HOLLYWOOD — The inspector’s tape measure ran out at 100 feet, which was the point, and stopped nine feet short of the fence, which was the problem.
On a Wednesday morning made almost pleasant by the hour, a two-person brush inspection crew worked its way up a Beachwood Canyon street the way it works up every hillside street in Hollywood between June and September: slowly, on foot, one parcel at a time, measuring the distance between combustible vegetation and anything a person sleeps in. The city requires 200 feet of clearance in the highest-hazard zones where the terrain allows it, thinned rather than scalped, with specific rules about what may stay and how tall it may be. The crews have roughly 1,400 hillside parcels on the Hollywood list this year and until the first red-flag warning to get through them.
What they write up is rarely brush.
“Brush I can explain to somebody in thirty seconds,” said the senior inspector, who asked that his name be withheld because he issues citations and would prefer to keep doing it without conversations at the grocery store. “The hard part is the other things. Firewood stacked against the house. A wooden pallet fence. Four years of a garden hose that doesn’t reach. A palm nobody has skirted since the nineties. All of that is fuel, and none of it feels like brush to the person who owns it.”
He has a category for the last one. Skirting a palm — cutting away the dead fronds that hang in a dry brown collar beneath the green — costs a few hundred dollars and is the single most common item on his notices. An unskirted palm in a wind event, he said, is “a torch on a stick, and it throws.”
The inspections are not new and neither is the frustration. Hillside residents describe a system that arrives with a checklist and no budget: notices go out, a deadline follows, and a homeowner on a fixed income discovers that the slope behind the house cannot be cleared by anyone without rope training. Compliance work on a steep Hollywood lot routinely runs past $3,000. Non-compliance eventually costs more, because the city will hire a contractor, do the work, and put the bill on the tax roll.
“I agree with every word on the paper,” said Winifred Achterberg, 71, who has owned the same house off Ledgewood since 1988 and has the notice on her refrigerator. “I also got three quotes, and the cheapest was more than my property tax. So I am doing it in thirds. This year is the top third.”
A small volunteer effort has grown up in the gap. A canyon association that formed after the 2023 wind event now runs two chipper days each summer, renting a chipper truck for a Saturday so neighbors can drag cuttings to a shared pile rather than pay for individual hauling. The June date drew 60 households. The August date, set for the 15th, is full.
The city’s fire officials frame the whole exercise less as prevention than as arithmetic about time. Clearance does not stop a wind-driven fire; nothing available to a homeowner does. What it buys is minutes — enough for an engine to be able to defend a structure without being trapped on a one-lane road, and enough for the people on that road to get down it.
That second part is the argument neighbors here find most persuasive, because they have all done the drive. The canyon streets above Franklin were laid out in the 1920s for cars that were narrower and fewer, and they end, in several places, in a turn that a modern engine cannot make with a car parked opposite. Two residents mentioned, unprompted, the same stretch of Rockcliff, and both used the word “cork.”
By eleven the crew had finished eight parcels, left four notices, and reached the end of the pavement, where the road becomes a dirt fire break and the brush becomes the county’s problem. The inspector coiled his tape and looked back down the hill at a canyon of wood-frame houses stacked in the chaparral, which is one honest way of describing the most beautiful part of the neighborhood.
“People ask me if I’d live up here,” he said. “Sure I would. I’d just skirt my palms.”