February 2019 - Parks & Recreation - 39

tus and non-native pine that, arguably, create severe wildfire risks if
not managed. Resource agency permits for implementation of wildfire
forest reduction activities include
specific conditions for working
in these habitats and around special-status species. The Park District's wildland forest reduction
team coordinates with dozens of
partners, including environmental
consultants, contractors, regulatory agencies, academia from nearby
U.C. Berkeley, utility companies
with easements through parkland,
community organizations and federal, state and local government
agencies, in accordance with permitting and funding conditions.

Wildland Forest
Management Tools
For decades, the Park District has
performed various forms of forest
management activities to reduce
wildfire risks in ridgeline areas.
These efforts have historically included maintenance of a 200-footwide fuel break between regional
parklands and the urban border,
goat grazing to control vegetation
growth and manual removal of
hazardous vegetation in fire-prone
areas.
The catastrophic Oakland Hills
Fire in 1991 significantly changed
the scope and scale of fire-prevention efforts. The fire started in a
residential backyard, adjacent to
wildland managed by East Bay
Regional Park District, in a canyon above a freeway tunnel where
many fires had burned before. It

caught in dry grass and brush, but
quickly exploded into the densely
packed homes along the steep canyon and the 100-foot-tall eucalyptus plantations, becoming an immediate conflagration. At the time,
the Oakland Hills fire was the most
devastating fire California had ever
seen, claiming 26 lives and nearly
3,000 structures. Unfortunately,
only the 2018 Paradise, California,
fire has eclipsed the Oakland fire
in terms of loss of life and property. These fires are examples of the
complex fire landscape that many
land managers in the western United States grapple with: a combination of challenging terrain, roaring
winds and a fuel mix of overgrown,
fire-prone vegetation and dense
housing.
In the aftermath of the Oakland
Hills fire, wildfire prevention efforts began to be re-examined. The
Park District worked with local

community leaders and government partners to better coordinate
fire response and land-management actions to reduce the risk of
catastrophic wildfires. The current
iteration of this fuel management
program is governed by the Park
District's Wildfire Hazard Reduction and Resource Management
Plan (WHRRMP), a prescriptive
action plan incorporating ecological assessment, fire behavior and
fuel modeling. The plan makes
recommendations for where initial
fuel treatments should be focused
and emphasizes the importance of
repeated treatments over the long
term to ensure undesirable vegetation does not grow back.
The effort to establish the current
program reflects more than a decade
of work, including plan development, coordination with scientific
experts, negotiation with stakeholders and comprehensive public re-

East Bay Regional Park District parkland
after forest management activities to
reduce the risk of devastating wildfires.

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February 2019 - Parks & Recreation

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