This transcript was automatically produced from the evacuation webinar and has not been edited.
Introduction and Logistics
[Michel Thouati] This clinic was first given a year ago several times, both as a seminar and a webinar, and we started the series again a week ago with the first seminar. We’re going to keep on going as often as people want to see it.
First, a disclaimer because this is California. This is in no way authoritative advice. These are our opinions. You cannot and should not rely on those solely for your own decisions. The only authoritative sources are the City of Berkeley, the Berkeley Fire Department, CAL FIRE, and federal agencies.
The format of this evacuation clinic is different from the City of Berkeley’s Evacuation Clinic. The City of Berkeley’s Evacuation Clinic is covering both tsunami and wildfire, we’re focused very tightly on wildfire, and we’re trying to provide much more information. Because of that, we’re going to move very fast. So I would ask that you keep your verbal questions for the end. You may at any time use the Q&A to actually ask written questions. And if a co-host is able to, he or she will be able to answer them in written form. Any of the Q&As that are remaining unanswered, we’ll take care at the end. Everyone is muted.
Anyone at any time can actually raise their hand, but we will not pick up any questions until the very end. At 7:30, we’ll take Q&As first using the raised hands, and then if someone doesn’t know how to use the reactions menu, we will unmute everyone at the very end. We will stay here as long as we need to answer every single question. So, we’re not in a rush, we’ll keep on going, but we’ll try to go as fast as we can through the format.
There are two handouts that are companion handouts to this presentation. They can be downloaded from the Prepare for Evacuation Main Content Page. There is a two-page evacuation checklist, and there’s a one-page Evacuation Plan Draft Worksheet. If you take a picture of this screen, you can use the QR code to go on this page and download these handouts. The agenda, as you can see, is packed, so we’re going to start right now with an Amber Attack.
What Kind of Fire are We Faced With?
What is the kind of fire that we’re going to be faced with? We all know the East Bay has a very long history of fire. If you look at the right-hand picture in this illustration there, you’re going to see that the densest fire bubbles are the ones in front of the East Bay, in front of Oakland and Berkeley. That’s unfortunate, but that’s the way it is. Because we have a long history, we’re able to look back at the past and make analyses to figure out when and how those fires start. But before we do this, I would like to share this video with you, because it will put this in the right frame. Exactly how does it feel to be within an amber fire?
I shudder every time I see this video. Because we have seen many such fires in Berkeley, we know roughly what kind of a fire we’re expecting. We’re expecting an ember fire like the one described in the video. We also are expecting long range ember attacks because we have those very large groves of eucalyptus a mile and a half away from the crest, which are going to generate very long range embers. If you look at the drawing here, there’s a drawing of the 1923 fire while the fire hadn’t yet reached Shattuck. You already had a municipal dump fire on 4th Street. So what is the fire going to be like? It’s going to be an ember fire. It’s going to come from Tilden. It’s going to be driven by a very strong wind from the northeast, which we call a Diablo wind. It’s very likely going to be a very high temperature day with very low humidity.
Weather Patterns and Fire Alerts
Michel Thouati: What does this mean for us? It means that when we look at all of the fires that have been happening in the East Bay and in Northern California and in California as a whole, we can correlate the occurrence of those fires to a certain type of weather. Almost all uncontrolled fires happen in California in very high sustained winds and they happened in very low relative humidity and typically at high temperature.
Because we have a repeatable pattern, what this means is that we can predict when an uncontrollable fire may happen in the East Bay. Now, the National Weather Service provides or predicts red flag days, which are days with a decent amount of sustained wind and lowish relative humidity. But we have 20 to 30 red flag days every year on average. In fact, when you look at the diagram that we had in the last slide, we know that the uncontrolled fires happen only on the lower right hand.
