FIRE LESSONS January 17, 2025
I live in San Francisco, but the fires in Los Angeles County are personal.
My son Yosi lives in South Pasadena. To his north, the Eaton Fire destroyed much of Altadena. Thankfully, the threat to untouched South Pasadena has greatly diminished.
The challenge now is recovery and lessons learned to guide it. Can Altadena, parts of Pasadena, Pacific Palisades, Malibu and other communities rebuild successfully? Should they rebuild at all?
I asked my friend Dan for his take. He spent decades building luxury homes and has studied the urban/wilderness interface that produces so many major conflagrations. At a certain level, Dan says, fire storms are like giant tornadoes or hurricanes. They even create their own weather. How to combat them?
California has high building standards. These include in-home sprinkler systems, better carbon monoxide and smoke detectors, shut-off valves for gas, and class-A fire-resistant roofs and siding. But eventually, they will burn. Also, many buildings lost weren’t built recently. The key: Homes are not designed to withstand huge fires but to delay fire long enough for people to get out. There is no cost-effective way to enable these structures to survive.
Could “fireproof” homes be built? If possible, the cost would be prohibitive to all but the wealthiest people.
The problem extends beyond home and other construction to where people live. Communities keep expanding into the urban-wilderness interface at the edge and into forests. The greenery is wonderful, and hillsides offer fabulous views. But communities anywhere near the UWI exist at great risk.
Dan points out that most destroyed homes were richly landscaped. Trees and shrubs provide fire with plentiful fuel. “The home I built in Lake County has almost no vegetation within 100 feet,” Dan says. But that home is located on a large property. L.A. communities, urban-suburban in nature, were packed with houses close to each other.
Fires that started near the affected communities were turned into blazes by fierce Santa Ana winds that blew embers and ash towards them. The winds abetted fire leaping from house to house.
There’s no rosy fix for this, says Dan. You try to mitigate, but you can’t totally defend against this kind of fire. If people are going to live near the wilderness with communities abutting each other, disaster will happen again. Suburbs and cities can also suffer the same fate.
What next? Rebuilding requires insurance covering this kind of damage so people aren’t destroyed financially. How to make insurance available and affordable remains unanswered. We’ll also need better forest management, utilities management—undergrounding all power lines—and warning systems.
Los Angeles County faces a huge humanitarian problem. Where will residents live? “I can’t imagine what will happen to the cost of housing with fewer homes and rentals available,” says Dan. These problems won’t get solved quickly. It will take years to fix infrastructure and build homes.
For detailed insights into what fires storms can do and how they act, Dan recommends the book “Fire Weather” by John Vaillant. I read it. It blares out a frightening wake-up call.
I’m glad Yosi is okay and wish the best to all the people who have suffered through these fires. May they and their communities rally to provide and receive all possible aid and comfort.
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