The Bay Area’s Pacific Palisades: This is one of the cities most at risk of urban firestorm

A Moraga-Orinda Fire District mitigated fuel break alongside a network of remote rural fire roads above the community of Canyon. Bryan Banducci/Special to the Chronicle

In 2019, when state lawmakers were grappling with the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., California’s largest electrical utility, they needed an estimate of how much a worst-case-scenario wildfire might cost. They tapped Michael Wara, a Stanford University climate expert, who used fire-risk models to identify three communities where a major fire would be extremely costly and devastating.

One was the Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, where an ongoing fire has reduced thousands of buildings to rubble and forced tens of thousands of people to flee in one of the most costly natural disasters in U.S. history. Another was the East Bay communities of Moraga and Orinda. 

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