More than a century ago, entrepreneur Anthony Chabot cultivated a eucalyptus grove in the Oakland hills, with the lumber transported across Skyline Boulevard to the Port of Oakland for homebuilding throughout the Bay Area.
But now, the clusters of dead, overgrown eucalyptus, oak and bay trees in Anthony Chabot Regional Park, the same trees used to build the railroad and Victorian homes, present the biggest wildfire threat to Oakland, San Leandro and Castro Valley, according to the East Bay Regional Park District.
In response, the agency has launched the largest vegetation-management project focused on eucalyptus in Northern California — an effort to keep 667 acres of dead and dying trees from becoming fuel for the next potential wildfire.
“We see this as an emergency for our communities,” said East Bay Regional Park District Assistant Fire Chief Khari Helae. “We know that what happened was that there was a drought, and the drought caused the trees to be stressed, and that caused everything to be unbalanced, caused infestations, caused the pathogens, caused the die off.”
In response to a severe drought in 2020, East Bay Parks conducted an aerial assessment across more than 125,496 acres of parklands to identify dead trees — considered fertile grounds for wildfires. Similar conditions were apparent in Los Angeles County over the past year, where mounds of vegetation had dried and died after Southern California received less than 5% of its typical rainfall from October to the beginning of 2025. If major Diablo winds blew through Anthony Chabot Regional Park at the wrong time, devastation could follow.
“With climate change, it’s not consistent,” Helae said. “We don’t know what’s going to come next. Like nobody probably predicted that we were going to have this tree die-off or fire seasons being extended past October into February and March.”
East Bay Parks has nearly quadrupled its fuel reduction staff in the past five years to take on the Herculean task of bringing the forest back into order, including the addition of Fuels Reduction Coordinator Givonne Law.
“Eucalyptus is notorious for being a very difficult-to-handle tree. Not only is it very heavy, but there’s generally huge accumulations,” Law said. “A lot of machinery operators out there will see a project like this and will just walk away.”
An invasive species, eucalyptus presents a unique threat among trees because of the high oil content of their leaves, making them highly flammable. The first planted in California was brought over in 1853 by Capt. Robert Waterman, a merchant ship captain, according to the U.S. Forest Service. In the decades that followed, eucalyptus displaced native trees across California as it spread rapidly to accommodate Californian’s need for timber.
“Eucalyptus became a favorite after 1870 because it was fast-growing, was believed to be of great medicinal value, and was supposedly fireproof,” an academic paper commissioned by the U.S. Forest Service states. “By 1880, the eucalyptus were widely planted throughout the state.”
Other Bay Area cities such as San Mateo have launched offensives against the eucalyptus’ incursion into California woodlands. These efforts to curtail eucalyptus extend to nature reserves on the Central Coast, where foresters in the Elkhorn Slough Reserve have pioneered methods to restore native habitats.
Law’s task was to thin the forest from more than 750 eucalyptus stems per acre to 150 stems per acre. Her aim, she said, was not to eliminate eucalyptus — despite their oily, flammable properties — but to reconstitute the balance of the forest to allow less dangerous trees such as bay and oak to reestablish themselves.
“We don’t want to go in and remove all the eucalyptus from a stand such as this,” Law said. “What happens is you have an immediate encroachment of brush species into the area, not really promoting a habitat type that we want to see.”
From a firefighting perspective, this small-scale terraforming project is key to fighting fires in the future, Helae said. Helae showed an area of the forest that had been thinned on Monday, pointing out the low-lying grasses that had taken root but would not fuel flame lengths for dangerous conditions where firefighters can’t attack a blaze.
“Ideally, (fire) doesn’t come into the canopy of trees and create spotting for miles away or create flame lengths that are higher than six feet. That’s an important number,” Helae said, “because we’re trained that if a fire has flame lengths higher than six feet, we’re not to engage.”
East Bay Parks has thinned out approximately 475 acres of the 667 acres that make up Anthony Chabot Regional Park as the project enters its third year, Law said. The undertaking would not be possible without a major shift in the state’s funding for fuel management, she said.
In the 10 years before the mass tree die-off, East Bay Parks spent an average of $2 million per year on fuel management. But in the past year, the agency spent $9 million to cull vegetation and limit the potential for explosive wildfires such as the 1991 Oakland hill firestorm that killed 25 people and destroyed about 2,800 homes and 400 condominiums.
“You can’t prevent ignitions in the wildland-urban interface. They’re just there. They’re going to happen,” Helae said. “When those ignitions occur, though, we want to be able to protect our communities and keep everyone safe and control the impacts.”