The lower right hand is categorized by the city of Berkeley as an extreme fire weather condition. And so, while the National Weather Service issues red flag days alerts, the City of Berkeley issues extreme fire weather alerts. In an extreme fire weather condition, it is easy for an uncontrollable wildfire to ignite and spread. Why is that really valuable to us in terms of prediction? It’s because on average, there’s 20 to 30 red flag days per year, but on average, there’s only 0 to 2 extreme fire weather days. And what that means is that if we know that an extreme fire weather day is coming, we can take precautions.
The 2025 Berkeley Evacuation Study
Let’s talk about the 2025 Berkeley evacuation study, which studied exactly the kind of ember fire that we saw in 1923. The evacuation times ranged between two and some hours to four hours and 35 minutes. It’s dramatic because, as we know, the fire took only two hours and 20 minutes to get to Shattuck. So the evacuation will be very slow for many different reasons, one of which is that there is only one evacuation route that is going in the direction of the fire. That’s Marin Boulevard. Everything else is going perpendicular and very slowly, and there is simply no way for 9,000 households on the Berkeley Hillside to evacuate through Marin Boulevard.
Key Recommendations from the Study
- Evacuate before a fire starts: Well, how do you think that could happen? That’s a good question. It’s because we can predict extreme fire weather days. The recommendation therefore of the study is to evacuate when an extreme fire weather is predicted.
- Carpooling: Households that have a vehicle should carpool as it should evacuate in a single vehicle. The recommendation is also that evacuees who don’t have their own car should connect to neighbors and try to evacuate with them. Of course, this would be ideal, and I hope it can happen, but I can’t help but worry about depending upon third-party people. Clearly, it would be a heck of a lot safer to evacuate before you’re required to evacuate.
- Plan more than one route: It’s certain that multiple routes will be blocked, and we won’t really know until we actually are in a pileup, and so the evacuation study recommends that we plan for two or three evacuation routes.
- Red Curbing: Finally, the last recommendation is to the city. They think that red curbing will not help according to the model that they put together, except in areas where there’s two way driving. Unfortunately, their model does not analyze two way driving, the ingress of fire vehicles. Unfortunately, as we know, on all of those side roads that are parallel to Spruce and Euclid, there will also be two-way driving from residents themselves, and so the conclusion on red curbing may or may not be valid.
The primary conclusion of the evacuation study is we cannot wait, we must evacuate early.
Berkeley’s Official Evacuation Zones
Berkeley official policy is Berkeley has defined two zones:
- A leave early zone
- A get ready zone
They recommend that the leave early zone evacuate immediately upon extreme fire weather warning. If you look on the right hand side of the picture, you see a zone that covers roughly the very high fire hazard severity area where we’re supposed to leave early and then another zone which goes all the way down to the circle where we’re supposed to get ready. Now, I would like to point out that there’s a number of evacuation zones there that will have an extremely hard time evacuating. I’m looking, for instance, at BR029, BR032, BR018, BR009, BR004, BR019. None of these are going to have an easy time, and so we feel that more than the leave early zone should leave early.
Let’s talk now about the consequence of this study: we now have two modes of evacuation.
[Mary Pat Farrell]
Two Modes of Evacuation
The graphic on this page is the handout that Michel talked about at the beginning of the presentation. We put together a two-page handout. It’s actually one page, but different cases on each side.
Emergency Evacuation Mode (Worst Case)
- Evacuate when you see smoke or fire or when there’s an evacuation order.
- This is the worst case evacuation scenario because it’s going to be really a matter of your surviving and it’s going to be a very frightening experience.
- In the video they talked about how it’s going to be physically exhausting and traumatic. That will describe evacuating when there’s already a fire on this hill.
Early Evacuation Mode (Zen Mode)
- Evacuating early on an extreme fire weather alert.
- You generally get those alerts two days early. So you have lots of time.
- They happen from no times per year to two times per year. We can’t think of a year in recent history that there’s been more than two. Last year there were zero and the year before there was one. It’s a very rare alert.
- All of the really bad fires in Northern California happen in these conditions. Winds that are sometimes exceeding 50 miles an hour, very high heat, very low humidity.
