Fire Zone 2’s Re-Roofing Rules, in the City’s Own Words

Berkeley keeps three local fire zones. Zone 1 is the default — the rest of the city under the standard building code. Zone 3 covers the Environmental Safety–Residential districts and adds its own requirements. Zone 2 is the one with teeth, and its restrictions reach further than most owners expect: the guideline applies them to construction, reconstruction, additions, alterations, repairs and re-roofing alike, and they have been in force in this form since July 1, 2008.

One caution before the spec itself, because the confusion is now common: two fire maps overlap in the hills. The City’s Zone 2 — the map your permit is judged against — is Berkeley’s own, drawn larger than the state’s. CAL FIRE’s state maps were redrawn in 2025, as Berkeleyside’s map explainer walked through, and the state picture changed again. A contractor quoting the state map at you may be describing a boundary the permit desk does not use. And the ground-level companion to all of this — the five-foot Zone 0 band — is covered in our EMBER guide.

Because Berkeley has read this report before. When the Tunnel Fire ran through the Oakland–Berkeley hills in October 1991, the U.S. Fire Administration’s technical account named the ignition mechanism precisely: embers carried ahead of the fire, landing on bone-dry brush and on residential shake roofs. Twenty-five people died and more than 3,000 homes were destroyed across the two cities. The shake prohibition is not an aesthetic preference; it is that sentence, codified.

Berkeley’s response, over the following decades, consistently went further than Sacramento’s. The City adopted the state’s wildland-urban interface codes in 2008 and expanded them — larger zones, and requirements expressly extended to repairs and alterations, per the City’s own firestorm-anniversary summary. The guideline on this page is that instinct in document form: a city that watched roofs become the fuel deciding, in writing, what a roof may be.