Neighbors Worry About Carlos Bee Park Fire Safety
Carlos Bee Park on Grove Way in Castro Valley is posing a fire risk to nearby residents, one homeowner claims in letters to officials and the press.
Amber Jayanti, whose house overlooks the park that is built partly on a hillside, says that piles of what appear to be mulch can easily ignite from cigarettes smoked in a parking area or by people elsewhere in the park.
Jayanti has the sympathy of the Grove Way Neighborhoods Association, said GWNA president Dr. Ann Maris
“We always support neighbors,” Maris said. “My unprofessional opinion about the mulch is that it is tinder, which can be a fire hazard.”
She suggests spreading it out a bit more to reduce the hazard. Mulch is often used in gardening to discourage weed growth, which is itself flammable.
According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), mulch fires occur, but some mulch is more combustible than others. Rubber pellets and red cedar bark ignite readily, but the kind that uses wood chips usually doesn’t.
Chris Peterson, HARD parks and facilities maintenance manager, said the wood-chip mulch used is low in flammability and that the tree companies that provide it take it selectively from less flammable species of trees.
“There’s no pine in it, for example, and it tends to retain some moisture,” Peterson said.
“Now that we’ve gotten a needed tractor back from the shop, we will be moving some of the mulch from near the parking lot to other parts of the park,” he added.
Jayanti had complained to HARD that they had dumped a waist-high pile of the ground cover in a wooded corner of the parking lot near Grove Way on top of ordinary park litter of dead leaves and sticks. A cigarette discarded by anyone in the parking lot could easily ignite that pile.
When both Jayanti and GWNA notified HARD, a crew soon came out and spread the ground cover out, creating a layer a few inches deep.
Jayanti sees this as spreading the hazard instead of removing it.
“Now it has a bigger area that could ignite and spread from there,” she said. “The trees could ignite, the fire could jump the creek and set homes on the other side on fire,” she said.
Any spread between trees could jump the creek to nearby homes in one direction and spread up the hillside in the other direction to endanger homes there, Jayanti added.
Jayanti pointed out several dead trees elsewhere in the park and some dead debris from the winter storms that had yet to be removed. All of these are flammable, she said.