Safety
On Sunday, Councilmembers Pat Kernighan (District 2) and Libby Schaaf (District 4) hosted a lecture by crime expert Franklin Zimring about New York City’s crime reduction successes and how Oakland could implement the same strategies to tackle crime.
As police and Occupy Oakland protesters squared off in front of City Hall this week, organizers of a recall campaign took their first formal steps this week toward an effort to remove Mayor Jean Quan from office.
After a day of clashes with police, approximately 150 Occupy Oakland protesters remained outside of Frank Ogawa Plaza as midnight approached. There were at least five new arrests as of 9:15 pm this evening, according to police, and 97 were arrested during the day after police raided two Occupy Oakland encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and Snow Park near Lake Merritt.
Homes where families used to live, beloved pets left behind, a phoenix rising from the flames—a ceremonial visit to these hand-painted images, which adorn thousands of tiles at Rockridge’s Firestorm Community Mural Project, was one several Saturday events winding up the 20th anniversary week of the devastating 1991 Oakland Hills fire.
It’s been 11 days since Occupy Oakland took over Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza, and now the tent city is bigger than ever and facing eviction. Over 550 people occupy Oakland’s plaza, even after they received an evacuation notice from the City Administrator’s Office on Thursday evening. Among the concerns listed on the notice are graffiti, vandalism to plaza infrastructure and “the historic tree,” and the disruption of the plaza for public use by groups who had to relocate events which had previously been scheduled at the plaza.
The 1991 wildfire, which shot out of control on October 20 and lasted almost 72 hours, was so large and fast-moving that it challenged the capacity of Northern California’s fire departments and wreaked havoc on the hills community. OaklandNorth.net remembers the fire and examines what has changed in the past 20 years.
Twenty years ago, when Oakland Fire Department Captain Ian McWhorter was out on the burning hills, joining hundreds of other firefighters battling a blaze that took 25 lives and destroyed over 3,500 homes, he was dressed for battle with a structural, not a wildland fire.
The map shows the spread of the Tunnel Fire and infrared imaging of the burning hills taken by NASA’s DART satellite. The NASA Ames Research Center assisted firefighters in monitoring the movement of the fire, which was difficult to control due to extreme lack of visibility on the ground.
From a distance, standing on the windy ridge in Las Trampas Regional Park, the space-age contraption surrounded by a chain link fence looks out of place in the middle of swaying grass and a herd of grazing cows. But this array of sensors is playing an integral role in protecting this landscape. Remote Automated Weather Stations (RAWS) represent one of the biggest advancements in fire preparedness since the 1991 Oakland Hills Fire.