The winds that blew through the Santa Cruz Mountains sounded like a jet engine the night that Sarah Johnston watched a tree erupt into flames from the window of her Aldercroft Heights home.
It was around 3 a.m. on Aug. 16, 2020, and hundreds of lightning strikes had begun raining down on the region, sparking fires across San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties. It was the start of the more than 86,000-acre CZU Lightning Complex Fire that would burn for weeks and destroy nearly 1,500 buildings.
While firefighters were able to quickly extinguish the small blaze near Johnston’s home that night, the threat of yet another lightning storm came roughly a week later. By that time, several other massive fires were burning across the state, prompting what she described as an “incredibly scary, isolating feeling.”
“I knew how taxed all these fire agencies were, and I realized that there probably wasn’t anybody who was going to come and help us if we had a similar lightning strike in our neighborhood,” she said.
Johnston has never had to evacuate in the 25 years she’s lived in the mountains, but worries about whether they would be able to get everyone out fast enough.
Located off Old Santa Cruz Highway in an unincorporated pocket of Santa Clara County, Aldercroft Heights is one of about 20 “one way out communities” identified by Cal Fire in the county — neighborhoods with at least 30 homes in fire-prone areas that only have one road leading in and out. The majority of these communities are located in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the hillsides of Saratoga and Los Gatos and have aging populations and infrastructure.
The narrow roads from these communities to larger thoroughfares have made evacuations difficult — and sometimes deadly — as residents have fled from California’s increasingly intense infernos. After the Tubbs Fire in 2017 and the Camp Fire in 2018, legislators passed a series of laws aimed at improving emergency preparedness and evacuation route planning.
One law in particular, Assembly Bill 747, requires cities and counties to identify evacuation routes and analyze their capacity under different scenarios in case of a natural disaster. Former Assemblymember Marc Levine, who authored the bill in 2019, said the fires the two years prior, along with the harrowing stories of people fleeing from their gridlocked cars, were the driving forces behind the legislation.
“I took an approach to rather than having plans list what those routes are, that the routes need to be well thought out, that capacity must be a consideration in navigating where those routes should be,” Levine told Bay Area News Group. “It’s not just checking off boxes of yes in these plans there are routes, but that in fact these routes can be effective means of getting community members to safety.”
The law went into effect in 2022, but three years later, Santa Clara County has yet to complete the analysis of its more than 600 miles of roads as part of its safety element update — a planning document that identifies potential hazards in the unincorporated parts of the county. The work was supposed to be done in 2024, according to the county’s website, but in a statement, county planning officials said it’s now tentatively slated to be completed in 2025 or 2026. The county updated the completion date on its website following an inquiry by Bay Area News Group.
The state doesn’t monitor compliance with the law, according to the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, and Levine said that it wasn’t his goal to penalize local jurisdictions and that his “hope was it would be done thoughtfully.”
When asked about the delay, county officials said in a statement that they are “emphasizing a thorough and thoughtful update that covers the dynamic range of communities that are within the county’s vast territory and jurisdiction — with varying characteristics, terrains and challenges.”
But many cities and counties across the Bay Area have already complied with AB 747.
In Orinda — a Contra Costa County city that largely falls in a severe fire hazard area — the safety element identifies areas that will have evacuation constraints and where residents might need more time getting out. The city of Oakland identified Interstates 580, 880 and 980 as the region’s primary evacuation routes, but acknowledged that the city’s existing road and intersection capacity wouldn’t be enough for all of its residents to use in the event of a mass evacuation. Alameda County pinpointed roads in its unincorporated areas that need to be prioritized for improvements to aid evacuation route planning. And Marin County has conducted a detailed risk assessment that includes traffic modeling based on evacuation difficulty.
In the unincorporated parts of Santa Clara County where evacuation route planning has yet to be completed, residents — many of whom have spent the majority of their lives living in such remote areas — have said they’re used to taking their safety into their own hands.
