The earliest all-structures Zone 0 in California reaches two feet, and requires no noncombustible fence.

Zone 0 in Contra Costa County: Moraga-Orinda's rule reaches two feet, not five

Fact-checked August 23, 2026·Sources at the end of this article

Two sets of rules, and only one is in force today

Contra Costa is the county the Zone 0 story usually gets wrong. The famous rule and the fence rule are different rules, in different districts.

In force now: Moraga-Orinda Fire District (MOFD) Ordinance No. 23-03, which sets its own date: "This ordinance shall become effective on March 17, 2023." MOFD's elected Board of Directors adopted it, not a city council and not the Board of Supervisors. It binds every parcel in the district, State Responsibility Area and Local Responsibility Area alike, and reaches outbuildings within 100 feet of a structure. Drawing no line between new and existing buildings makes it the earliest Zone 0 ordinance in California to reach all structures, though not the earliest local Zone 0 rule: Ventura County's district reached new buildings from April 1, 2019, and Laguna Beach existing ones from November 5, 2021.

Adopted, then withdrawn from OAL: the statewide regulation was approved August 19, 2026 and filed with the Office of Administrative Law on August 28, but that filing was withdrawn on September 8, 2026 without a decision, so it is not in effect and not under review. Two legal tracks sit underneath it: the State Responsibility Area (SRA), where the state carries financial responsibility for wildfire protection, under Public Resources Code section 4291, and the Local Responsibility Area (LRA), under Government Code section 51182. Their fence texts are not identical. Our timeline and enforcement guide follows the process.

Where the statewide rule will reach in this county

Once effective, the regulation covers the whole SRA whatever the hazard class, plus Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones inside the LRA. Contra Costa has plenty of both: the Office of the State Fire Marshal's table gives the county 191,471 SRA acres, 68,838 of them Very High, and 72,648 LRA acres, 16,014 of them Very High. Map adoption is uneven. Con Fire and Crockett-Carquinez FPD adopted the updated LRA maps "effective as of July 10, 2025," MOFD designated its zones by Ordinance 25-03, and for San Ramon Valley FPD we found no adopting ordinance.

Concord (79), Brentwood (75) and San Pablo (58) carry small Very High acreages, and six jurisdictions carry none. That does not mean unmapped: the 2025 maps added Moderate and High to the LRA for the first time, and Walnut Creek holds 3,542 High acres, Lafayette 5,309. Those are the state's figures, not a verdict on risk. To place your parcel, use our address lookup walkthrough.

What Moraga-Orinda's Zone 0 actually requires

Ordinance 23-03 defines Zone 0 the way everyone expects, then requires something smaller.

ZONE 0. Referred to as the Ember-resistant Zone or Home Ignition Zone, it extends from 0 to 5 feet from any Structure, attached deck, or Outbuilding on the Parcel. Zone 0 requires the most stringent wildfire fuel reduction.

Moraga-Orinda Fire District Ordinance No. 23-03, definitions

The operative duty, at section 4(b)(1)(A), then reads: "Maintain all ground areas within 2 feet of any Structure or attached deck free of combustible ground cover, including combustible mulch and bark. Hardscape materials, such as gravel, pavers, concrete, and other noncombustible mulch materials are permitted." The plant-clearance and annual-grass clauses use the same two-foot line. Other Zone 0 items run the full five feet or are unbounded: Monterey pines and eucalyptus, firewood and lumber storage, and non-irrigated brush are all prohibited. The City of Orinda republishes the list under the heading "ZONE 0: (0-5 feet)", and its first line is still the two-foot one. For Zone 0 there is no phase-in.

The fence rule in Moraga and Orinda, and what it does not say

This is the paragraph most readers came for. Section 4(e), in full:

Fences. No Person who has any ownership or possessory interest in or control of any Parcel within the Fire District shall construct or allow to be constructed or placed on the Parcel any screen, fence or other Structure made, in whole or in part, of bark, mulch, or wood chips within 100 feet of a Structure or within 10 feet of the paved edge of a Fire Apparatus Access Road.

Moraga-Orinda Fire District Ordinance No. 23-03, section 4(e), in force since March 17, 2023

That bans bark, mulch and wood-chip fencing across a full 100 feet, far wider than Zone 0. It does not require a noncombustible fence anywhere, and it says nothing about a wood board fence in the first five feet, about attached fences, or about gates. MOFD's own summary states it in the same terms, and so does Orinda's republication.

