During 1991 Firestorm, Piedmont Area Was Refuge

Cary Schneider was six years old on Oct. 20, 1991 when the Oakland Hills Fire swept over the ridge and raced toward his family's house on Alvarado Street.

“My parents were at a high school reunion and were just getting back to us. I was with my sister. She was driving and the police were making people turn around right on the freeway,” Schneider remembers. “They were telling people you can’t go up, your houses are gone."

Schneider and his sister found safety with family friends on Downey Place, a few blocks from the Oakland-Piedmont border. There, they waited for their parents to reach them.

“It was a scary feeling to know a fire is uncontrollable. On television, they were hosing down the roofs but no one really knew if they could stop it.”

By the time his parents arrived, Schneider remembers people in the Piedmont area were packing up their stuff and evacuating. The Schneiders left to stay for what turned out to be an extended visit with relatives in San Mateo.

His father—who lost time trying to help neighbors rescue their homes from the raging inferno with simple garden hoses—had only 10 minutes to grab belongings from the family’s home.

“He had a two-door car so he was focused on getting essentials. He didn’t have the space or the time to grab tons of stuff. I remember he brought me a stuffed animal, a dog, that I had. But my mom used to be a professional photographer and he totally forgot about her portfolio of photographs.”

Schneider says the fire and the fear it left behind had both immediate and long term impacts on his family.

His parents chose not to rebuild in Oakland, but moved to Marin.

Schneider became a master of disaster preparedness.

In January of this year, he and childhood friend Max Kwan-Rosenbush launched PrepareUs. The company sells one-bag-holds-everything disaster kits, including a reader’s digest guide for how to make a seven-day emergency plan, and a unique refill program alerting customers when items in the kits are about to expire.

Schneider had been focusing his efforts to spread the word about preparedness in Marin and the San Francisco neighborhood where he lives now. But the anniversary of the fire prompted him to think of the friends that gave his family refuge 20 years ago who have since moved over the line to Crocker Avenue.

“Our friends in Piedmont should be prepared, but personally, I don’t know if they are," Schneider said. "I definitely plan on contacting them to put a kit on their list. You know, because my family had a plan, because we knew where to go, we were safe.”