We asked Brent Blackaby, Councilmember for District 6, to share with us his progress towards Zone 0 compliance. He generously agreed to share his thoughts along with a few pictures every few weeks. His posts will be published below. Check here often!
You can find Brent’s posts on Substack here.
An Introduction to my progress towards Zone Zero Compliance
by Brent Blackaby
Last June, the Berkeley City Council unanimously passed our EMBER ordinance, a fact-based proposal from the Fire Department that asks ~900 households located in the highest wildfire danger zone along the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) in the Berkeley Hills to clear all combustible material within 5 feet of their homes, including shrubs and plants, patio furniture, and wooden gates and fences that intersect structures.
This “Zone Zero” proposal is based on the best available wildfire science and after-action studies in the wake of catastrophic fires that have struck California, including most recently in Altadena and Pacific Palisades.
Why Zone Zero here in Berkeley? Because the most likely wildfire to threaten our community will come out of Tilden Park on a dry, hot, windy day — not as a wall of flames, but as millions of small wind-blown embers that rain down on rooftops, blow under eaves and against windows & doors, and pile up around the bases of homes.
If we harden our homes so embers can’t penetrate into vents, under garage doors, or ignite siding… and if we ensure that embers collecting on the ground within 5 feet don’t ignite dry material right next to our homes… then we can prevent an ember storm from metastasizing into an urban conflagration where our densely packed homes become the fuel and whole neighborhoods are consumed. And we will buy valuable minutes and hours that will enable the Fire Department and all our nearby mutual aid resources to swing into action to extinguish other spot fires that may pop up.
As a councilmember, protecting the safety of our families and our neighborhoods is my absolute top priority. Given the wildfire threat that we face, as the effects of climate change accelerate, I believe that Zone Zero and home hardening are critically important.
But don’t just take my word for it. The latest study from UC Berkeley Professor Michael Gollner shows that home hardening and creating Zone Zero defensible space around structures can double the number of homes that survive an urban conflagration like what we saw in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, halving the amount of damage done in a devastating wildfire.
To be sure, these are not the only actions we must take to make our community more wildfire resilient: Vegetation management in Tilden Park, removal of hazardous fuels including eucalyptus, ensuring safety of power lines and auto-shutoff by PG&E on fire weather days, ensuring EBMUD can deliver adequate water supply to fight fires, pre-evacuation of residents on extreme weather days — all of these things will have an impact too.
But there’s no question that what we do to prepare our homes and our yards for the wildfire threat — especially at scale, across all 900 homes in the WUI adjacent to Tilden Park — will play a vital role in our community’s wildfire resiliency.
It’s not going to be easy. But if we each do our part individually, then collectively I’m confident we will meet the moment.
It starts with each of us. I’m a city councilmember that passed the ordinance. But I’m also a homeowner that’s being asked to do this important work at my own home here in the Grizzly Peak Mitigation Area.
So I will document and share my family’s own experience, in real-time, as we walk step-by-step down the path to EMBER compliance.
I hope you’ll follow our journey, and share any tips you have along the way. If we can make this a little easier or answer questions that you or some of our neighbors have, then it will be well worth it.
Let’s get going! The sooner we start, the sooner we’ll reach the goal of creating a non-combustible Zone Zero around our homes.
In my next post, I’ll share more details about the first phase of work we did last fall, and then turn our attention to the work we’re doing next in the weeks ahead.
# Getting started with Zone Zero: Take inventory, then take a first step!
by Brent Blackaby
Last summer, after the Berkeley City Council unanimously approved the Fire Department’s EMBER proposal — along with amendments and modifications I introduced to improve implementation based on community feedback — it was time for our us to get started on Zone Zero right here at our own home.
Fortunately, in previous years, our family had already done vegetation management work in our front yard to meet Zone 1 standards for creating a a “lean, clean, and green” 30-foot defensible space around our home. That’s a good place to build from. But Zone Zero requires more effort and care in the first 5 feet around the perimeter of our home, both in the front yard and back.
So first, we took a quick inventory. Where would we really need to focus our attention? And ultimately, where should we start first, to get the ball rolling?
The good news is, we already have some natural Zone Zero advantages around parts of our home:
That’s the good news. But in taking inventory, we also identified areas we’d need to work on:
That’s not a short list! We certainly couldn’t tackle it all at once. But where should we start?