So, while the handout has both scenarios, and they’re slightly different, we’re really encouraging you that the only safe way to evacuate is the leave early mode for those really rare few days when there is extreme fire weather.
Preparing for Evacuation
How to prepare for evacuation? The city of Berkeley has a fire weather and evacuation page, and it talks about the same kind of things that we’re talking about, but there’s a lot more meat on the bone. They do time studies for evacuations, they do a simulation of the 1923 fire, and there’s many different scenarios, plus things about the go bag. A lot of the things we’re gonna talk about are in that area. It’s just a little bit on the long side, but really a lot of good information, and I encourage you to go to that site and look around to see the kind of information they have there.
Step 1: Sign Up for Emergency Alerts
In terms of preparing for evacuation, you need to sign up for all of the services that will give you the warnings that you need to decide how and when you’re going to evacuate:
- AC Alert: It’s the alert system for Alameda County, and it will tell you about red flag days, road blockages, and all kinds of information. You’ll get extreme fire weather alerts up to two days early, giving you the luxury of time. You won’t have to worry about being on the hill with many cars, with things going up in flames and embers raining down on you. You’ll just be in your house, packing your clothes and preparing calmly, because there will be no fire.
- Genesis Protect: Provides zone-specific information, including evacuation warnings and evacuation orders.
- Evacuation Warning: Means leave now if you need extra time to evacuate or have pets.
- Evacuation Order: Is a lawful order, meaning everyone must leave now due to an immediate threat to life or property.
Do not wait for the evacuation warning. Don’t wait for the evacuation order. Yes, fires can start on other days, but fires on days with less wind and more favorable conditions are much less dangerous and much more easy for the fire department to take care of before they turn into massive urban conflagrations.
Step 2: Know Your Evacuation Zone
First thing you need to know to get these alerts is you need to know your zone. You can do that by either going to the Berkeley Emergency Map or Genesis Protect. Go up, look where your street is, and get your zone so that when you get a zone-specific alert, you know what to do about it.
Step 3: Actionable Steps on Red Flag Warning Days
On red flag warning days (roughly 20 times per year), you are requested to do the following:
- Keep your phone on and with you to receive alerts.
- Back your car into the driveway so you don’t have to be doing a 3-point turn in a crowded street when there’s a potential evacuation warning or order.
- Prepare your go bag and leave it by the door.
- Avoid anything that could cause sparks, because red flag warning days are the precursor to extreme fire weather.
Step 4: Extreme Fire Weather Guidance
In extreme fire weather, there is guidance. The homes in the highest risk areas at the very top of the hill are designated as leave early zones, and they should leave early and stay elsewhere. The zone just below that is defined as get ready zones. In that case, they say be ready to evacuate, doing the same kind of things you would do on a red flag day.
However, there is an important caveat:
- If you are in a get ready zone, but your street has only one way in or out, your household needs help from outside your neighborhood to pack and get ready.
- My household would plan to evacuate the Berkeley Hills on bike or foot. This is really—you have to leave early if you’re going on bike or foot, because you cannot be in superheated gases and an active fire when you’re on bike or foot.
- I prefer not to be caught in an emergency evacuation. This is your power. Take it. You don’t have to be in that situation where everything’s on fire, embers are raining down, and houses are exploding around you. You can choose not to be there. It will require some planning, but you don’t have to be caught in that emergency situation.
Evacuation Tech Tools
Mary Pat Farrell: Sign up for alerts. On our handout, there are QR codes for every one of them that takes you directly to the sign-up page.
- Genesis Protect: Gives you zone-specific information. You can specify addresses where you’re concerned and want alerts around those addresses, such as where your parents live, where you live, or based on location if you are traveling.
- AC Alert: The Alameda County Mass Notification System. It is capable of sending alerts via voice, text, or email. It covers red flag days, extreme fire, evacuation warnings, evacuation orders, earthquake and tsunami warnings, and important road closures.