MOFD is candid about this. Listing six recommended steps on its Zone Zero page, the district writes that it "suggests these guidelines based on expert findings, though they are not currently mandatory:" and the first bullet is the full five-foot version, wooden fences included. That version was proposed but never adopted: MOFD's ordinance index, running through Ordinance 26-06, contains no amendment adopting it. Read that page and the district FAQ with care: both are stale on their face, and the FAQ line "The Board has not adopted a Zone Zero requirement" refers to the proposed version, not to Ordinance 23-03, already in force when it was written. Nor does the newer construction code change anything: Ordinance 26-02, adopted January 21, 2026, applies the 2025 California Wildland-Urban Interface Code district-wide, yet contains no whole-word occurrence of "fence", "gate", "Zone 0" or "defensible".

We read Moraga's and Orinda's own codes, and neither has a Zone 0 rule

Added August 30, 2026. This is worth saying plainly because it is the single clearest example we have found of how these rules actually reach people, and it happens to sit in this county.

The Moraga-Orinda Fire District has a Zone 0 rule. It is on our register and set out above. We then read the municipal codes of Moraga, Orinda and Lafayette themselves, from their codified text, searching the building, construction, fire, wildland, safety and health titles for both model sentence families, the section numbers they use, "ember-resistant zone", and a five-foot distance beside a noncombustible or ignition-resistant term. Nothing in any of the three.

So two cities sit inside a district with a Zone 0 rule while their own city codes are silent about it. A resident of Moraga who searched the Moraga Municipal Code for a fence rule would find nothing and could reasonably conclude none exists. They would be wrong, and the document they needed was their fire district's.

That is why, everywhere on this site, we ask people to find out who writes their fire code before reading their city's. We have read ninety-four California cities this way and exactly one had a Zone 0 rule in its own municipal code. The full sweep, and how much it misses, is here.

The five-foot fence rule that does exist here, and who it binds

Two of the county's fire jurisdictions adopted materially the same new section 508 in their 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code ordinances: SRVFPD Ordinance 2025-41, effective January 1, 2026, and County / Crockett-Carquinez FPD / Con Fire Ordinance 2025-15, operative January 8, 2026. The scope clause is the whole point. Section 508.1 applies to "new residential subdivisions" only, and only where "(a) the subdivision includes 30 or more dwelling units; and (b) any portion of the subdivision is located within or abuts a designated Wildland-Urban Interface Area."

Inside that scope it bites hard. Section 508.2 requires that "All fencing regulated by this section shall be constructed of non-combustible materials, or materials approved for a minimum one-hour fire-resistance rating," counting "fence posts, rails, pickets, panels, post caps, gates, decorative features, and appurtenances" as fencing. Section 508.3 reaches perimeter fencing, fencing within 30 feet of a structure, fencing abutting a Wildland-Urban Interface Area, and "Any fencing located within five feet of a structure... regardless of whether any portion of the lot is located within or adjacent to a Wildland-Urban Interface Area." That one-hour rating is a different test from ASTM E136, the noncombustibility standard the Zone 0 conversation usually runs on. And one thing this ordinance does not do, verified from its full text on August 23, 2026 after Riverside County’s WUI adoption turned out to hide exactly this: it adds no Section 604.11 fencing regime and no Zone 0 provisions at all. Its fencing rules live entirely inside the 30-unit subdivision box above, which is why Contra Costa stays off the register while Riverside joined it. Our guide to noncombustible fence materials leads with aluminum, then steel, wrought iron, chain link, masonry, concrete and stone.

A provenance note. Con Fire's posted copy of Ordinance 2025-15 is a scan whose first four pages carry no text layer, so the section 508 wording above comes from the County's own text copy hosted by the City of Concord, which carries blank signature lines and is therefore pre-adoption. The three codified sections that do appear in the signed scan match that copy verbatim: strong evidence, not the executed instrument.

Update, August 23, 2026: a third adoption, and it is not identical. The City of Pinole's Municipal Code Chapter 15.22, long unreadable behind its code publisher's front pages, has now been read in full from the publisher's section-level pages. By Ordinance 2025-05 the city adopted the 2025 California Wildland-Urban Interface Code with amendments plainly drawn from the county and district text, down to a title clause that still names "Contra Costa County, the Crockett-Carquinez Fire Protection District, and the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District" inside Pinole's own code. It carries a section 508 too, and the differences matter. Pinole's codified version is condensed: it applies to new residential subdivisions of 30 or more dwelling units in a designated Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Area, reaches "all perimeter lots where any portion of the fence is located within 30 feet of a structure," and requires posts, gates and decorative features to be noncombustible. The county version's separate five-foot-of-a-structure trigger does not appear in Pinole's codified text. Like the county's, it adds no Section 604.11 regime and no Zone 0 provision, so it changes nothing on the register: a subdivision development standard, now confirmed at city level as well as district level.

