Angel Island might be one of the hardest places in California to hold a prescribed burn. Fire engines have to arrive on a boat, one at a time, all seven of them. The weather can’t be too wet or too dry, so it almost always has to happen in the summer when firefighters are often needed elsewhere. Once on site, firefighters have to travel single file along the narrow trails. When all the logistics come together, the burn still needs approval from the Bay Area Air District. The goal is to pick a day that will avoid wafting smoke to the 7 million residents in the Bay Area—and there’s no such thing as a zero-wind day on Angel Island. “This is probably one of the most modeled fires I’ve ever worked on,” says Sarah Gibson, the statewide burn boss at California State Parks. “We had climatologists working with us for over a month.”
Yet somehow, on Sept. 8 and 23, California State Parks and its partners got seven fire trucks and dozens of fire personnel onto the island and managed to safely burn 147 acres. Despite all the weather modeling, the wind still came and did what it likes to do best: change directions, sending smoke toward East Bay lungs. Complaints started rolling in, leaving broadcast burns on Angel Island postponed indefinitely, at least until the end of the year.
California is in the midst of a climate-change-fueled wildfire crisis, and the state has been trying to reduce the risk of catastrophic fires, including by dramatically upping the acreage of prescribed burns each year. The state is averaging about 591,000 acres a year, according to a 2026 PPIC report, well short of a million-acre annual goal. Studies have found smoke exposure to people from prescribed burns is significant, but the hope is that such burns will ultimately lessen the health burden from smoke by preventing catastrophic wildfires.
“I have asthma,” says Naftali Moed, a senior environmental scientist with California State Parks who worked on the burn. “Wildfire smoke is one of the reasons I do this.”
Moed acknowledges the team has more work to do on the smoke-prevention side. But for the protection of the island’s historic buildings, and the health of its wildlife and plants—the burn was a success. “Personally, from a prescribed fire treatment view, it looks really good,” says Gibson, who was a part of the team overseeing the burns.
This week, Bay Nature took a walk through Angel Island’s newly singed landscape with Gibson and Moed to see what this fire has already accomplished, and what is still left to do.
A landscape refreshed by fire
We walk a trail near Point Stuart, on the west end of the island, that shows both why the fire was necessary, and what it did. The burn crew intentionally burned just one side of this trail, because it’s easier to manage. On one side, three inches of yellow, crunchy oak leaves, twigs, and sticks remain, ready to ignite. The other side of the trail is charred—blackened soil, darkened knee-high shrubs, with some oaks and pines still lining the path.
Oaks, Monterey pines, Monterey cypresses, and eucalyptus dominate Angel Island’s 731 acres. The last three were brought here by the U.S. Army, says Moed, who’s leading us around. “The history of this place is really linked deeply to the actions that the U.S. military took over its many years managing the island,” he says. “And then State Parks as the current steward is really left with that legacy.”
Get Bay Nature’s Free Weekly Newsletter
Angel Island is no stranger to fire. One Sunday night in October 2008, a human-caused wildfire spread across half of the island. Putting out these flames took over a dozen fire engines and 275 fire personnel. Somehow, it avoided destroying any of the buildings from the island’s history as a U.S. Immigration Station, from 1910 to 1940, that brought thousands of immigrants to the Bay. Those remaining structures are “one of the most significant cultural resources we have out here that we need to protect,” Moed says. The fire illuminated the stakes of an out-of-control wildfire. If a wildfire that big were to spark now, there’s only one boat in the entire San Francisco Bay that’s able to bring fire engines or equipment from the mainland. Getting enough fire engines to the island to stop the fire could take over 24 hours.
Daniella Garcia Almeida / Bay Nature
The best way to prevent catastrophic fires is by doing a kind of prescribed burn called broadcast burning—low-intensity, widespread fire that clears potential fuel. Until September, that hadn’t happened since the late 1990s, though State Parks has done some pile burning since 2020.
