or why some people think we need to be protected from our trees.
You may remember, Gentle Reader, that in our last episode it was revealed that a column I wrote for the New York Times Magazine a couple of weeks ago raised the hackles of one reader and definitely got a rise out of this writer.
So let us turn now to the righteous complaints of one Elizabeth A. Baugh (strangely apt) of Brownsville, Texas who writes, "While I am sympathetic to Briggs Nisbet's desire to enhance her property, I was disconcerted to read her reaction to the City of Oakland's enforcement of landscaping regulations."
While I am sympathetic to Ms. Baugh's discomfiture about my reaction to Oakland's landscaping regulations I am truly puzzled that she thought I was writing about a desire to enhance my property. Not that it is my property. I only rent the garden, unfortunately. Which is why the landlord called The Tree Guy. But I digress.
Ms. Baugh goes on to tell us that while people in "...other parts of the United States..." may think us strange for having landscape regulations, Bay Areans know that it's all about the Oakland (not Berkeley) Hills Firestorm of 1991 in which at least 25 people died and nearly 3,000 homes burned--"....the vast majority single-family homes."
I know that people in other parts of the United States think we're strange but it's not for our landscape regulations. I do think there's something strange about that last bit about single-family homes. Are we to be more saddened that the burned homes were single-family homes instead of apartments? Or, is this a clue to the Great Fire-landscape regulations connection? In fact, a huge condo/apartment complex was the scene of most of the human deaths of the Oakland Hills fire. But I assume that Ms. Baugh is linking single-family homes to yards full of trees closer than 10 feet to the roofline.
The letter ends with these emphatic words. "The City of Oakland is correct to enforce regulations put in place to protect its citizens." There's something strangely familiar about that tone. Do the words "homeland security" come to your mind too?
So I come to the heart of this letter, and the burning question, "do trees cause fires? Or, more specifically, "did trees cause the Oakland Hills Fire?"
Before we can answer that question (and I feel a little research project coming on) I have to explain that I was, like Elizabeth A. Baugh, living in the Bay Area at the time of the horrific fire. And it was horrific. Nobody close to me died but someone very close to me lost his house and all his possessions. The house he built by hand over five long years. Possessions collected over a lifetime (and part of mine).
The fire raged for days, blackening the sky over San Francisco Bay and raining charred debris as far as 20 miles away. At the end of the first day I stood on Broadway at 51st Street in Oakland and stared at a wall of flames completely engulfing the 1000-foot high hills. The fire jumped an 8-lane highway and blew back up the hillsides, burning houses at the bottom and, strangely, sparing houses at the top.
Fire temperatures exceeded 2000 degrees. The flames melted steel and turned brick to ashes. At my friend's house, newly built to the latest fire and earthquake standards, the remaining ceiling sprinklers spewed water on smoldering ruins for two days because nobody could enter the area until it cooled down. The house was gone except for a piece of the kitchen counter which had an unopened (but defrosted) package of Foster Farms chicken breasts sitting on top.
When it was over, the hills overlooking north Oakland were black and empty, denuded of houses, apartments, cars, streetlights, and vegetation. Except for some scorched coast live oaks, and the biggest Eucalyptus trees. The ground was a thick layer of ashes.
Of course one of the first questions everybody wanted to know was how did it start and why. We knew some of the answer. It began on one of those dry, hot October days when the wind is blowing hard from the east--Santa Ana's they call them in Southern California. Rain doesn't fall between May and December in our "mediterranean" climate so Fall is full of dry tinder. A couple of carpenters were seen having a backyard barbeque on a building site the day before. The fire department put out a small hillside fire but didn't stay around to make sure it was dead. And then there were the trees--forests of huge eucalyptus trees that shed great swathes of their bark which collected in piles on the ground. Decades of hill dwellers had added their own vegetative excesses to the densely shrubbed slopes.
People began to call for the remaining trees to be cut down--all of them, no matter if they might still be alive. Somebody, something had to pay.