Berkeley Is Trying to Avert Another California Wildfire Disaster

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 ...