- WatchDuty: A volunteer organization that reports on and maps fire all across the country, which is very valuable in California. It shows where the fire is, where it is moving, what streets it is crossing, how many acres is the fire, what percentage is contained, and potential evacuation routes/maps. I would really highly recommend that anybody that lives in a high fire danger area gets this application.
Creating a Family Evacuation Plan
The central thing in the handout is to make a plan. This is more a state of mind than it is difficult, because a plan is really simple.
- Know your zone and memorize it so you can follow specific alerts.
- Think about how you will be going. Do you need to carpool? Am I taking my own car? Which car am I taking? When?
- What will trigger you to evacuate? I hope the answer to that is I will evacuate on extreme fire weather, and also on evacuation warnings or evacuation orders.
- Who needs to be with you? Who do you have to be concerned about? Children and pets are obvious, but what about neighbors?
- What routes am I going to take? I need one default route as my go-to route, and I need an alternate route in case that route is blocked.
- Where will you meet if you don’t leave together? What if somebody’s out shopping and they shouldn’t come back up the hill to meet with you? What if your kids are at school? Where will you meet and how will you post or communicate about status? Will you use WhatsApp, text, or what have you?
- The name, address, and phone of where you will go. Name, address, and phone contact of where you will go that everybody in your family knows, not just you, not just the one who prepared the plan.
- An emergency contact whom you will all contact in an emergency, or who will be trying to reach us in an emergency.
One of the hardest things is where will you go? A lot of people will choose hotels down the hill or friends, which is perfect if you can do it. If you can’t do it, what I would recommend is you go as far away as you reasonably can down the hill, and go to a big parking lot where if embers land, there’s nothing to burn, and consider what to do now. We will be trying to get the city of Berkeley to name a couple of parking lots as staging areas. But even in advance of that, wide open spaces where there’s nothing to burn is where you want to be if you don’t have a hotel or a friend already lined up.
Preparing Your Home to Leave Early
Preparing to leave early is more a mental thing. If I have to leave, what am I going to do to protect my valuables, my documents, and my identity documents?
- Consider scanning documents and photos and storing them in the cloud or on a thumb drive.
- Decide if you want to have one room in your house that’s locked and move valuable artwork in there. One friend of mine has a friend who is moving sentimental and valuable things off-site to a friend’s house for three months of the year because she doesn’t want to think about that stuff when she evacuates.
- Turn off the gas, power, and AC.
- Shut windows and doors to prevent fire spread.
- Get things away from your outside walls that can burn, including your garbage bins, which are flammable.
- Limit items near the inside walls that are flammable, like curtains, cushions, and blinds. Intense heat can cause those things to burn even if no ember has gotten into your house.
- Unplug your EV and get it down the hill. EVs burn really hot and really long, so move it if you can.
- Leave hoses and a ladder ready for use for the fire department.
- Pack like you’re going on a two-day trip. Most wind events only last 12 hours, but they can last up to 24. Take irreplaceable items and comfort items (like children’s toys, or for me, an eye mask and earplugs).
This is your opportunity to take control of your destiny, and to do it in a calm, relaxed way without any kind of fear.
Preparing Your Home During an Active Evacuation Order
This is different. Now there is a fire. There’s either a fire close to your house or it’s moving close to your house.
- Stay tuned to AC Alert and Genesis Protect. This could be a rapidly moving and deadly fire.
- You want to be in the first wave to leave, and that means you’re going to have to have things ready. You don’t have leisure time to get it ready, it has to be ready.
- Roads will get progressively worse as time passes. The Evacuation Time Study shows that after 30 minutes, things get quite clogged. Getting a lot of cars out to the few winding routes that go down the hill is going to be very difficult, and there will be traffic jams.
- Just remember that if you don’t have the perfect go bag or all your stuff, you can buy stuff at Target, Goodwill, or CVS. The most important thing is to act like you’re trying to survive and to get out early.
