A San Mateo County barricade, built to extinguish traffic flow out of local neighborhoods, is now sparking a debate over wildfire evacuation safety.
The gate at the Hallmark Drive-Crestview Drive end of the Belmont-San Carlos border offers many residents a welcomed sense of relief, preserving the peaceful urban atmosphere by blocking cut-through traffic en route to State Route 92 and Interstate 280. For some, however, the gate’s narrow design fuels significant safety concerns of hindered evacuation routes in the event of a fire.
While police officers and firefighters have the authority to open the gate during emergencies, only one first responder or residential vehicle can pass at a time, according to Belmont councilmember Thomas McCune, whose district includes the barricade. He says this may result in delays in escape during a fast-moving wildfire.
“We only have two ways to get out of our neighborhood, either Club Drive or Crestview,” said Erica Iyer, a resident on the San Carlos side of the barricade. “If a fire breaks out in nearby Devonshire Canyon, both of these current escape routes could be cut off, and we’d be stuck with a slower, unsafe egress through the small Hallmark gate.”
According to Belmont Fire Captain Kyle Leathamn, even a small fire can quickly spiral out of control. Delays in spotting the flames, reporting them, and dispatching responders often allow fires to grow, turning minor sparks like a cigarette on canyon trails into wildfire disasters.
Global warming has added a sense of inevitability to this conversation.
“The wildland-urban interface in the border area, where housing developments border natural landscapes, poses a significant risk, especially as climate change has increased the danger of wildfires,” Leathamn said. “In the past, the Bay Area benefited from a daily marine influence, with fog rolling in, but this moisture, as well as the moisture in plants, have since decreased, creating more flammable material.”
A recent Climate Central study found that the average wildfire season in California is now 105 days longer, burns six times as many acres, and sees three times as many large fires as compared to the 1970s. A Jan. 25 issue of Science Magazine from the American Association for Advancements in Science links this trend to rising temperatures and dwindling rainfall, two of the many escalating threats posed by global warming.
Denise Enea, Executive Director of FIRE SAFE San Mateo County, believes that widening the barricade’s gate would be a practical solution to increase the safety of surrounding communities.
“Evacuation routes must be robust and safe with minimal vegetation adjacent to roadways. Narrow roadways, locked gates, and traffic calming devices like the barricade are all potentially dangerous scenarios for neighborhoods with a large number of evacuees in an emergency situation,” Enea said.
Enea points to other communities, such as Portola Valley, that have successfully improved their emergency access by installing emergency fire gates along public roadways. These gates are clearly marked and provide residents with access codes, a feature San Carlos residents suggested be added to the Crestview-Hallmark barricade to ensure swift use during evacuations.
Marc Nobrega, who has lived on Hallmark Drive for over 40 years, describes the area as a quiet neighborhood where kids can bike, people walk their dogs, and traffic is minimal.
“I’m not really concerned about fire evacuation, as we have good outlets to get out of the area on this side of the barricade,” Nobrega said. “Opening up the barricade would turn Hallmark into an on-ramp, and it would be a free-for-all. I would only support replacing the current barricade with a wider gate to allow better access for emergency vehicles if they’ll still keep the gate closed regularly.”
This stands in contrast to the perspective of some San Carlos residents who are prepared to sacrifice potential commute convenience in favor of enhancing emergency egress access.
“In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be a barricade at all. I believe that having the barrier there to simply not have traffic on Hallmark is not a good enough reason to risk the safety issues,” Iyer said. “But if there is one, it would be safer if changes were made to the barricade to allow more traffic through.”
Iyer says that the barricade creates another danger. By redirecting traffic to the nearby road Hastings, the narrower and steeper stretch of Belmont amplifies the risk of car collisions.
“I talked to the fire marshal once about the barricade and these issues around it. The response was essentially, ‘It is what it is—just deal with it.’” Iyer said. “What makes it even harder is that if you send a letter to San Carlos, they say it’s a Belmont issue, and if you send it to Belmont, they say it’s San Carlos’ problem. Neither city takes responsibility.”
Following the recent string of wildfires in Los Angeles, Bay Area residents have flooded platforms like Nextdoor to voice their growing fire readiness concerns. Meanwhile, the Watch Duty app, which delivers real-time wildfire alerts, has soared to the top of the iOS App Store’s news category, outranking platforms such as X and Reddit.
“We have learned many important and telling lessons from past and current wildfire tragedies in California. Now is the time to implement those lessons learned,” Enea said.
