{{ Some California homeowners have elected to install personal fire hydrants. For a larger lot, a 50,000-gallon tank of water with pumps powered by a solar, battery and liquid-gas system would keep running in the event of a power shortage. }}
It would be interesting to compare the cost of a “fireproof home” with the typical schlock produced by Lennar and DR Horton.
intercst
The monolithic dome is not a lot more than a standard site built, not track homes but site built.
A monolithic dome home costs $100 to $250 per square foot or $180,000 to $500,000 on average, not including the land or site prep. The cost of a monolithic dome home depends on the dome size, foundation type, and interior finishes and fixtures. Monolithic domes are highly energy efficient and can withstand powerful hurricanes and tornadoes.
Other places indicate that they are fairly fire resistant, but like anything else they are not idiot proof.
Cheers
Qazulight
I like open plan dome homes, but I bet most HOAs do not.
It would be great if the ceiling height was sufficient to hit a 3-pointer from 30 ft.
intercst
A “personal fire hydrant” isn’t going to help if everybody else is trying to tap from the same feeder at the same time. That’s the problem California had, not that it didn’t have enough water.
A “50,000 gallon” tank is approximately how much water a 25x45 swimming pool would hold, so that’s going to be one gigantic tank. I would recommend a swimming pool instead, which you can swim in during hot weather 
And, FWIW, I made this identical recommendation a while ago, right here.
I’ve wondered about water pressure during the fires. When you have thousands of homes destroyed, isn’t it likely the water lines that served those homes are running wide open? And wouldn’t that cause a significant drop in water main pressure?
With no power in the area, pools become useless… Ideally a gravity fed setup, as in an overhead, rooftop tank, but that adds more problems as the weight load may not be practical… We looked at it with my BIL’s loss a few years ago… Better solution, find a safer area, go there!
I thought I had written about it here, turns out it was at shrewdm.com. This guy in Southern California has a pool. He has a generator. He has fuel. He bought a high pressure pump, hose, and apparatus and put it in his garage. When it was time to use it he pulled it out, set the generator running, set the hose up dousing his house, and left.
When he came back most of his neighbors’ houses were in ashes. His was fine. He had enough water left to help put out the fire at his next door neighbor’s place.
This L.A. dad vowed he’d be ready for fires. His plan saved his home — and othersNeil Desai learned a lesson four years ago when a fire came precariously close to his family’s house. He geared up.
Some homeowners turn to garden hoses in the face of a potential wildfire. Desai had bigger plans.
He pulled out an array of mobile sprinklers he’d set on tripods, placing three in the backyard of his home and two on the tile roof. The 60-year-old attached a 2-inch hose to a pump by his backyard pool and fired up the generator to power it as his wife left and his son went to school.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/pacific-palisades-fire-20027678.php
That exact set-up: swimmingpool of water, generator, pump, 2” hose, sprinklers on roof and on one particularly vulnerable balcony; is what I used in my nutso wooden rental house high above Malibu where I had proclaimed myself fire marshall. I also has a team of 6 kids from our small neighborhood, 16-20 years old, I had trained in simple fire suppression. Also, crucially, I kept them practiced at exiting the neighborhood in the dark, as if in smoke, by an emergency foot trail we kept extremely carefully cut of weeds and chaparral up and over Saddlepeak Mountain behind us.
They made certain as fire season approached that each home in the neighborhood had at least two trash barrels full of water on top of roof with fireproof rags and small buckets ready to put out wind blown embers.
We had a very close call in the fire of 1989 with embers raining down that we doused. The neighborhood has survived well since I moved, and one of “my kids” is now the self-appointed fire marshall.