Con Fire's own ordinance, which we could not read

Lafayette and Walnut Creek are Con Fire territory rather than Moraga-Orinda's, Lafayette's district having merged into Con Fire on January 1, 1969. That one point of geography resolves a lot of bad advice. Con Fire names its defensible-space instrument plainly, as "Contra Costa County Ordinance 2023-07," and posts it as a ten-page image-only scan from which two extraction tools recovered nothing. On August 23, 2026 we rasterised the scan and read the pages ourselves, so what follows is transcribed from page images of the signed document rather than extracted text, and we say so because provenance matters when quoting.

The ordinance, adopted jointly for Con Fire and Crockett-Carquinez territory and effective May 4, 2023, defines Zone 0 exactly as its neighbors do: "Referred to as the Ember-resistant Zone or Home Ignition Zone, it extends from 0 to five feet from any Structure, attached deck, or Outbuilding on the Parcel." Then comes the sentence that decides its register status. The operative duty at Section 3(b) requires owners to maintain defensible space "in accordance with California Code of Regulations, Title 14, Section 1299.03, and in accordance with Public Resources Code Section 4291." It points at the state regulation rather than writing its own five-foot standard. Today, that state section carries no Zone 0 requirements, because the new statewide text is adopted and not in effect, so Con Fire stays off the register: the definition exists, and the substance defers.

Two provisions with immediate force are worth knowing anyway. Its fence rule, Section 3(e), is the MOFD-style one: no "screen, fence or other Structure made, in whole or in part, of bark, mulch, or wood chips within 100 feet of a Structure." And Section 4 is a point-of-sale requirement: "Before the close of escrow on the sale of any Parcel within the Fire District, the seller shall provide to the buyer documentation from the Fire Code Official stating that the property is currently in compliance," with discretion for alternate means where the work would delay a sale.

One implication we flag as our reading rather than a holding: Section 3(b)'s incorporation of §1299.03 carries no date qualifier. If it operates dynamically, then the day the state's Zone 0 text takes effect as §1299.03, those requirements become locally enforceable across this territory under an ordinance that has been in force since 2023, escrow documentation included. Whether the incorporation is dynamic or frozen at the 2023 text is a legal question the ordinance does not answer, and neither do we.

We can rule out a fence duty hiding elsewhere in the county. County Ordinance 2025-14, the 2025 Fire Code adoption, extracted cleanly and contains no occurrence of "Zone 0" or "five feet". SRVFPD's defensible-space ordinance 2023-38 is acreage-based, with no Zone 0 and no fencing requirement. El Cerrito's and Kensington's published vegetation standards define only Zone 1 (to 30 feet) and Zone 2 (30 to 100 feet), and neither imposes a fence duty; Kensington's adopted ordinance, though, is its own story, told below. Richmond inspects without a Zone 0 rule. Both 2025 WUI ordinances let their cities go further, and we found none that has. Our local ordinance tracker lists what we can confirm.

Kensington wrote the state's next rule into its code on purpose

The smallest fire district in this county drafted the most explicit sentence in our statewide survey. Kensington Fire Protection District's Ordinance 2025-01, given first reading June 18, 2025, adopted July 16, 2025 and effective thirty-five days later, designates the district's fire hazard severity zones and then imposes this duty: any person who owns, leases, controls, operates or maintains a building "shall maintain such building or structure in conformance with the vegetation maintenance standards established by the applicable defensible space and home hardening requirements of Public Resources Code Section 4291, Government Code Section 51182, 14 CCR Sections 1299.01-1299.05 and any other state regulations adopted pursuant to" either statute, "as each is amended from time to time."

Eight local codes in California point at the state's defensible space law this way, and we track all of them, because the state's Zone 0 package will land in exactly the places they point. Kensington's is the only one that names the statutes, the current regulation, and their future amendments in a single sentence, and the only one whose recitals state the intent outright: the district "seeks to align local regulations with state law by adopting defensible space and home hardening measures that include Zone Zero standards." The ordinance also attaches a point-of-sale regime: sellers in the district must obtain a defensible space and home hardening inspection and hand the buyer the resulting certificate of compliance or noncompliance report. Today the duty means the thirty-and-hundred-foot standards, because that is what the state's law requires today. The day the state's Zone 0 text takes effect, this ordinance is the member of the club most clearly drafted to carry it, and Kensington homeowners will be bound through a district ordinance most of them have never heard of. It is not on our register, because a pointer at a rule that does not exist yet is not a rule in force, and we apply that test evenly.

