Homes in the Berkeley Hills, California.
Photographer: Camille Cohen/Bloomberg
How This California City Aims to Avert Another Urban Wildfire Catastrophe
In the wake of the Los Angeles fires, Berkeley has moved quickly to require ember-resistant zones for high-risk homes after years of delay by the state.
Within weeks of the Los Angeles firestorms in January, the city of Berkeley, California, moved to do what the state had failed to for years: mandating ember-resistant zones around wildfire-vulnerable homes.
The Bay Area university town of 120,000 is the latest California municipality to take matters into its own hands to defend residents against increasingly destructive climate change-driven wildfires. As heat waves and drought exacerbate fire risk in cities that border wildlands across the US, scientists have determined that removing vegetation and other combustible material within five feet (1.5 meters) of a dwelling is one of the most effective strategies to prevent wind-carried embers from igniting an uncontrollable urban conflagration.