top of page

Orinda Needs to Review Its Wildfire Prevention Plan

(Public Comment to the Orinda City Council)

To:                Orinda City Council

From:           Steve Cohn

Date:            January 21, 2025

Subject:        Wildfire Prevention in Orinda

 

With all due respect to City officials, elected, appointed and on staff, and to MOFD officials, I believe that the City needs to review what is being done about wildfire prevention in Orinda and what is not.

 

In light of the devastation and deaths in LA, another wakeup call following the Oakland Hills Firestorm (1991, 25 dead), Sonoma’s Tubbs Fire (2017, 22 dead), Paradise Camp Fire (2018, 85 dead) and various others (Lahaina, Marshall CO, etc.) Orinda and MOFD should stop all spending on all non-essential services (including mini-parks) until they have a clear understanding of what is needed to maximize Orinda’s fire resiliency. 

 

An article in Saturday’s SF Chronicle, quoted Stanford climate scientist Michael Wara, “If Orinda or Moraga were to burn, it would not be a wildfire,” Wara said. “It would be an urban firestorm.”  This was in 2019 at which point he included Orinda/Moraga as one of the three most at-risk communities in California with Pacific Palisades being one of the others.

 

Has Orinda improved since 2019?  In 2022 Orinda’s Dr. John Radke proposed to model the fire risk, neighborhood by neighborhood, for $600,000.  The SSTOC advised the City to accept the proposal but City Manager, David Biggs, told the Council the City had “other priorities” for that money. (The City is now considering $363,000 of flowers for the corner of Brookwood and Camino Pablo.)  So, the City and its residents have no idea what the risk is in Orinda other than by implication, with over 30% of Orinda’s fire insurance policies being cancelled by insurance companies that HAVE modeled the risk and found it to be unacceptable.

 

The City and MOFD have not been completely inactive. 

 

  • There is a $400,000 grant incentive program to remove hazardous vegetation.However, over the two years it has been in effect only about 2% of the properties in Orinda have been awarded grants and the total amount granted, $100,000, represents less than 1% of the Measure R revenue, a sales tax sold to the voters as a wildfire prevention tax.This probably represents a few weeks of vegetation growth and not necessarily a net gain in safety.WE JUST DON’T KNOW.

  • There has been a 2 foot “zone zero” fire code in place and that will “probably” be replaced with a 5 foot "zone zero”.While these are definitely helpful in protecting homes from a “normal” vegetation fire, are they effective in the “urban firestorm” Wara describes and LA just experienced?If that had been in place in LA, would any of the currently known deaths have been prevented?I find it hard to believe that a 5 foot gap will have any impact on a fire storm driven by 50-70 mph winds.Again, not a useless exercise, but not an effective tool to prevent deaths in the type of fire which could destroy Orinda.WE JUST DON’T KNOW.

  • Education, including Firewise Neighborhoods, is great.The vast majority of property in Orinda is private property and property owners should be responsible for their own properties.But the risk of the “urban firestorm” is a public health problem.Anything that threatens dozens of lives is a public heath issue.The City Council has seen the evacuation study produced in January 2023.This was done without the impact of wildfire closing off some evacuation routes taken into account.Even so, the analysis shows that virtually all of Orinda will take between 30 and 60 minutes to evacuate (except those areas that take longer).And anyone who has been stuck on Moraga Way, twice a day, on school days, can’t believe that if EVERYONE is trying to evacuate (including people from Moraga), that it is possible to do so even in 60 minutes.But do we have 60 minutes?We don’t know.Wildfire propagation models (again, as proposed by Radke in 2022) have never been run.But when you think of cars moving 5mph (the evacuation study assumption) and flames being whipped by winds at 50-70 mph, the answer is “probably not”.But neither has Orinda ever asked the question.WE JUST DON’T KNOW.

 

The list goes on about things that have been done but what is missing is the answer to the question, “how effective have they been?”  WE JUST DON”T KNOW.

 

Every other year we survey our streets to measure their condition.  But we have no way of knowing the “condition” of our wildfire risk or of assessing the change in risk (hopefully decreasing) moving forward.  Why do we measure road condition but not wildfire risk?   Maybe because we hire no one to do it.  We hire engineers to maintain our infrastructure.  We hire planners to plan our downtown and residential neighborhoods.  We hire firms for grants, for PR, for everything else.  WHY NOT FOR WILDFIRE RISK???

 

We rely on MOFD for that.  Why?  MOFD has demonstrated that while they are willing to write code (which may or may not be effective), and they are willing to hire people to enforce code (at least from what they can see from the street, but everyone knows the problem is not in front of our houses but behind them), they are not willing to spend any of the $23 million a year we pay them to actually remove anything that could reduce wildfire risk, namely vegetation.  Why not?  I have no idea, You need to ask them. 

 

I will tell you, as I have many times in the past, they are collecting millions of dollars more per year from Orinda taxpayers than they are spending to make Orinda residents safer and if they did spend Orinda tax dollars in Orinda, which they could do, and those tax dollars were spent removing excess and dangerous vegetation, then Orinda would be safer.

 

So far we have been lucky.  If the 1991 Oakland Hills Fire had started 5 miles to the northeast of where it did start, above Orinda Downs, a lot more than 25 people would have died and most of them would have been Orindans. 

 

Climate change is accelerating and not in a good way.  We are getting more extended heat waves with temperatures not dropping at night and winds increasing.  We cannot keep counting on luck to reduce our risk of wildfire.

 

We can determine what to do, we just need to hire the professionals to guide us.  Again, we have not done so. 

 

But the good news is, as opposed to most communities, we have the money to make the necessary changes.  We don’t have to rely on 7,000 individual property owners all doing the “right” thing (like everyone stopping at a four way intersection because we can’t afford a traffic light).  It is not that people don’t want to be safe and it’s not even that they don’t understand what is required to be safe.  But they are “busy” people who are paying a lot of taxes and who expect the government to use those taxes to make them safe.  Pave the roads.  Maintain clean water.  Process sewage.  Remove dangerous vegetation like pines and eucalyptus and many other species.  Measure the fire risk in Orinda, fireshed by fireshed, come up with a mitigation plan for each fireshed and execute it with the help of the property owners.  This is what the City can and should do and what the property owners need it to do.  Don’t just say “it’s the property owners’ responsibility”.  That is failing and will continue to.

 

I know you are tired of hearing me tell you that we paying MOFD too much, but we are.  And that is money that SHOULD be used to make Orinda safe.  We are paying MOFD $2.5 million per firefighter, when it is only costing them $2.0 million to provide the service, and Lafayette pays ConFire even less than that, $1.8 million. (I won’t reiterate what Moraga is paying, thanks to our subsidy.)  Thus, we are wasting between $4.5 million and $6.0 million a year on emergency services provided by the 9 firefighters serving us.  Not that the services we are receiving, mostly emergency medical response with a few structure fires and an array of other emergency responses, are bad.  In fact, they are great.  It’s just that they are costing $4.5 million and $6 million more than they should.  Now, if we had no use for that money, it would be one thing, but we do have a use for it.  We have millions of dollars of excess vegetation which is not being removed and that is negatively impacting everyone’s safety.  Saying it is not the City’s job to make people safe is wrong.  Especially when “the people” have given the City their tax dollars with the expectation that they will be effectively used for what is needed.

 

The City needs to act.  If the people understood that we have the tax dollars available to provide the services needed but the City is neither determining what is actually needed nor is it making sure the tax dollars are being responsibly spent, they would be furious.

 

bottom of page