- Do minimum things at your home: shut the windows and doors, and unplug the EV. Do more only if you have time, but likely you will not. Only if you’ve already packed them, take photos and treasures with you, and grab your go bag.
Survival Dress and Go Bag Checklist
This is the situation where there’s an evacuation order or warning. While you really never want to leave your car in a fire because it’s the safest place for you to be while evacuating, it could happen that your car gets into a situation where there is no way out. To improve your odds when you are out in the elements of smoke, flames, fire, and heat, you must dress for survival.
Dressing for Survival (No Synthetics - They Melt!)
- Denim jeans
- Cotton or canvas clothing
- Wool, tightly woven garments
- Leather work boots
- Thick wool socks
- Leather gloves
- Wide-brim canvas hat or cotton bandana over your head (to protect long hair from falling embers)
- Goggles or safety glasses
- Leather jacket (great protective wear)
- Cotton mask over your N95 (N95s are flammable in the right conditions)
Last-Minute Go Bag Items (Keep in a small, accessible bag)
- Wallet
- Cell phone
- Medicine and medical devices
- Extra car keys
- Laptops and chargers
- Eyeglasses
Items to Keep in Your Car At All Times
- Map
- Water
- Multi-tool
- Emergency blanket
- Contractor bags and duct tape
- First aid kit
Standard Go Bag Items
- Cash
- Passports and critical documents
- Thumb drives
- Kids’ toys
- Batteries and radios
- …
If you don’t have a go bag, don’t pack it when there’s already an evacuation order. Just go. You’ll find everything else down the hill. This is the kind of preparation you can do to just improve your odds of survival and also to make you feel better so that you know you have thought about this and done everything you can.
[Michel Thouati]
Maximizing Your Odds of Survival
As Mary Pat talked about, there are two modes of departure: the early mode and the emergency mode. When you’re leaving early, it’s on your terms. You have plenty of time, you can do some planning, prepping, and set your house up. When you are leaving on an evacuation order or because you can see, hear, or are being warned of a fire, you’re leaving on the fire’s terms. Your only goal is to survive—you may not survive.
The best odds you can have on your side is to follow everything that Mary Pat has talked about in prepping for evacuation. Remember, if you’re not evacuating early, you are not worried about anything else than surviving. You’re trying to get out quickly and effectively.
It’s very possible that you’re going to get blocked in your car as you’re evacuating, and if you are in a hot car, your survival odds improve significantly if you have the right clothing. None of it is really optional without a significant amount of additional danger.
Driving During an Evacuation
This could very well be what our streets look like on the way out: fire on the sides, driving on asphalt with fire on both sides or one side, and smoke in front of us where we can’t see a thing except the car right ahead of us.
- Park facing out and leave as quickly as you can. You do not have any time whatsoever. Leave right away.
- As you’re leaving, one of you could call neighbors or tell them about your departure, which way you’re going, and honk as you go out.
- If you have time, pick up neighbors or do some carpooling. Take your pets.
- Keep your car windows closed and make sure your ventilation is on recirculating, so that you’re not bringing in outside air.
- Look at all of the evacuation routes you have planned.
- Do not abandon your car: You’re likely to be much safer inside your car. There are many stories of people who left their car and died while their car actually survived, or where one person left and another stayed in the car and survived.
- If you must leave your car on the road, understand that you are basically condemning the people behind you to death. Leave it off the road and leave the keys in so that someone can actually move that car.
- Once you are in safety, post and let people know that you’re safe.
Selecting Your Routes
A year ago, I was planning multiple routes from Creston Road, where my house is. I was planning in one direction to go down Marin, and in the other direction to go down Shasta, and then thinking if I can see where the fire is, maybe I could go all the way up to the top of Spruce or the top of Euclid and go down this way. After having heard Dave Winnacker in our last evacuation clinic, I’ve taken out all of these last options.
