When Robert Doyle walked out of his house Sunday morning in Walnut Creek, he felt warm winds fanning from the east.

It’s the kind of wind that makes curtains billow, gusts that jiggle blinds before slapping the slats against windowsills.

It’s the kind of wind, drifting in unseasonably warm temperatures, that spreads wildfires.

Doyle has been following the fatal fire that has devastated swaths of Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties, leaving scores homeless and missing.

“This is just chilling, this latest disaster, and I don’t think anybody anticipated it would happen in the North Bay,” said Doyle, general manager of the East Bay Regional Park District.

The park district manages more than 120,000 acres of regional parks, wilderness, shorelines and trails in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

It was a similar warm eastern wind that fanned the October 1991 firestorm that killed 25 people and wiped out nearly 3,500 homes in the Oakland hills.

Fire experts believe another firestorm is inevitable, because wildfires ignite in the Oakland hills about every 20 or 30 years. Doyle is focused on making sure another small grass fire, like the one that flared into the firestorm 26 years ago, doesn’t become a major disaster.

The grasses, chaparral and shrubbery in California’s wilderness are easily ignitable and burn voraciously. The key to avoiding another disaster is aggressive fire prevention, according to Doyle. That means a preventative culling of vegetation — a wildfire’s fuel — long before responses are limited to grabbing what you can and outrunning flames licking at rooftops and doorsteps.

“We have to prevent these conflagrations,” Doyle said. “The public has to demand that this pre-fire work gets done, and I’ve got people working doing that every day, except I could do more if we had the money.”

Here’s what’s causing Doyle’s financial bind: legal wrangling on what to cut — more or less.

In 2015, the Hills Conservation Network, a small cohort of land activists, sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency and landowners UC Berkeley and the city of Oakland, accusing them of unfairly clear-cutting eucalyptus, Monterey pines and acacia trees. According to my colleague Rachel Swan, the group charges that thistle, hemlock and poison oak would replace the felled trees, creating a greater fire risk.

The East Bay Regional Park District was named in the lawsuit.

“What we’ve been advocating for quite some time is that the fire risk around here is with the grasses and the shrubs,” Dan Grassetti, who heads the Hills Conservation Network, told me. “We are trying to prevent the creation of more of that kind of vegetation, because it’s an enormous fire hazard.”

Grassetti sees another problematic issue that’s being overlooked — neighborhoods encroaching on nature.

“The problem is that we’ve put houses too close to this environment,” he said.

In August, a hillside fire near Grizzly Peak, a summit with beautiful vistas where people go to party in the Berkeley hills, ravaged 20 acres of rough terrain. It took five days and more than 150 firefighters to fully contain.

And late last month, a grass fire in the Oakland hills provoked evacuations of at least 100 homes. The fire burned through 22 acres of dry brush and grass. Both were quickly contained, because since the 1991 firestorm, fire training and suppression has been paramount.

“The good news is that the city of Oakland kind of has its act together on this at this point, which is great news,” said Grassetti, who lives in Claremont Canyon.

But it’s not enough. To save lives — and money — more emphasis should be placed on prevention.

“California has to wake up and recognize that it is far more practical to do fire prevention,” Doyle said.

Doyle said he needs more federal money to cut and clear brush and thin eucalyptus. In some areas in the hills, there’s a century of growth that needs to be removed.

But the funds have been threatened by a string of lawsuits. Though FEMA settled the lawsuit with the Hills Conservation Network, the $2.6 million the federal agency earmarked for the regional park district to cut brush and eucalyptus was made vulnerable because of a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club, which claims FEMA isn’t doing enough.

The Sierra Club wants about 1,500 acres of eucalyptus removed and replaced by a native forest, which is exactly what the Hills Conversation Network is against.

If only the all-hands-on-deck attitude of post-disaster relief could be tapped to find an equitable solution before it’s too late.

“People need to be more flexible to recognize that everybody is trying to do the right thing,” Doyle said. “But tying money up that could save lives and property because you think it should be 10 trees in this spot or no trees in this spot — it’s the two extremes.

“It’s just very frustrating, because we end up spending billions of dollars just fighting fires and doing recovery, and there’s a tragic loss of both lives and property.”