Inspections, escrow, and what no grant here pays for

MOFD holds the sharpest enforcement lever here, and it fires at closing. Section 5 requires that "Before the close of escrow on the sale of any Parcel within the Fire District, the seller shall provide to the buyer documentation from the Fire Code Official stating that the property is currently in compliance with the fuel mitigation requirements of this Ordinance 23-03 and the fuel break requirements of Ordinance 23-04 or its successor ordinance." Mind the successor: MOFD's index shows 23-04 repealed September 20, 2023 and replaced by Ordinance 23-08. Section 6 allows administrative citations, nuisance abatement at the owner's expense and infraction or misdemeanor liability, and the resolution index records the Board upholding a citation issued in July 2025 under 23-03. San Ramon Valley FPD sellers face a different trap: that district's real-estate inspection trigger still runs off "the most recent (11/07/2007) assessment" rather than the 2025 maps. Our Zone 0 checklist follows what an inspector looks at.

On money the pattern is stark: every open program we verified funds vegetation removal, vent mesh, gutter guards or chipping, and none carries a fence or hardscape line item. MOFD's Home Hardening Grant runs "until June 30, 2027," capped at "a maximum of $1,000 per parcel" for ember-resistant vents and sales tax only, and its chipper program answers the question on its own page: "CAN I CHIP WOOD FENCING? No." Fire Safe Moraga-Orinda matches up to $10,000 for groups of five or more properties, vegetation only. Con Fire's Measure X program offers low-income households "up to $1,500 in hazard control or weed abatement work." Kensington's two grant windows closed May 31, 2026, and Diablo Firesafe Council's cost-share has been paused since May 2025. Orinda lists a Measure R incentive whose terms page returns a 404, so we publish no figure; call the City at (925) 253-4220. Our guide to who pays tracks this statewide.

Claims we could not verify

• Resolved, August 23, 2026: County Ordinance 2023-07 has now been read, by rasterising the image scan and reading the pages. Kensington FPD's handout, previously our only description, turns out to have been accurate. The one detail still resting on secondary sources is the May 4, 2023 effective date, which Con Fire and the handout state consistently but whose signature page we did not transcribe.
• Whether section 508 as executed matches the copy we read. A certified copy from the Clerk of the Board would close the gap.
• Whether section 508 binds inside the incorporated cities in Con Fire territory. Ordinance 2025-15 carries no ratification clause, while MOFD's parallel ordinance waits on each city. Ask the building department.
• Hazard-map adoption by San Ramon Valley FPD, El Cerrito, Richmond and Pinole. SRVFPD's ordinance index names no adopting instrument and its hazard-zone page gives no date; the others were not found. Kensington FPD's is resolved: Ordinance 2025-01 designates its zones, and its text is quoted above.
• The currency of MOFD's two Zone Zero pages. Undated and internally stale, though corroborated by the ordinance text and index.
• The City of Orinda's Measure R award amount and eligible work. The page describing them is a 404.
• Con Fire Ordinance 2026-08 on administrative fines. Listed on Con Fire's ordinance page; we did not open it.
• Whether the 2025 California WUI Code itself contains Zone 0 or fence provisions. We did not obtain the state code text; everything above concerns local amendments.

What this means for you

• In Moraga, Orinda or Canyon, no rule in force requires you to replace a wood fence. Required instead: two feet of noncombustible ground cover, no firewood or lumber in Zone 0, no Monterey pine or eucalyptus, no bark, mulch or wood-chip fencing within 100 feet.
• Selling inside the Moraga-Orinda district? Start early. You need a compliance document from the Fire Code Official before close of escrow.
• Building 30 or more homes in San Ramon Valley FPD or Con Fire territory? Section 508 reaches perimeter fencing, gates, post caps and appurtenances, not just the five feet at the house. Price it at design.
• Everyone else: use the runway rather than the panic. Walk your first five feet with our self-assessment and read what the fence requirements guide will actually ask before you spend anything.
• Do not plan around a grant for fencing. None exists here. Replacing anyway? The detail is in the five-foot transition, and the insurance side, a credit rather than a requirement, in fence insurance discounts.

How often CAL FIRE inspects here

CAL FIRE has 316 parcels in Contra Costa County in its defensible space inspection program in July 2026, the month the dashboard is currently reporting. Of the 314 inspected, 313 were compliant, which is 99.7 percent. 1 property has already been found non-compliant more than once.

Two things this does not tell you. These counts cover inspections by CAL FIRE and Contract Counties inside the State Responsibility Area only, so work done by local fire agencies in the Local Responsibility Area is absent entirely. And none of these inspections is checking Zone 0: they are inspections against the defensible space rules in force today, which reach from the structure out to one hundred feet and contain no ember-resistant zone requirement. See the full inspection figures and what they mean, read from CAL FIRE's public dashboard on August 23, 2026.

Not the county you were looking for? See every jurisdiction we can prove has a rule in force, and ask us to add yours.