From her home in the Oakland hills, Pamela Jordan has been watching coverage all week of the horrific Los Angeles fires destroying entire hillside communities that look much like her own: neatly packed homes lining winding, tree-lined streets that empty into bustling urban centers.

Related Articles

Hydrants’ failure casts Los Angeles fire chief into public spat with City Hall

Map: Palisades and Eaton fire perimeters and evacuation zones

Evacuations soar in the San Fernando Valley, Brentwood as Palisades fire enters Day 5

1 in 10 Los Angeles homes don’t have insurance, says one estimate

Why is California’s wind blowing so hard in January?

“Then sometimes I just can’t take it,” she said.

The images remind her of how close she and her neighbors came last October to being wiped out in the same way, when 40 mph winds blew a spark into the bone-dry grasses on the hillside below, driving flames through her neighbor’s yard; she panicked when she spotted them from her living room window.

Not since the Oakland Hills fire of 1991 that killed 25 people and destroyed nearly 3,000 homes has the Bay Area witnessed the kind of urban infernos that have ravaged swaths of Los Angeles this past week, killing at least 16 people and destroying more than 10,000 structures in the Hollywood Hills, Pacific Palisades, Altadena and Pasadena.

But those fires are a reminder of the same vulnerabilities in the Bay Area’s foothills lining Oakland to San Jose, from Piedmont to the Hayward Hills and East San Jose to Los Gatos — all communities that lie not deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains like the ones torched by the 2020 CZU fire, but are an easy glide to the urban core.

Could LA’s tragedy happen here? Are we prepared?

“You can have all the fire suppression, all the firefighters and resources, but you can’t really compete with 80 mph winds,” said Oakland Fire spokesman Michael Hunt of the wind speeds that fueled the Southern California conflagrations.

With last October’s Keller Fire near Jordan’s home, “we dodged a bullet,” as Oakland Fire Chief Damon Covington says. The fire was contained to one home and 15 acres.

After the lessons learned from the 1991 tragedy here, Covington’s team was prepared. The National Weather Service had a red flag warning in place. Fire stations were fully staffed. Emergency crews were ready. Fire trucks were patrolling the Oakland hills. Air tankers were poised to take off. Mutual aide was on standby. The weather cooperated.

This week, however, in the midst of a city budget crisis, the Oakland City Council shut down two fire stations in the Oakland Hills for six months — one on either side of the Keller Fire footprint. With a plentiful start to the rainy season — unlike Los Angeles, which hasn’t seen rain since last spring — city politicians were willing to take chances until the first of July. They are considering similar “brownouts” of four others.

Like the Los Angeles fire chief who last month complained to city officials that budget cuts there could create “unprecedented operational challenges,” Covington in Oakland isn’t happy.

“There is no time we can afford to be without two stations,” he said in an interview. “Here we are in January and we’re having one of the worst fires in our state that we’ve had in a very long time. So we have to be prepared.”

Los Angeles is more than 300 miles away, but many Bay Area residents are feeling a personal loss with the fires. Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr lost his childhood home in Pacific Palisades, where he and 100 guests celebrated his mother’s 90th birthday last summer.

Pamela Blackwell of Saratoga choked up when she recounted how her daughter, Chelsea Meister, is holding on to her final memory of her Pacific Palisades home. That morning as she prepared to leave for a business trip, she’d danced around it with her baby in her arms, listening to “What a Wonderful World” on her phone.

“She didn’t think she was saying goodbye to the house forever,” Blackwell said. At her own hillside home, the fire danger seems more real than ever.

“We do as much fire pruning and everything as we can, but we’re butted up to an open space and fire could just envelope the whole area,” Blackwell said. “Yes, I fear it.”

Over the past decade, Bay Area residents mostly have had to contend with the smoky after-effects of far flung fires to the north. During the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa in October 2017, flames barreled down the mountain, destroyed the foothill neighborhood of Fountaingrove, hopped Highway 101 and consumed the entire Coffey Park subdivision.

A year later, in November 2018, the Camp Fire on the bluffs of Paradise took out nearly the entire town near Chico, killing 85 people and destroying 13,500 homes.

The fires came closer to the Bay in August 2020 when some 3,800 lightning strikes sparked more than 300 of them across Northern California — including the CZU fire, which destroyed nearly 1,500 structures in the Santa Cruz mountain towns of Bonny Doon, Boulder Creek and Swanton.

But the Oakland Hills Fire, sparked 33 years before the Keller Fire, remains the Bay Area’s apocalypse — which newly sworn in Congresswoman Lateefah Simon remembers as a 9th-grader living in San Francisco when the smoke drifted across the bay and her Oakland cousins ran from the flames. From her office in Washington, D.C., earlier this week, she called Oakland’s interim Mayor Kevin Jenkins.

“This is no time for brownouts,” she said she told him of the fire stations slated for temporary closure. “Safety needs to be the last thing we cut.”

The Oakland Hills fire is such a historic catastrophe that it is burned into the department psyche. Problems back then are legendary: fire crews from other cities who tried to help were slowed when hose hookups didn’t fit Oakland hydrants (they’re universal now); outdated radio equipment with incompatible frequencies between firefighting agencies hampered communications and a coordinated response to the firestorm, and vegetation, overgrown without strict city enforcement, fueled the spread.

As bad as the 1991 fire was, Hunt from Oakland Fire said, it could have been worse.

“If winds would have been different, it would be very likely that the fire could have made it all the way to downtown Oakland,” Hunt said.

When fire conditions ripened last October, Chief Covington employed everything he had from land and air. This time, Oakland had something it didn’t have in 1991 — a red flag warning issued by the National Weather service that not only alerts residents to fire danger but gives the city powers to prohibit parking in certain areas to allow fire trucks easy access on narrow roads.

Last year, Oakland voters passed a plan to spend $3 million a year to cut back vegetation largely along roadsides that tend to start most wildfires, and the city continues to deploy a herd of goats to clear more than a 1,000 acres of city-owned land every year.

In Los Angeles, the fire crews also had red flag warnings and advance crews in place, but it wasn’t enough.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass now is facing a barrage of criticism over cutting back on the fire department’s budget.

“We are still understaffed. We are still under-resourced, and we’re still underfunded,” Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley told KTTV on Friday. “It did impact our ability to provide service.”

In Santa Clara County, Fire Chief Suwanna Kerdkaew said she has the “overwhelming support” of the Board of Supervisors.

Like most hillside communities, however, Santa Clara county still has narrow winding roads through East San Jose and into the Santa Cruz Mountains that can cause congestion in panicked evacuations and super high demand on hydrants could conceivably cause hydrants to run dry, like in Los Angeles, although she doesn’t foresee that as a looming issue.

When she joined the fire department 22 years ago, the agency owned just two small wildland-capable trucks. Today, it has six larger units that can drive off-road.

“County fire has evolved to be able to respond to the changes in risk that we’re seeing based on the increase of wildfire threat,” Kerdkaew said.

In the Oakland Hills, Jordan is safely back in her home. The trees behind it are burned to the ground now — both reducing and reminding her of the risk.

“We live the American dream,” Jordan said, “and we’re paying for it.”