While San Francisco's dense construction and cooler, often foggy climate doesn't seem particularly prone to the kinds of wind-driven wildfires we've seen devastate parts of Sonoma County, and now Los Angeles, there are a couple of areas that experts have pointed to as being moderate- and high-risk for fire.
When fire season rolls around, San Francisco tends to feel mostly immune from the panic. The effects of the Diablo winds are felt most acutely on hillsides iin the East Bay and North Bay, and recent past experience has shown us which areas are particularly vulnerable if a fire gets sparked there during dry conditions.
But you may recall a scary situation in October 2020 when a brush fire broke out on Sign Hill in South San Francisco amid windy conditions, threatening homes near there — two teenagers would soon admit to starting that blaze — and we saw a brush fire near Lake Merced the previous October, in 2019.
Illegal fireworks have also been linked to small brush fires in the middle of the city, including two in July 2022 — one of which, in Corona Heights Park, was visible all across the city.
There aren't a ton of dry, grassy, "wildlands" spaces in San Francisco prone to fire like that, and these fires were all quickly brought under control. But the Chronicle today highlights a few of the more vulnerable spots around town — Lake Merced is one of them — and notes Cal Fire has only designated one small section of the city as being "high risk" for fire. (Though this doesn't seem to be a designation that's well documented on current maps.)
That is the hilly part of Crocker-Amazon, and the risk extends over the border into Daly City. One resident of the neighborhood, homeowner John De Groot, tells the paper that because of the "high risk" assessment, his insurance company forced him to get a new roof or else they were going to refuse to renew his policy.
San Francisco has no areas deemed "very high risk" by Cal Fire, which was the designation given to Pacific Palisades in LA before the Palisades Fire. And there are no parts of San Francisco on the Public Utility Commission's map of areas at high risk of utility-caused fires.
Cal Fire doesn't even provide a fire severity risk map for San Francisco on its website — the county list literally skips from San Diego to San Joaquin. But the Chronicle has pulled a map from 2008 from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection which I'm not able to locate online that shows elevated fire risk around the Presidio, Lands End, parts of the bayfront in the Bayview, and a small section of Crocker Amazon.
Take this as you will, and the insurance companies are clearly paying attention. But all told, we can rest assured that San Francisco is fairly safe when it comes to fire risk. Unless, that is, there's another massive earthquake, gas lines break, and the water mains break too, like they did in 1906. But that's a little different.
Photo via Google Street View