For me personally, the most difficult step to take is usually the first one. Inertia is a powerful force. So just changing from “no motion” to “motion” is often the biggest hurdle. I wanted to make that shift as simple as possible by tackling a first project that I could easily accomplish in a weekend.
So last August, we decided to start somewhere easy, to get the ball rolling. We decided to trim some of the branches out of our big driveway tree and our small lemon tree — and to also pull up some of the weeds and bushy overgrowth in the front yard next to our house and our front porch.
Fortunately, some Firewise Communities in our area were organizing a “Prepare for Fire Season” weekend event in August, encouraging neighbors all along the Grizzly Peak Ridge to take an hour or two to remove vegetation from their yards — even scheduling a bunch of appointments with BFD’s chipper program to make it easy to haul off all the debris. (Side note: I highly recommend taking advantage of the chipper program — for your own home, or for your neighborhood!) A weekend event like this really helps people feel like we’re all in this together.
That was just the catalyst we needed. My trusty sidekick and I spent a few hours on a Saturday afternoon weeding, trimming, pruning, and clearing. And we stacked up a big pile of branches, leaves, and weeds for the chipper to haul off the following Monday.
That Sunday afternoon, we celebrated a weekend of productive work with friends and neighbors at a picnic at Crescent Park in Park Hills — all told, amassing 55 cubic yards of debris across 46 different chipper pickup piles over an August weekend. It was fun to see everyone and feel good about the work we had each done to make our homes and our neighborhood safer.
And it was a great way for our family to take a relatively easy first step as we embark on our journey to full Zone Zero compliance.
Now our inertia has shifted toward motion — and we have more steps to take. Stay tuned.
What We Learned from our BFD 1:1 Home Consultation
By Brent Blackaby
Last fall, we hired an arborist to trim some bigger trees in the back yard and next to the driveway, carefully prune some branches on our front yard lemon tree, and remove an Italian cypress tree and some bushes in Zone Zero in the front yard.
After we had taken more of those preliminary steps to remove vegetation and begin clearing 5 feet of non-combustible space surrounding our home, we wanted to turn to the experts to get additional guidance and support for the steps we need to take next.
So in November I scheduled a 1-hour inspection with staff from the Berkeley Fire Department Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) team.
This 1:1 consultation was extremely helpful! We walked the full 360 degree perimeter of our home with 2 knowledgeable inspectors, asked lots of questions, got their feedback, and were able to identify the key areas we really needed to focus on.
In short, here were our key takeaways from our inspection:
(1) We’ve made good progress on part of the landscaping in front of our home. Here are before and after photos:
Much of the vegetation in Zone Zero has been removed, but we still have mulch to rake up.
As you can probably see, we also have a Japanese maple that’s only 3-4 feet away from the home that we’ll likely need to either move or seek a WAMMR for. (A WAMMR is a request to BFD, which they must review and approve, to extend out additional defensible space around the tree and further harden our home behind the tree, to meet the same level of wildfire resiliency as if we had otherwise moved the tree.) I’m going to leave that for now, but we need to come back to it in the next few months and make some decisions.
(2) We still have some flower beds near the front steps where we need to remove ferns, bushes, and ground cover — and the mulch underneath those plants:
There’s also a small section of wood fence that touches the house at the very top of the first photo, which we’ll need to replace with non-combustible material.
We’ll also need to be ready to move that storage box of wound-up hose in photos 2 & 3 on extreme fire weather days.
(3) The area around our front driveway is in pretty good shape:
You can see that the lemon tree has pretty well been trimmed to create 5-feet of defensible space between it and the house. But we’ll need to keep monitoring that, pruning it and maintaining it to encourage growth outward rather than toward the house.
The driveway itself provides plenty of defensible space.
And then the other big tree that extends above the roofline has been trimmed back to create space away from the roof. But we’ll also need to keep that well maintained each year.
(4) The sidewalk from front to back creates its own 5-foot noncombustible zone:
That said, we’ll need to move some of the hoses, the lawnmower, and a few of the plants immediately adjacent to the path. But this whole southern side of the house will be pretty easy to maintain.
There’s a small gate at the bottom of the walkway that we’ll need to replace with noncombustible material.