Evacuation on Foot or by Bike
Unless you’re evacuating early, everything we’ve heard says do not evacuate by foot or by bike. Dave Winnacker’s point is that anywhere down the road, there could be pockets of superheated gas that will take you out in 5 to 8 seconds. You can’t out-think the fire, and you can’t think and guess where the fire is and try to walk out of it. If you’re trapped, it’s generally better to shelter in your car and hope that a bulldozer will come over and free you, or that you will survive inside your car. But there is another solution that’s even better than that, and that’s to have evacuated early.
Preparing Your Home on Short Notice
In general, we’re going to know ahead of time that there is danger. We may or may not have a fire ready, but we know there’s danger. If you have to leave on very short notice, I would still:
- Shut the windows and doors.
- Unplug the EV.
- Do not disconnect the water hoses.
The rest depends upon the time:
- If you can leave a ladder out, that’d be great.
- You could turn on the lights inside, too, because they can actually see.
- If you have time to check around your Zone Zero and move gear away from the walls, if you could open the blinds and remove the curtains, and if you have even more time, if you could move some furniture away from the outside walls, that’d be great. But if you are leaving right now, none of the later items are reasonable.
Electric Vehicle Fire Risks and Guidelines
EVs are a tricky problem because nobody’s really rationalized how to deal with them. EVs are very dangerous fire risks, both to the firefighters who are going to try to save our neighborhood and to your home. They burn very long, they burn very hot, and there is no known good way to extinguish an EV. Normally it’s going to take seven hours and just burn very hot all the way through.
- Unplug the EV before you leave: This is the first thing you can and should do.
Because there’s no official guidelines, everyone has to make up their own plans. This is the plan that we have:
- On Early Evacuation: We’re going to take both our EV and one of our gas cars. We’re going to park the EV away, very far away, and we’re going to leave it underground in a place where no spark can actually light it up, and we’re going to leave it there. We’re going to drive around the gas car. Why? Because about a third of the homeowners in the hills have EVs and are using their own home chargers. When they are all down the hill, they’re going to need to charge and there’s going to be big competition for chargers.
- On Immediate Evacuation: We won’t take both. We’ll unplug the EV, leave it there, and take the gas car along.
Key Clinic Takeaways
- Don’t wait. Pre-evacuate on an extreme fire weather alert whether you are in the leave early or get ready zone.
- If you are hearing of or seeing a fire, or get an evacuation order, you have zero time to leave. Leave immediately.
- Listen to Dave Winnacker: you cannot out-think the fire. Don’t say, “I think the fire’s gonna go this way, so I’m gonna go that way.”
- More than likely you’re going to be a lot safer in your car. It is going to be psychologically very difficult in some cases to stay in your car, but that’s probably the right way to go.
Question & Answer Session
Q: How do we know about routes? Will there be updates on AC Alert?
A: There will probably be some limited updates on AC Alert, but we all have to understand that there’s going to be an enormous “fog of war.” Nobody will know all the information that there is to know, and that includes BFD. Nobody will know. And so there can at most be some partial updates, and they might be already wrong by the time they get published.
Q: Will there be real-time status info on where to go?
A: Same thing, due to the fog of war.
Q: Will police or fire be directing traffic?
A: Yes, but only in some locations.
Q: Will the fire department provide a safe place for people to go once they are down the hill?
A: The Office of Emergency Services would like to be able to do that, but that would only happen if there’s an evacuation order, not if there’s a pre-evacuation.
Q: Did the evacuation study actually say that choke points outweigh street parking?
A: Yes, but they did not model two-way traffic, so we’re not 100% sure as to how valid that is.
Q: Are there news or pointers on how to handle traffic and choke points?
A: Let’s be really clear here. There is no way to know where the traffic will be, where the choke points will be. More than likely, every single way out is going to be choked and not all of us will make it out alive. The more people leave early, the more people are going to survive.
Q: Will traffic controllers be deployed?
A: Yes, but not everywhere.
Q: Are there Arson Watch volunteers?
A: None in Berkeley.
Q: How will people know if exit routes are impassable?
