California is the state in the U.S. that has historically been the most prone to devastating brushfires. Most often, they occur during the autumn months, in the weeks prior to the first rains of the winter, when hot, dry winds sweep down, turning the landscape tinder-dry. One such example of this was what happened in the hills of Oakland and Berkeley on October 19, 1991, when a small grass fire that was improperly extinguished near the intersection of State Highways 13 and 24 in northeast Oakland caught the scent of the Diablo winds (the Northern California equivalent of the Santa Ana winds that blow through Southern California), and literally exploded into a violent firestorm that burned for several days. By the time the fire was finally put out for real, over fifteen hundred acres had burned, the long-term property damage was $1.5 billion, and twenty-five people had lost their lives, with another 150 being injured.
This is the story told in the 1993 made-for-TV film FIRESTORM: 72 HOURS IN OAKLAND, which mixes in certain dramatic elements with real-life television news footage of the fire, which burned for three days and was, at the time, one of the most catastrophic urban fires in American history. A good cast, including LeVar Burton as Oakland fire chief J. Allan Mather, along with Jill Clayburgh, Keith Coulouris, Richard Yniguez, and Michael Gross, does a fairly good job working with basically an average script that does at times overdo the melodrama in the tradition of many disaster films, both for the small screen and the big screen. With something like the Oakland Hills firestorm, you don't really need it, because the disaster itself is plenty horrifying.
Still, there have been worse films, both for TV and for the big screen, that have been made about real-life disasters, which is why I'm giving FIRESTORM: 72 HOURS IN OAKLAND a '7'.
This is the story told in the 1993 made-for-TV film FIRESTORM: 72 HOURS IN OAKLAND, which mixes in certain dramatic elements with real-life television news footage of the fire, which burned for three days and was, at the time, one of the most catastrophic urban fires in American history. A good cast, including LeVar Burton as Oakland fire chief J. Allan Mather, along with Jill Clayburgh, Keith Coulouris, Richard Yniguez, and Michael Gross, does a fairly good job working with basically an average script that does at times overdo the melodrama in the tradition of many disaster films, both for the small screen and the big screen. With something like the Oakland Hills firestorm, you don't really need it, because the disaster itself is plenty horrifying.
Still, there have been worse films, both for TV and for the big screen, that have been made about real-life disasters, which is why I'm giving FIRESTORM: 72 HOURS IN OAKLAND a '7'.