San Francisco's Civil Grand Jury has released a report warning that Glen Canyon Park — a 66-acre urban greenspace in the Glen Park neighborhood — contains fire conditions that don't match the city's "low risk" wildfire designation, due to a dense, aging population of Blue Gum eucalyptus trees.

CAL FIRE has long rated San Francisco as low-risk because of its cool, foggy climate. But the grand jury report, released in June 2026, argues that the 2025 Pacific Palisades fire proved that urban vegetation management — not just weather — determines fire outcomes. In Glen Canyon, the warning signs have gone largely unaddressed for over a decade: a 2012 assessment found that 80 percent of the 427 eucalyptus trees evaluated were in poor condition. The canyon has only two fire hydrants. And the land is split between three separate city agencies that the report says need to dramatically improve coordination.

San Francisco doesn't think of itself as wildfire country. CAL FIRE's official risk map rates the city low — a product of the marine layer, the fog, the cool summers. But a new Civil Grand Jury report released this month zeroes in on Glen Canyon Park and makes an uncomfortable case: the conditions inside the 66-acre canyon are materially different from the city around it, and nobody has been managing them seriously.

The report's central concern is the Blue Gum eucalyptus. The species was imported from Australia in the mid-1800s by investors who believed the fast-growing trees could be harvested for railroad ties and lumber. Historical photographs confirm Glen Canyon was largely treeless before that planting effort — the land was used as a dairy farm.

The scheme failed. Eucalyptus wood warps and splits and has little commercial value. But the trees stayed, and now number in the hundreds inside the canyon.

"The leaves have a lot of oil in them, and so actually, if it's very hot, and it's been very, very dry, they actually explode, because it's highly flammable," said Rick Carell, a member of the Civil Grand Jury who spoke with ABC7. "So somebody throws a cigarette out into there, and you have a potential fire."

Carell noted that a 2012 assessment evaluated 427 eucalyptus trees in the canyon and found roughly 80 percent were in poor shape — a figure that has never been acted on comprehensively.

The grand jury didn't recommend clear-cutting the canyon. Glen Canyon's steep terrain means large-scale tree removal would raise the risk of landslides, the report notes. Instead, it recommends targeted vegetation management: clearing brush and dead debris, limbing lower branches, and removing diseased trees. Carell described the canyon as an "ideal training site" for CAL FIRE crews.

City agencies are beginning to move, at different speeds.

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which manages a small stretch of the canyon along O'Shaughnessy Avenue — a key emergency evacuation route — has already removed trees that posed falling hazards. It has also contracted with habitat specialists to replace non-native vegetation with fire-resistant native species, including coast live oaks.

"That has all these tannins in the foliage that resist fire," said Josiah Clark, a habitat specialist working on the project. "You can put a lighter right under that thing in the middle of the hottest day of the year, and it will not burn like these willows."

The San Francisco Department of Public Works is expected to coordinate with CAL FIRE on broader vegetation management.

"To remove any brush that might be a fire hazard," said Rachel Gordon of Public Works. "We're going to raise up the lower branches of the tree because that's where a lot of the problem is for the spread of fire, and if there are any dead trees that are really hazardous or branches that may hang over the roadway, that we can take them out as well."

The largest share of the canyon — the majority of its 66 acres — is managed by the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, which the report says must play a central role in coordination. The grand jury concluded that improved agency coordination is essential to making any fire management plan work in practice.

The fire access picture adds urgency. The report found that Glen Canyon has only two fire hydrants: one near the Glen Park Recreation Center and one near a day camp building. While San Francisco's high-pressure Emergency Firefighting Water System and underground cisterns supplement those hydrants — including a 75,000-gallon cistern at Chenery and Surrey streets — fire crews operating at a standard pumping rate of 1,500 gallons per minute would exhaust that cistern in roughly 50 minutes.

The report invokes the 2025 Pacific Palisades fire as a cautionary example — a coastal community with a historically moderate fire rating that burned catastrophically when extreme conditions met inadequate vegetation management.

San Francisco's fire season is not the same as Los Angeles's. But the grand jury's message is less about predicting a fire than about removing the conditions that would allow one to spread unchecked through a park surrounded by dense residential neighborhoods.