A: We will not know.
Q: What do we advise if all of our exit routes are impassable?
A: Call 911, let them know where you are, wait in your car, or if you are far away from the evacuation routes, look for a place that doesn’t have a lot of heat source around it. If you’re in Tilden, go to the golf course, for instance. Hopefully you have wildfire-appropriate clothing with you. If I was in a car near Tilden when that happens, I’d drive straight over the golf course in my car.
Q: What should we do if the fire overwhelms our car as we’re evacuating?
A: Call 911, wait in your car, and wear your wildfire-appropriate clothing.
Q: Is there any way we can prepare ahead of time to survive the situation?
A: Prepare wildfire-appropriate clothing, evacuate by car, but mostly evacuate early.
Q: Would we be sharing the same handouts tonight that were passed out at the meeting last week?
A: Yes, if you go on berkeleyfirewise.org and look for the evacuation main page, at the very top, the two handouts are listed. Before we end this meeting, I will bring up the slide that has a QR code, you can actually take a picture of that QR code and go straight there and download these things.
Q: Will the city provide any guidance as to the evacuation route each family should take?
A: No, the answer is no, not at this time. We are trying to get a meeting, a series of meetings with the Berkeley Fire Department to talk about the best options, but I am not 100% sure that this will happen.
Q: Can you go over the evacuation routes that you have found plausible this year, recognizing that there are a lot of unknowns?
A: Gosh, this is such a difficult question and that’s the hardest question among all of us. What way should we take down? For those of us who have close access to Marin, Marin is absolutely clearly the best way down. It’s gonna be hyper jammed, but it’s definitely the best way down. I live a couple of blocks south of Marin. One option that’s about a third of a mile south of me is Shasta. Shasta goes all the way down to Cedar, and Cedar is a main evacuation route. Shasta has, I think, 5 or 6 180-degree curves. In the smoke, it’s gonna be hard to find them, it’s gonna be difficult. Spruce and Euclid are actually large evacuation routes as well. The problem is that they intersect Marin. And what that means is that you take them up, there’s going to be choke points where Spruce and Euclid meet with Marin. It would probably be a little more efficient to go down Marin if one can, and then go down Spruce and or Euclid later.
Now, there is one strategy that I think makes a certain amount of sense, although dangerous like any other strategy that doesn’t involve going early, and that is this: Marin is going to be a choke point for anything, because there’s going to be so much traffic. And so the best bet that we can have, if we’re trying to go down quickly, is to come up with a path that is going down the hill that is not intersecting with Marin. If you can find one and if it is not blocked on the way down, then it might be a good way to exit for yourself.
Q: What about Centennial as an exit route?
A: I had Centennial last year as one of my exit routes. I was thinking, if the fire is coming from the northeast, I could drive all the way down to Centennial. Chief Dave Whitaker was in the room, took the questions, and afterwards explained to me why Centennial was a terrible choice. First, he said Centennial is very vulnerable to an amber fire because there’s a whole side in one area of the face of the hill near Centennial that’s going to pick up embers and ignite very quickly, so Centennial is probably going to get cut off fairly quickly. But the other point he has is that I’m trying to outthink the fire when I’m driving a mile and a half all the way to Centennial (unless, of course, I’m right near it). I’m trying to outthink the fire. I should go any which way that goes down the hill faster than going all the way on Grizzly, parallel to the fire.
[Eric Weaver]: What Chief Arnold said is if you have no other option, go down Centennial. So it’s not a good option, but it’s better than no option at all. So if that’s the only way down that’s open to you, go for it. Another problem is that there’s a huge choke point at the bottom, which is the stadium. But if that’s your only choice, then you should go.
Q: What did you say about the golf course?
[Michel Thouati] A: What I said about the golf course is that if I was caught in Tilden Park in my car or on foot at a time when there’s a fire and I have no other way to get out, what I would do is I would go to the golf course, which is basically bereft of burning material, and I would try to find shelter there. And if I had a car there, I would drive over the golf course in my car, because I think it would be the safest place for me to be. Not that it’s an ideal location, but I might survive there, who knows?
