There are four approaches to saving a residence from wildfire. Three are preventative measures that can be done by the homeowners themselves — landscaping, building defensible space and hardening the home with certain materials. The fourth approach is the last resort — firefighter response.
None have proven 100% effective against the chaos of flying embers, changing winds and human behavior.
This was the paradox posed at Berkeley FireBreak before an audience of innovators, public officials and researchers at the Berkeley Gateway Accelerator, a technology venture fund. The meeting Thursday was the first in a series of events planned by the accelerator and the University of California, Berkeley Institute for Security and Governance. The series is meant to define how the East Bay’s academic, research, entrepreneurial and policy communities can work together to advance wildfire innovation.
Dave Winnacker spoke from his experience as the former fire chief for the Moraga-Orinda Fire District, an area just east of the Berkeley Hills. On the Berkeley side, the Grizzly Peak and Panoramic Hill areas are designated as high wildfire risk zones.
They are subject to enforcement by Berkeley’s new “Zone 0” rule, part of the Effective Mitigations for Berkeley’s Ember Resilience initiative. The rule, which took effect in January, requires homeowners to remove combustible vegetation and other materials from within five feet of their homes, decks and stairs.
Facing the fear
Berkeley Assistant Fire Chief Colin Arnold, who leads the fire department’s wildland-urban interface division, said he wishes he had a psychologist with him to explain the fear response he sees during enforcement visits.
Winnacker attributed that fear to a lack of guarantees.
“We take people who have lived there for decades, for whom the vegetation turns that house into a home and is integral to their sense of place, and we’re asking them to change that, in a space where there is a degree of uncertainty,” he said. “That’s really hard.”
Trees are very rarely the fuel for fires that result in structure loss, Winnacker said.
“It’s the proximity of ground fuels to the home that allow embers to intrude into the void spaces of the home,” he said “That allows the home itself to become available as a fuel.”
“We take people who have lived there for decades, for whom the vegetation turns that house into a home and is integral to their sense of place, and we’re asking them to change that. … That’s really hard.”
Dave Winnacker, former chief for the Moraga-Orinda Fire Distirict
All speakers generally agreed that cleaning debris from the landscape was the most obvious way to reduce risk. The second was to build defensible space, as with Berkeley’s ordinance.
“There’s also defensible space up to 100 to 200 feet further down for your community fuel breaks,” said Winnacker, describing broader perimeter roads or open spaces that surround whole neighborhoods that can interrupt fire spread.
“We did this study in communities in Lake and Sonoma counties,” said Michael Gollner, director of the UC Berkeley Fire Research Lab. “For those specific scenarios, we didn’t see big impacts of the fuel treatments.”
Home hardening helps
Gollner said home hardening made a bigger difference in their research and modeling. Home hardening addresses the structure itself and can include using fire-resistant building materials or installing ember-resistant mesh over vents.
The fourth fire mitigation element is firefighter response. Jeff Fields, senior fellow at UC Berkeley Institute for Security and Governance, described research in Santa Rosa, where firefighters were looking for better technologies. However, their research found that the agency’s biggest problem was a high fire department attrition rate.
“Every time someone with seniority left, all the experience was leaving with that firefighter,” Fields said. “There was no way for them to create a living corpus of expertise on the different nuances about what they did. A lot of times technology can just be something as simple as how do we create a shared awareness across domains, across disciplines.”
The emerging research suggests that coordinated neighborhood-scale mitigation, including defensible space and especially home hardening, could reduce the opportunities for fire to spread — but researchers are still working to determine exactly how much mitigation is needed and how to translate those reductions into insurance and community incentives.
Speakers agreed the broader challenge is adapting existing communities that were built before wildfire risk was fully understood. The goal, they said, should be measuring whether mitigation efforts reduce the risk of homes and communities igniting, rather than simply counting projects completed.
