Winds blow down from the mountaintops, hot and fierce, unique to California. In southern California, they call this the Santa Ana wind. In the San Francisco Bay, we call it the Diablo—or Devil—wind. The Diablo wind flows down from the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, rushes up the Berkeley Hills, and then pours down again, sometimes reaching hurricane speeds in the spring and fall, felling telephone poles, starting fires, then spreading those fires like a bellows. One of those fires burned down almost all of North Berkeley in 1923.