We’re a little concerned about the parallel privacy hedge that separates our home from our neighbor’s, as it’s big and bushy, but it’s more than 5 feet from our house and for now is in decent shape.
(5) Our back yard Zone Zero consists mainly of a brick patio at ground level, running all the way along the western side of the house, and a wood deck that extends one level above it.
There are some bushes that extend up and come in contact with the wood deck, which you can see in photos 1 & 2. We need to trim those way back.
But the patio itself provides a nice buffer between the bulk of the back yard and our home itself.
(6) We still need to screen our vents with wire mesh (so embers can’t penetrate and ignite the home from the inside) and cover our gutters (so leaf material can’t collect and catch fire).
We know we’re going to need to take some measurements about the amount of material we’ll need, and line up a vendor to help us install it (our eaves are really high, so don’t want to do that on my own). The good news is that, because we live in the Grizzly Peak Mitigation Area and have now had a recent inspection, we’ll be able to order that material for free from BFD. (More on that in a future post!)
All told, the BFD inspection process was extremely easy and valuable. We’ve now got an even clearer picture of the key steps we need to take to complete our Zone Zero and harden our home by screening vents and covering gutters.
If you haven’t already, and you live in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, I highly encourage you to schedule your 1:1 consultation with BFD. Not only will they help you formulate a 3-year plan to meet EMBER’s requirements, but the inspection also serves as a necessary first step for you to subsequently apply for the Resident Assistance Program (for financial support), order your wire mesh, or request a WAMMR.
Up Next: Ordering Wire Mesh for Vents & Gutters
Home hardening that delivers the biggest bang for the buck
Over the past couple months, we’ve been working a lot on clearing our Zone Zero, a critical five-foot non-combustible buffer around our home. To guard against a wildfire igniting in Tilden Park and blowing embers onto our rooftop & into our yard, we want to be sure we’ve created sufficient defensible space and removed combustible material that could easily catch our home on fire on a hot, dry, windy day.
But here’s the thing: Defensible space and home hardening are like two peas in a pod. Think of defensible space as your home’s outer shield—it stops the fire from getting close enough to ignite your walls. Home hardening is your inner armor. It ensures that even if embers fly over your yard (which they can do for several miles), they don’t find a way into your house.
While replacing a whole roof or installing ignition-resistant siding is a big lift, one of the most cost-effective things you can do to harden your home is surprisingly simple: screen your vents and cover your gutters with wire mesh.
If an ember gets blown into an attic vent or lands in a gutter full of dry pine needles, a house can ignite from the inside out. Standard plastic window screening or large-gap bird wire just doesn’t cut it; embers can pass right through them. To stop them, you need 1/16-inch to 1/8-inch non-combustible metal mesh.
Here’s the good news: The Berkeley Fire Department makes this wire mesh available for free to any resident in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone! First, schedule your 1:1 consultation (if you haven’t already), and then visit the Berkeley Firesafe website to order the mesh you need.
Step 1: The Great Vent Count Grab a notepad and walk the perimeter of your house. You are looking for:
Gable Vents: The large vents on the flat ends of your attic. We didn’t have any of these.
Deck Screening: You can also order wire mesh to screen in the area underneath your deck. We didn’t need this either.
Step 2: Measure Your Gutters You don’t necessarily need to get on a ladder for this. To get your total length, you can often measure the footprint of your house on the ground.
In our case, I dug up plans from a remodel we did 10 years ago which had the dimensions of each of our exterior walls. (We have lots of nooks and crannies, with both long and short segments of gutter to count up.) I used those blueprints to determine the base measurement for each gutter, and then added 16” on either end to account for the added length of the eaves. Then I counted up the total linear feet of gutter that we have.
Step 3: Order Online at BerkeleyFiresafe.org. The Berkeley Fire Department has set up a handy web page, with links to lots of great photos and videos, to help you measure your wire mesh. When you’re ready, you can place your order online. If you live in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, you can get this wire mesh for free!
Doing this work can feel like a lot, but it’s much more manageable when we do it together.
If you’re unsure how to measure or want to see what the mesh looks like in person, feel free to reach out to me (email to bblackaby@berkeleyca.gov) or chat with a neighbor who has already started.
One more step down, and still more to go!
