Frontline had program on the Maui fires this week. As with the LA fires, brush fire spread by strong winds.
Shouldn’t it be possible to reduce the risk by burning the brush beforehand when winds are not severe? A controlled burn.
Is that practical?
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SoCal, the multiple forms are not in woodsy brush-lands, but residential, and right downtown, urban, and so, no raking the forest, just nasty dry, hot winds, some over 100 mph, so like a blowtorch… last I heard 5 deaths, likely to rise…
Billions of dollars loss, and many, many homeless… Here in NorCal, we had a lot of rain this year, so not as dry, but we’re all watching… BIL lost his home here a few years ago, so hot it melted all the aluminum wheels, engine block, transmission of a pickup in the driveway next door… Puddles of aluminum… HOT!
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Probably no controlled burns in residential areas, but I understand that the local Fire Marshall may order you to clear all the brush within 30 ft of your home, or send someone out there to do it for you and bill you.
intercst
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Yes, in some places, but not in others. These fires are overwhemingly NOT trees, but dense, resiny chapparal. Doing a “controlled burn” with it is doable and at times useful, but requires great care to keep controlled.
and chapparal usually burns with shocking heat. The pre-modern ecology of the Caifornia coastal hills and mountains was growth for 20 to 30 years followed by what we are seeing right now — super hot super fast spreading almost total burn — followed by gorgeous wildflowers after spring rains.
I lived high up in those mountains (just under Saddlepeak) for ten years, but never owned there, only rented.
I expect home insurance will get much more expensive soon.
I pray that land use planning start to change.
During an earlier iteration of this terror (November, 1983) I was the volunteer fire warden for a small subdivision tucked right under Saddlepeak Mountain. I badgered and bullied everyone to get out except three high school kids who had had proper training. Our ultimate escape route if all went wrong was up an extremely steep one kilometer trail I kept pruned up and over the top of Saddlepeak. We were spared.
Fire crews had come from all over (the trucks closest to our community was from Arizona!) to help. Early early on the morning the fire was over, I used my fire warden’s pass to go down to the a liquor store on the coast and loaded up 4 flats of beer and 12 flats of bottled water. When I started tossing them out to the firefighters lying on the road, as they were awaken from deep exhausted sleep, I discovered what it is like to be profoundly thanked and appreciated…… Ironic.
d fb
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I’m thinking the fire is spread by blowing embers. If you do controlled burn with calm wind you destroy the fuel and should be able to control spread. So no raging fire.
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30 ft is not nearly enough. In high wind embers are going 2 miles.
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Every foot helps. The only solution to the blowing embers is a metal roof.
intercst
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Traditional Spanish architecture? Clay tile roof, and stucco (portland cement) exterior walls?
Steve
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Of course you need to clear brush, and keep wooden structures to a minimum, etc. But even if all that were done perfectly, there are credible reports of embers being blown 100s of yards and even one report of a mile away. When it is that dry and that windy, there isn’t much you can do.
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And here a few years back, it was those embers that blew into my BIL’s attic that turned their home into a pile of ash, even the foundation was cooked so badly it had to be removed… It was only the light of the flames next door, 50 yards away that woke them, gave them a chance at escaping…
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Stucco and cement doesn’t work well in earthquake zones.
Survivable LA design would be reinforced concrete block walls with a metal roof, and disposable furniture you’re willing to write off when it’s incinerated in a wild fire.
Can’t imagine what homeowner’s insurance will cost going forward.
intercst
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Our house in Caracas was next to a ravine that most summers had wildfires. During the rainy season “gamelote” (guinea grass) grew tall and then dried out to became good tinder.
As a kid I used to cut it down near our house with a machete and watered it for good measure.
Of course, we didn’t have California style regulations.
The Captain
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…and you did not have the winds nor the chapparal.
That would and does work. Hardly ever done.
My very very traditional “Spanish style” home for 15 years in the Hollywood Hills was structurally wood beamed, but clad with extra thick “type c” sheet rock covered with thick stucco, with spanish tile roofing, and every little hole or gap filled with fireproof material. It was never put to the test, but I did feel quite confident about its survivability. My retrofitting of the exterior walls, from the inside out (also radically increasing its earthquake survivability) was not cheap but well worth it. The Fire Chief for the area came to the house for a community meeting on fire awareness, at my invitation inspected the house with a tech assistant, and then wrote to me asking if I would be willing during a major fire to have my house be used as a HQ.
Fireproofing aint worth it to most people, and so it is not done much, and so structures of all sorts burn and collapse far too often. People talking about their “dream homes” need their heads examined and a strong dose of reality.
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(I now live in the Mexican Bajio where “fire” mostly means grasses burning ears, and there have been no significant earthquakes for about a million years. I sold the Hollywood house (which I still love dearly) to an English movie star who is in the house now, but he has his go bags packed).
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The bill for the fires is estimated at $135 billion. Home owners nationally is going to rise fast.
TFG might as well have said they did not vote for me. He does not care. But all of us are affected.
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I predict a mass exodus as people take the money and run, having no sentimental ties left.
This will be an interesting couple of years for California as migration, renewal, evermore burdensome(but uneffective?) statutes are written while state budgets and insurance financials are challenged.
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I know someone homeless in LA as of three weeks ago. His stuff is in storage.
He is not leaving. He is a photographer who has some business coming in so he needs the income.
He is illogical. The money does not add up. He is only a photographer.
Some will leave. Others will move in. People net are leaving CA perhaps but net is a very small number in relative terms.
Captain, were you intentionally baiting me with that idiot raving about DEI and the Klamath River dams as if they had any actual impact on the fires? Damn, get him help.
The problem was and is the almost complete lack of sanity in land use planning in California for the past century. Placing cheaply built wooden structures near or in inevitably burning forests is staggeringly stupid, but sure made the original subdividers lots of money.
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Oh, I did, but as I am also no fan of the current administration, it was mostly boring while also being, as I posted, basically nuts as to the fires.
Once you put highly flammable buildings in the path of very hot high speed winds adjacent to chapparal, you are going to have infernos and large capital losses.
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People seem to like danger, putting homes too close to the ocean and too close to volcanos.
The Captain
“A beach house,” he said, “doesn’t even have to be on the beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate,” he went on, “at boundary conditions.” “Really?” said Arthur. “Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other.”
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