So the fuel has been building up, including heaps of eucalyptus bark and leaf litter. “There’s really just more material on the landscape than we can easily manage,” Moed says.
Doing pile burns first helped make the broadcast burn safer, Moed says. “Pile burning is a way for us to essentially aggregate woody material that we would like to see removed from the landscape, and burn that material specifically.”
Beyond preventing catastrophic fire, the other big reason for the prescribed burn was to improve the island ecosystem’s long-term health. California flora and fauna are adapted to fire, and thrive when dead brush is cleared and nutrients are returned to the soil. Fire creates a more diverse landscape and promotes native grasslands and coastal scrub, in a place where non native vegetation has long dominated.
Monterey pines are one of those dominating non native species, and they “specifically evolved over millennia with a very different type of fire behavior than what the island would have had,” Moed says. “These pine trees are really problematic from a wildfire perspective.” That’s one of the species the burns were meant to target, and we passed several burnt stumps along our hike.
In the char, plants are sprouting—a lot of them natives, including purple needlegrass (the state’s official state grass). It’ll take a while to see how the burn changes the plant composition—some species, like Fremont star lilies, Indian paintbrushes, and lupines might appear this spring. Moed says he’s already seen “a whole host of native grasses and wildflowers, some of which were there before, and some of which we are curious to see if they were hanging out in the seed bank and are wanting to make an appearance.”
“On the ecological goals that we can assess this early on, we’re seeing promising signs,” Moed says of the burn.
As we walk up the trail, Moed spots a buck under a tree, antlers poking through the shrubby hill. Circling above the hills are a couple of red-tailed hawks, and in the shrubs, sparrows are hopping around.
The burn itself was planned with Angel Island’s captive non-human residents in mind. It was scheduled after nesting season, and conducted in ways that would allow animals to escape safely. “A common misconception about prescribed fire or fire in general is that it can be really bad for wildlife. The animals that are here and the plants that are here have evolved with fire for millennia,” says Moed. “One thing we saw every day that we were burning, and in the days following the burns, is actually many of our raptors coming in, because they see fire as an opportunity to have an easier time hunting.”
In technical terms, scientists divvy up the fuel on a landscape by size, and then figure out how much of each type they want the prescribed burn to consume. “Those small fuels we were looking at about 50 to 90 percent reduction immediately post-treatment,” says Gibson, “and we did meet those objectives.”
Fire stewardship, ideally, is like maintaining a lawn: it’s a constant process, not a one-and-done thing. Over 100 acres of the originally planned 260 remain unburned, waiting for the next moment a broadcast burn is possible—not until next year at the earliest. There are still dozens of piles, which may be burned this winter.
And yet, the smoke
As successful as the burn was on the island, many people off it were not pleased at the smoke. That included John Goia, a Contra Costa County supervisor and member of the Bay Area Air District Board, who posted on his Instagram: “The harmful air quality in SF and the East Bay resulting from Cal Fire and State Park’s controlled vegetation burn on Angel island today is unacceptable and impacted daily routines and people’s health. I’ve heard from many residents who feel frustrated and upset, just like I feel.”
Daniella Garcia Almeida / Bay Nature
On both days, the fires had begun on mornings with favorable wind conditions. In an ideal burn, the smoke goes straight up. But as the afternoon came along, the winds shifted, sending smoke to the East Bay. “At the end of the day, even with all the climate modeling, all the forecasting, and a lot of really, really great minds from the National Weather Service, the Bay Area Air District, and others working together, that was really the one part of this that we always knew wasn’t fully within our control,” Gibson says.
Since burns have been put on pause, the Angel Island team plans to work with its partners at the Bay Area Air District, the Marin County Fire Department, and Cal Fire to figure out “what types of conditions might exist in the future that might give us more favorable smoke dispersal,” Moed says. For now, they’ll keep working on building burn piles and removing invasive plants—until the next time they can set this island aflame.
