The Oakland Hills Firestorm occurred on Sunday October 20, 1991, almost exactly two years after the Loma Prieta earthquake. The fire is often referred to as the East Bay Hills fire, since it struck the hills in both Oakland and Berkeley, California. The fire killed 25 people and injured 150. On the 1520 acres destroyed were 2,449 single-family dwellings and 437 apartment and condominium units. The economic loss has been estimated at $1.5 billion.

The fire started on Saturday October 19 in the hills north of the intersection of Highways 24 and 13 (0.5 miles northwest of the Caldecott Tunnel entrance), as a grass fire that was not completely extinguished. It re-ignited on Sunday October 20, as a brush fire at about 11 AM and rapidly spread southwest with the wind to where it had jumped both highways within an hour, quickly overwhelming local and even regional firefighting resources. The wind then shifted to a more southerly direction and it progressed along a broad front for the next several hours.

Among the contributing factors that led to the firestorm were föhn winds (regionally called Diablo winds), which are hot dry winds that blow off shore (over land and then out to sea). Thick, dry vegetation close to many dwellings, and non-native "exploding" eucalyptus trees also contributed to the firestorm.

The Oakland Hills Firestorm was one of several fire disasters that have occurred in this same area, which have occurred about once every 10 to 15 years. The first was the fire following the earthquake of 1906 in the 60-year-old city of San Francisco. Twenty years later a fire in the hills of Berkeley nearly leveled that community. A succession of hill fires burned smaller areas of the Oakland hills in the 1970s and 1980s as construction of homes continued in the area, creating a densely populated residential area on steep hillsides at the edge of an extensive open space parkland (East Bay Regional Park District).

The fire also threatened to destroy the historic Claremont Resort hotel but stopped just before reaching it.

By 2006 most of the homes had been replaced with more fire resistant designs. The eucalyptus trees have regrown in many areas and continue to be a problem.

Trivia

This disaster was included as one of several different disaster scenarios in the game SimCity 2000.

References

• City Council report
• NASA Aerial Photo of Fire
• Google Maps - Burned Area

Eyewitness Photos

• Pictures of the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm
• Oakland Hills fire of 1991
• Images from Oakland fire 1991

Berkeley, California | Fires | History of California | History of Oakland, California | Wildfires | Fire disasters in the United States