero was reacting to a study commissioned by the city that estimates that, in some neighborhoods, it could take four hours for people to evacuate.
The study uses the boundaries of the 1923 fire and says that with the current number of automobiles being used on the narrow, winding streets, a similar fire in the area could end up being a major disaster as the streets become gridlocked with panicked evacuees.
"I think the four-hour estimate is reasonable in an orderly evacuation," DeNero said. "I think the real issue is, can there BE an orderly evacuation? If the alarms went off and AC Alert said, 'This is a mandatory evacuation, there's a fire in Tilden Park,' I think the Berkeley Hills would become jammed with cars within minutes. Everyone would try to leave at the same time. And then I think a four-hour evacuation is problematic. People would leave on foot as they did in the 1991 Oakland fire."
Berkeley has a unique system of walking paths and stairs that could be used to get people down out of the hills in a hurry on foot. And most living in the area have been planning on that for years.
"If we needed to leave, we'd be on foot," said Cragmont resident Danny Levie, "because in a car, everybody trying to get in their cars? It just wouldn't work."
"Imagine with an emergency, possibly at night, with smoke, people a little bit in a panic, the paths are going to be your best way down, on foot," said Colleen Neff with the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association.
"The problem with that," said DeNero, "is we have a significant elderly population in the Berkeley hills. And so, those who can't walk out, or run out, or get on a bicycle, will be stuck in the hills, particularly if the streets are jammed with traffic or abandoned cars."
The study points out that the road barriers that Berkeley has erected to block traffic flow into neighborhoods may also be a problem during a mass exodus. So, the city is recommending that people "pre-evacuate" by leaving their homes during extreme fire weather conditions. But DeNero thinks that may not be a realistic solution.
"The challenge there is how do you get a significant percent of the population to leave when there's no fire?" he said. "And I don't think that has been thought through yet. I think some creativity needs to come to play here. And I think we may have a problem that isn't really solvable."
We don't like to think of problems as "unsolvable," but that may be what Berkeley is facing when it comes to wildfire. They can plan for an orderly evacuation, but if history has taught us anything, it's that people's human nature tends to kick in when they're running for their lives.