This is what one of the worst fires in California history looks like
More than two dozen people died and hundreds lost their homes in Oakland in 1991
On a Sunday morning in October, 1991, residents in the Oakland hills awoke to the strong earthy smell of burning wood. Their homes, nestled among eucalyptus and pine trees, were hazy with smoke. There had been a small forest fire the day before, and just that morning, firefighters were noticing hot spots igniting again. Many residents thought the wildfires were far away — until they noticed the glowing cinders fluttering through the air around them. Covered in ash, people ran into the streets clinging to dogs, cats, and any belongings they could grab. Because of the 30-mile-per-hour winds that day, the fire ripped through the arid hills at devastating speed, leaving people little time to escape their homes.
Helen Kwak, tried futilely to douse her home in water before rushing to her car. As she drove, both sides of the street were ablaze. Nearby, Jocelyn Grote, sat in her car on the verge of tears. “There were big clots of fire streaming over the house,” she said. Her family stuffed clothes, photographs, and anything they could grab into bags. “When we left, the fire was just on the treetops in our backyard.” Soon it seemed all the hills were engulfed in flames. Police closed the surrounding highways. “My God,” one firefighter said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“What started out as a quiet fall Sunday of church going and car washing in the affluent suburbs across the bay from San Francisco,” wrote The New York Times, “turned suddenly into an inferno from which 5,000 residents fled in a frenzy, carrying pets and whatever valuables they could scoop up.”
In total, the fire would destroy 3,500 homes and 1,600 acres, causing $1.5 billion in damages, and killing 25 people, including one Oakland fire battalion chief. In terms of lives lost and property destroyed, it was, according to the Times, “the worst in state history.”
While wildfires are fairly common in Southern California, they are rarer in the urban parts of the Bay Area. But Oakland and its surroundings had become parched in a five-year drought. Though wildfires are considered by scientists to be a natural process, ones that occur in populated areas are most often started by humans and climate change makes these events more extreme. Soaring temperatures in the summer can cancel out the effects of wet winters, turning vegetation into fuel. According to an article in The Atlantic, these effects are exponential: “Every degree of warming does more to promote fire than the previous degree of warming.” Northern Californian cities and towns with their wet winters and increasingly hot summers offer the right — or tragically wrong — conditions for wildfires to flourish.
While you may have seen aerial views of the burnt-out aftermath of forest fires on televisions, these images don’t capture the visceral experience of actually being there during a firestorm. John McPhee, in his book The Control of Nature, explains that suddenly, the humidity drops to near zero, temperatures spike, and “moisture evaporates off your eyeballs so fast you have to keep blinking.”
In the case of the Oakland fire, flames whipped as high as 100 feet. Residents gathered in the street taking pictures, while others, armed with shovels, rakes, hoses, and axes joined firefighters from across the Bay Area to battle the flames. Ash rained from the sky and explosions rang out as transformers blew up in the extreme temperatures, leaving an estimated 10,000 residents without power.
As CBS reported, “Firefighters sometimes had to give up the battle as low water pressure left them nothing to fight the flames.” That combined with the literal uphill battle and gusting winds made much of the effort futile. Standing in front of the fully ablaze 250-unit Parkwood apartment complex, a firefighter helplessly remarked, “Oh God, I hope there’s no one in there.”
The governor quickly declared a state of emergency. By early afternoon, there was talk that the flames could reach the University of California, Berkeley campus, a few miles away. In nearby San Francisco, the smoke obscured the sun, and the city descended into an ominous beige-tinged darkness. There was the sense that if the world were to end, this is what it would look like.
In the years after the fire, Oakland would take precautions to try to decrease the likelihood that such a catastrophe would ever happen again. Fire emergency crews improved their policies and got better equipment. Homes were built with fire-resistant materials. But as The San Francisco Chronicle noted in 2016, the eucalyptus trees, sometimes called “gasoline on a stick,” had grown back, and neighbors disagreed over whether the trees should be cut back. The paper noted that “the conditions are ripe once again for a similar — if not worse — disaster.”
As temperatures rise, the chance of this only increases, and it seems hard to imagine that any amount of fireproofing could hold back a tidal wave of flames. As Park Williams, a scientists at the Earth Observatory at Columbia University has said, when it comes to climate change, wildfires are “a canary in the coal mine.”
