The city of Berkeley has a new message for residents of its most fire-prone neighborhoods: it’s time to cut back your gardens.
People living in the most high-fire-risk areas of the California city will be required to remove plants and other flammable materials close to their homes as part of strict new wildfire safety rules the city moved to adopt this week.
The city council in the San Francisco Bay Area city of 119,000 people on Tuesday approved the new requirement, which bans all combustible materials within 5ft of residences and and aims to create defensible space around homes and slow the spread of fast-moving wildfires. The regulations would apply to about 1,000 homes in the Berkeley Hills beginning next year.
The proposal comes on the heels of January’s deadly wildfires that tore through hillside neighborhoods in Los Angeles, killing 30 people and destroying thousands of homes.
“The fire tragedy suffered by the Los Angeles area is the most recent demonstration that wildfire is a recurring feature of our landscape, even more so as climate change results in more frequent extreme weather events,” the proposal stated. “Maintaining the status quo in communities with exposure to wildfire will inevitably result in similar, disastrous outcomes.”
Wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity in California and across the US. More than a third of the US population, about 115 million people, live in areas at high risk of wildfires, yet millions of people aren’t aware they are at risk. And many of the areas devastated by fire in recent years were unprepared.
While there has been pushback from some residents, who argue it will be difficult for people to comply with the new rules, experts have warned that limiting fuel, such as by removing burnable materials from trellises to trees around homes, is key to stopping the spread of fires. It can also give firefighters more time to respond to blazes and allow residents more time to evacuate, the city’s fire chief, Daniel Sprague, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Either we do this or we start to wrap our heads around the fact that we’ll enjoy Berkeley until the next big fire,” Sprague told the newspaper. “Not to be dramatic, but that’s the situation we’re in.”
The city council voted unanimously in favor of the proposal, and will hold a final vote on the item next month.
Meanwhile, California is in the process of adopting similar so-called “zone 0” restrictions in other parts of the state, which require an ember resistant zone of 5ft around structures that are located in the highest risk wildfire areas.
