The California Fires..........

[bae]

It IS possible to build much more fire resistant than we gnenerally do currently. Whether CA building codes will be changed to address wildfire the way they have for earthquakes is anyone’s guess.

Here's your gold standard:

https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Educatio...e/Firewise-USA

I live in a community that is generally on the list of the top-threatened neighborhoods in the state. The key appears to be not so much a building code/construction issue, but one of creating a defensible space around your house. And maintaining that space, and your home, in a state that doesn't allow embers landing to cause trouble.

If you look at some of the classic neighborhoods-destroyed-by-wildfire scenes of the past, you'll often see circles of burned out homes, with surviving trees all around. The trees didn't go up in the fire, the homes did. And worse yet, often burning homes are an ignition source for other homes in the neighborhood.

[Teacher Terry]

Here they have told people to remove a certain bush around their homes because it burns quickly. We did that but most people haven’t.

[pinkytoe]

My brother has a house in a high mountain resort community and the HOA board recently hired a fire mitigation specialist. They have to remove a lot of trees/brush and all building materials have to be fire-resistant. Some have wood shake roofs which will have to be replaced. It is now a chancy thing to live in and around a forested area.

[bae]

It is now a chancy thing to live in and around a forested area.

It always has been. People just forget. Or engage (and I'm not channeling Trump) in poor forest management practices (certain types of fire suppression) that result in huge buildups of ground-level ladder fuels, then you get huge fires instead of nice healthy fires.

My community was certainly the victim of well-intentioned fire suppression efforts, and we've spent lots of money and time and our own labor over the past 10 years removing those fuels, which is a monumental effort.

[jp1]

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fire-and-rain/

This was an interesting podcast on the topic which I listened to a while back. At some point the insurance companies will start demanding the fire resistant building methods like bae's link above mentions. Or else they will simply say "no more." and then it will be up to the government to decide if they are going to start offering subsidized fire insurance like they do flood insurance.

[bae]

I think many of the insurance companies already use a fire danger rating system, and price the policies accordingly.

I know the insurers in my region do. One of the reasons our community funds such a nice fire department is that it gets us down a couple of levels on the danger scale, and it saves the community as a whole a lot more money in insurance payments than the fire department costs to operate. They come out and test us too - response times, how much water we can flow for how long without interruption, and so on.

[jp1]

My mega corp insurance company employer must not. We have not written an underwriting profit on property insurance since before I started working for them ten years ago. It's entirely possible that this failure of profit is because of hurricanes on the east coast. I'm not sure. But even averaging out things across the whole world we're losing money.

At some point soon we'll be cutting our losses. Across all lines of business we've started pushing things towards profitability. Aggressively. With tens of thousands of buildings getting fried by the Camp fire I assume that process will move forward at lightning speed.

[razz]

Interesting to read the precautions that can be taken. Thanks.

[jp1]

Here ya go jp1.

Attachment 2588

And the same view after the rain has cleared the air. City hall is the domed building midway towards the hill.

IMG_1770.JPG

[Tradd]

I wonder if it’s going to get to the point, depending on location, for insurance people to come out and look at a house in a fire-risk area, to see what the owners have done with landscaping, removing trees a certain distance from house, etc., before issuing a policy.

Or is this already done? Maybe Bae would know.