Nightmarish Circumstances Fueled Inferno

The fire that devoured at least 400 structures in the hillsides of Berkeley and Oakland was fueled by a nightmarish recipe of weather, wild land, poor maintenance and bad luck that no number of firefighters could have overcome.

For starters, there was the freakish climate: temperatures as high as 90 degrees, humidity as low as 8% and Santa Ana-like winds as strong as 35 m.p.h.--the kind of day that Southlanders ruefully await in October but Northern Californians hardly ever see.

Then there was the vulnerability of the homes in the pricey, heavily wooded neighborhoods. They were an eclectic mix of classic, turn-of-the-century estates and smaller residences that had been built a half-century ago as summer places for sun-seeking San Franciscans. Many were topped with wood shingles. Most were surrounded by large parcels of drought-parched brush and trees. In a region that had not suffered from a major fire for 21 years, relatively few property owners seemed to pay much attention to brush-clearing ordinances.

Then, as fire spread and panic set in, there was the power outage. Two hours after the fire began, its flames disabled many key electrical transmission lines. The lack of power crippled the pumping system that was supposed to keep reservoirs and fire hydrants filled. Firefighters were, in some cases, forced to stand by their trucks and watch tragedy descend.

Even the eucalyptus trees that festoon the hills conspired. Eucalyptus, for all their leafy calmness, are not indigenous to North America and are extremely susceptible to drought. Dry or dead, they explode when fire strikes. They, along with pine trees, sent torches of flame soaring from tree to tree and from house to house.

“The conditions were right for disaster,” Berkeley Fire Chief Gary Cates said Monday.

It was, state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesman Karen Terrill said, “the fire of the future for California”--a grim reminder of the consequences of building residential neighborhoods in brushy hillsides, an ever-popular industry and lifestyle.

The fire came when many firefighters were being placed on standard seasonal layoff, and as state budget cuts were depleting some resources that could have been used to fight the East Bay fire and two others that broke out Sunday in Sonoma County and Los Padres National Forest in Ventura County.

Fire officials insisted that the manpower and equipment issues were academic--the same point they made last year after a huge fire destroyed at least 425 single-family homes in a similar setting in Santa Barbara.

“As long as that many houses and that many trees are crammed into an area that tightly, (having more) air tankers is not the point,” Terrill said. “All the air tankers in the world could have not stopped this fire. This was a wild land fire. The houses became the fuel. This was an extraordinary natural phenomenon and it resulted in a tragedy.”

The blaze was triggered when a “hot spot” in a 12-acre fire that had been extinguished Saturday suddenly flared out of control on Sunday, even as three crews of firemen were monitoring it. The cause of Saturday’s fire remained unknown Monday. What was clear was that the winds quickly pushed the blaze through the hills in Oakland into Berkeley.

The fire grew from a one-alarm blaze to a four-alarm fire in its first hour.

“The fire just got away,” said Oakland Fire Chief Lamont Ewell, who took over as chief several weeks ago after leaving a job as an assistant fire chief in Maryland. “We’re at the mercy of (Santa Ana-like) winds.”

Whether firefighters would have had a chance to control the blaze became moot when four of Pacific Gas and Electric’s eight main East Bay power lines were put out of commission by the fire. That cut off power to the East Bay Municipal Utilities District’s 17 water pumping plants that send water to hillside reservoirs, which in turn send water back downhill to a system of fire hydrants.

Seven reservoirs with about 4 million gallons of water quickly ran out of water. Radical fluctuations in pressure mixed with the heat of the fire snapped water lines.

“We just didn’t have any pumping capacity,” said Gayle Montgomery of the utilities district. “It was a firestorm.”

Alameda County Supervisor Warren Widener said he watched his house burn.

“People were just watching. The fires started jumping from house to house. Firefighters were there with their equipment but there was no water,” Widener said. “No one wants to sit and watch their house burn down. That’s the frustrating feeling. . . . If there had been water, I believe the truck could have saved the houses. Those houses burned because there wasn’t any water.”

The wind tore off chunks of burning roofs and sent them flying onto other houses.

Near the Sonoma County town of Healdsburg north of San Francisco, several thousand acres had been engulfed by flames since early Sunday. William Harrington, the state’s chief ranger for the area, was advised by state fire officials in Sacramento that they were diverting three air tankers from his fire to Oakland and Berkeley. That would give firefighters in the East Bay 10 air tankers to complement 10 water-dropping helicopters.

It was typical of the difficult choices fire officials face when more than one large fire is burning simultaneously, and they do not have enough resources. To make matters worse, fire officials decrease their resources every October in deference to a budget that does not permit the same level of year-round staffing. This fall is even tougher. State budget difficulties required the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to trim $4 million from its $200-million fire protection budget two weeks ago. The equivalent of 101 full-time positions were eliminated, including two lookout rangers in Sonoma County.

That makes day-to-day deployment more difficult, Harrington said. Losing the tankers Sunday meant less protection for fire crews that were being placed on some fire lines. But it did not, he insisted Monday, make a great deal of difference in the eventual size of the Sonoma County fire, which had burned 5,000 acres by midday Monday.

“If I’d had twice as many engines and tankers, there wouldn’t have been much difference,” he said. “Until that wind quits beating us, you can bunch the whole state of California (against a fire) and you can’t counterattack” a fire like Sunday’s. “It’s the master. There were times when I watched 75- to 150-foot flame lengths coming at you. You don’t deal with bulldozers or air tankers. You get the hell out of the way. Nothing’s going to stop that.”

Oakland, like Los Angeles, has a brush-control ordinance under which the city will clear brush around private property if the owner neglects to do it--and then bill the owner. But Oakland Fire Department Capt. Charlie Faso said brush-clearing consciousness is not high.

“People put that in the back of their minds,” he said. “It’s human nature. We try to remind them but it’s human nature to forget.”

Diana Baxman, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Forestry, was blunter when asked if East Bay hillside homes generally conform with the state’s recommendation for 30-foot clearance around houses or structures.

“Absolutely not,” she said.

One of those people who did not trim the brush around her home, and who lost it in the fire, was Ann Maurice. On Monday she recalled serving in the Peace Corps in Africa and seeing natives routinely burn savanna grass to keep down fire dangers.

“It’s obvious to me I don’t have the common sense of an African farmer,” she said sadly.

There did not appear to be a rush to condemn the Oakland Fire Department on Monday for its inability to control the embers of Saturday’s fire from spreading into Sunday’s conflagration.

“It wasn’t as if they left it unattended,” said Berkeley fire chief Cates. “I don’t believe anything could have been done any better.”

Morain reported from Oakland and Baker from Los Angeles.