Wood Shingle Firms Halt Fire Safety Standard Fight

With sentiment growing for restrictions or an outright ban on wood shingle roofs since the disastrous East Bay fire, the industry’s trade group has dropped its decades-long opposition to a statewide fire safety standard.

“The fire prompted the industry to take a hard look at making some sort of statement . . . to the public,” Don Meucci, a spokesman for the Cedar Shake and Shingle Bureau, said Friday.

“We will work with the Legislature to come up with a compromise measure (allowing the use of fire-retardant shingles) that will satisfy all concerned--the wood shake industry, fire marshals and lawmakers.”

The Cedar Shake and Shingle Bureau, based in Bellevue, Wash., has fiercely opposed legislators’ efforts to ban or restrict the use of wood shingles statewide. Such efforts have usually arisen after a severe fire unleashed a tide of public sentiment.

In recent years, various local governments have imposed rules or bans, resulting in a patchwork of legislation. Less than a week after the devastating 1990 blaze in Santa Barbara, for example, officials banned wood products on new roofs.

Meucci said the trade group realized that the East Bay fire makes it clear that passing statewide requirements for safer standards is the way to cut down on confusion.

Longtime advocates of prohibiting shake roofs on new construction called the group’s change in attitude a step in the right direction. But they noted that chemically treated wood shingle products can lose their fire-retardant characteristics in a few years from exposure to rain and sun.

“Chemically treated roofs are better than nothing, but the way to go is tile or asbestos-based roofs,” said Frank Kazerski, a self-appointed lobbyist against wood shake roofs whose Tustin condominium burned two years ago after the roof caught fire.

The wood shingle industry received a black eye Monday when Gov. Pete Wilson described the destruction he saw in an aerial tour of the burned area, the hills above Oakland and Berkeley.

“Suddenly, amid the charred ruins of all the destroyed homes, there seems to be one that is intact, almost untouched,” the governor told reporters. “In almost every case, the homes that were standing were those with tile roofs. And the homes with shake roofs were in ashes.”

Wilson suggested that the Legislature should consider adopting building codes that would require fire-retardant roofing material on new housing. Soon after, state Sen. Diane E. Watson (D-Los Angeles) vowed to introduce a bill to require that wood shingles be fire retardant. Assemblyman Thomas H. Bates (D-Oakland) said a measure he intends to introduce “would basically ban wood shake roofs.”

Bates and other legislators have asked for a special session to deal with issues from the fire, perhaps in early to mid-November.