I live on the northeast side of the East Bay Hills. On October 20, 1991, a fire broke out on the Oakland side of the hills 
, and it was the worst fire that involved the loss of property and life since the quake of '06. Fortunately, my side of the hills was left unscathed, but I did witness most of the event from beginning to end.
Reading about the fires that leveled San Francisco in 1906 and having seen first hand what happened almost a century after makes me ask: Does history really repeat itself? The similarity between the reasons behind the mass destruction is startling.
In a previous post, Charles Riggs wrote about how a then-technologically advanced fire department failed to save San Francisco from destruction: "…one of the ironies of the disaster—a peninsula surrounded by an ocean and a bay, but no way to get all that water on the flames." One hundred years later, raging flames once again trounced the promise of technology. This report on the Oakland Hills fire has given me food for thought.
Did it ever. My father lost his home in the Oakland Hills fire. I was a student at Berkeley at the time. I drove up Broadway Terrace in the back of a police car with other homeowners. Across all the hills, everything was gone. The police officer driving said "I haven't seen anything like this since Vietnam."