Q: During fire weather, should we have parking only on one side in streets like Vermont Street so people can evacuate, or have Firewise groups ask people to move their cars?
A: Many of us are asking ourselves the same question because we’re not really trusting the mathematical model of the evacuation study. It’s very difficult for any one of us to advise people to take a very small street that we perfectly know can choke at any time, even with a single car, and when we know that there’s going to be two-way traffic in almost all those streets. So, it’s a very hot topic among the Firewise groups, and it’s a discussion that we have to have with the Fire Department. But, personally, I agree with you.
[Mary Pat Farrell]: They’ve talked about red curbing in the past and gotten so much resistance that they feel like they can’t get it done to some extent. But they said, look, if there’s a neighborhood where you live in an area and you guys want to be red curbed, we can work with you to do that. Now, I don’t know if the people on Vermont Street would sign up for that. That’s the issue.
[Eric Weaver]: I would also add that Chief Winnacker said that when he was working in Moraga, he had even more resistance to parking restrictions than he did to clearing zone zero. Parking is a super touchy issue with people.
[Michel Thouati]: And we know in Berkeley that zone zero is already touchy, but if it’s even worse, gosh. So we’re going to have to see. I think we should at least investigate red curbing in many different areas, but we’re going to have to see whether and how we can make it happen. Whether you’re a supporter or an opponent of defensible space, I think there’s unanimity among many people at the top of the hillside that red curbing one way or another is necessary. Now, whether or not neighborhoods are going to accept that, that’s another question.
Q: Will the fire department help with traffic control?
A: [Eric Weaver]: The fire department and the police do have plans to work on traffic control, but as Michel said, the fog of war also applies to the fog of fire, and so there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to actually control all the chokepoint intersections, but they are gonna try. There’s one thing also I wanted to add: the Fire Department has told us over and over again that if people don’t evacuate before the fire, their initial focus will be on evacuating people and not fighting the fire. So evacuating early actually helps the fire department protect your house, because it doesn’t have to save people, and it can focus on saving houses.
Q: I am wondering about exiting from around the Claremont Hotel, not on North Berkeley, on South Berkeley, going down Ashby. Will that be a significant choke point?
[Michel Thouati] A: The answer is yes, but much less than coming through Panoramic Hill or coming from the Grizzly Peak mitigation area. Going down Panoramic Hill is probably the most nightmarish situation of all. There’s, I think, 280 households that are having a single shared lane that they have to go through that’s highly exposed to fire, where a fire vehicle has to do a three-point turn, it’s really, truly frightening. Every single large or small route coming out of the general direction is going to have some choking according to the study. But Panoramic Hill is going to be by far the worst in some ways if there’s fire conditions. And the higher part of North Berkeley is going to be worse too. So everything considered Ashby is going to be pretty good, but it’s going to be very relative.
[Mary Pat Farrell]: I think the reality is that, unfortunately, the hills just aren’t built for mass evacuation, and we can’t change the routes that there are, and they’re not designed for it, they’re not built for it, and everything is going to get congested. I was talking to someone who got evacuated out of Healdsburg for a fire, and she said Highway 101 outside Healdsburg was backed up for miles. So there aren’t any great scenarios for evacuating the Berkeley Hills, unfortunately.
Q: Will the fire department be helping with traffic control on Marin?
[Michel Thouati] A: I understand that the police is going to take charge of traffic control on the circle and some of Marin, I don’t know how high. I understand there will be presence on the circle, and in some of the streets leading to the circle, there will be some one-way driving. Probably Marin will be one way down, and there will be a certain number of streets that’ll be one way up for the fire department, or at least they’ll have traffic. For ingress of fire vehicles, the ingress is very well planned. The egress, maybe not quite as much. So we would love to be a part of evacuation discussions with the fire department, but that hasn’t happened yet.