A holiday tree-lighting ceremony may still be on for this weekend in Oakland’s Jack London Square despite a fire early Monday that scorched about 10 percent of the tree, a fire department spokesman said.

Quick work by firefighters about 1:20 a.m. kept the fire from burning more of the tree, at Embarcadero and Water Street.

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Keith Burbank is currently a fulltime reporter covering Alameda County and Oakland news for Bay City News. He has also worked on the Data Points project for Local News Matters, finding trends and stories about the region through data. In 2019, he was a California Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, producing a series about homeless deaths in Santa Clara County. He worked as a swing shift editor for the newswire for several years as well. Outside of journalism, Keith enjoys computer programming, math, economics and music.