|
The Oakland firestorm of 1991 was a large suburban wildland-urban interface conflagration that occurred on the hillsides of northern Oakland, California, and southeastern Berkeley on October 20, 1991. The fire has also been called the Oakland hills firestorm or the East Bay Hills Fire. The fire ultimately killed 25 people and injured 150 others. The 1,520 acres (620 ha) destroyed, included 2,843 single-family dwellings and 437 apartment and condominium units. The economic loss has been estimated at $1.5 billion. ==Origins of the fire== The fire started on Saturday, October 19, from an incompletely extinguished grass fire in the Berkeley Hills northeast of the intersection of California State Routes 24 and 13 ( north of the Caldecott Tunnel west portal). Firefighters fought the fire on a steep hillside above 7151 Buckingham Blvd., and by Saturday night they thought everything was under control. The fire re-ignited shortly before 11 a.m. on Sunday, October 20. It restarted as a brush fire and rapidly spread southwest driven by wind gusts up to per hour. It quickly overwhelmed local and regional firefighting resources. By 11:30 a.m., the fire had spread to the nearby Parkwoods Apartments located next to the Caldecott Tunnel. Shortly before noon the fire had been blown up to the top of Hiller Highlands to the west from where it began its sweep down into the Hiller Highlands development and the southern hills of Berkeley. The fire tossed embers from the burning houses and vegetation into the air as it went. These embers were swept away by the torrid winds only to float back to earth to start the blaze in new locations. Half an hour later, these embers enabled the fire to jump across both Highway 24, an eight-lane freeway, and Highway 13, a four-lane freeway, eventually igniting hundreds of houses in the Forest Park neighborhood on the northwest edge of the Montclair district and in the upper Rockridge neighborhood. The fire eventually touched the edge of Piedmont, burning some municipal property, but the buildings and houses were spared. The hot, dry northeasterly winds, dubbed as "Diablo winds," (in reference to the Diablo mountain range, Diablo Valley, and surrounding geography bearing the name), periodically occur during the early fall season, similar to the Santa Ana winds in Southern California, and have been the cause of numerous devastating fires. The fire began generating its own wind, the defining characteristic of a firestorm. The superheated fire-driven winds combined with warmer, dryer air east of the Oakland-Berkeley Hills, and interacted with the ambient cooler, moister Bay/Coastal air to create erratic, dangerous gusts, which helped produce numerous rotational vortices. All of these combined to help spread the fire, tossing embers in all directions. The wind was so strong that it also blew debris across the bay into San Francisco. Ash fell onto the field of Candlestick Park where the Detroit Lions and San Francisco 49ers were playing during that afternoon. The CBS telecast of the game also showed live footage of the fire. As with the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake two years earlier, the blimp shots from the national sports media provided many people with first word of the disaster. By mid-afternoon, the wind had slowed and shifted to the west, driving the fire to the southeast. At about 9 p.m., the wind abruptly stopped, giving firefighters a chance to contain the fire.〔(New York Times ) — 22 October 1991 — "Fire in Oakland Ranks as Worst In State History"〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Oakland firestorm of 1991」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|