Aldercroft Heights Road, the one road that residents of the roughly 141 homes in the neighborhood could use to evacuate, dead ends deep in the mountains at a locked gate where the county road stops and San Jose Water’s property begins.
Johnston and other members of the Aldercroft Heights Firewise Community — a group of neighbors who have come together to identify ways to reduce the risk of wildfires — have worked with San Jose Water to find an alternate evacuation route from their neighborhood. They recently conducted a test evacuation drill to see if they could reasonably evacuate through the agency’s property. That one-mile dirt road connects them to Summit Road, which would eventually feed into Highway 17. San Jose Water opens the gate on red flag warning days.
Scott Schreiman, who also lives in Aldercroft Heights, said the neighborhood has been working together to do what they can to be prepared.
“Everybody’s got a role to play, so we’ve been playing our role,” Schreiman said. “If it burns through and people lose their homes, at least we’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, we did our part.’ But on the evacuation route side, it feels like nobody is doing anything.”
Johnston said that the county has often referred them to the Santa Clara County FireSafe Council — a nonprofit that has been active in evacuation route planning.
“If the county isn’t going to be supporting people directly, they really need to make sure that there is adequate support for agencies like Santa Clara County FireSafe Council,” she said. “That is the key organization that interfaces with community groups that try to take action on their own.”
FireSafe Council CEO Seth Schalet said they’ve done dozens of evacuation routes in the county — largely through grant funding from Cal Fire. The nonprofit recently completed a three-year collaboration with other FireSafe councils in the region that removed vegetation and helped create fuel breaks along Highway 35.
“You have to create evacuation routes that can have some measurable ability to get concurrent vehicles in and out,” Schalet said. “We call it hardening so that we’re able to take the vegetation back far enough that the road won’t be on fire the same time you’re trying to drive through it.”
The FireSafe Council, he said, would like to get the new routes uploaded into the evacuation management tool Genasys Protect so people know where they can go in an emergency.
“In an ideal situation, they would know if that’s a freshly treated evacuation route, if it’s safe passage,” Schalet said.
Los Gatos resident Rob Stump lives in another one of these communities in the town’s hillsides, with only one road that would lead onto the town’s main arteries like Los Gatos Boulevard and University Avenue. But getting out of the narrow road in the event of a fire would only be the first hurdle if Stump ever had to evacuate.
During the summer months, which also coincides with peak fire season, those thoroughfares are packed with standstill traffic as drivers from all over the Bay Area attempt to take a shortcut through Los Gatos on their way to beaches in Santa Cruz.
“We have beach traffic from June through September where Los Gatos, typically on Saturday and Sunday, is jammed — the street is jammed, the freeway is jammed,” he said. “You hold your head going, ‘What if? What if we had a wildfire at this point?’”
The town’s Complete Streets and Transportation Commission has suggested shutting down a large portion of North Santa Cruz Avenue to cars to help mitigate beach traffic. The town previously shut the road to cars during the pandemic, and it was a popular decision that drew large crowds to the downtown and brought more liveliness to the area.
But “road diets,” as they’re commonly referred to as, have proven to be catastrophic in emergency situations. After the 2018 Camp Fire ravaged the town of Paradise, the L.A. Times reported that the town had several years prior narrowed a portion of one of its main roads in the interest of improving commerce and traffic safety — the same road that saw thousands of residents stuck in traffic as they tried to evacuate during the fire.
Harold Schapelhouman, the former fire chief at Menlo Park Fire Protection District, said that in Paradise, “people got so enamored with what the downtown could look like — the traffic needed to be slow and maybe parking could be an issue — that they forgot that that’s going to be a chokepoint if you have to evacuate the community.”
Schapelhouman, who retired in 2021, emphasized the importance of planning — something that he focused his four-decade career on.
“We’re literally watching communities that are being destroyed. It’s not all of it, but it certainly could have made a difference,” he said of being prepared. “When I look at what happened in the Palisades with all the cars stacking up and you need to use a bulldozer to push them out of the way, you’ve got a big problem. How did that happen?”
