Tag: house hardening

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Climate Change & Energy, Forests, Land UseTags , , , ,

Why are lone homes left standing after the Los Angeles fires? It’s not entirely luck

Ed Davey & Ingrid Lobet, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Emails and videos of burned buildings in Los Angeles next to those left standing have been flying back and forth among architects, builders and fire safety specialists around the world.

For many homeowners, like Enrique Balcazar, the sometimes scattershot nature of the carnage can seem like random chance. Balcazar, a real estate agent, posted video that showed little more than chimneys remaining of most homes on his block after fire leapt through his Altadena neighborhood. Balcazar stood on his neighbor’s destroyed classic Mustang to douse his smoldering roof, but his home was otherwise fine.

“It’s an older house and it still has the old wood sidings,” Balcazar said. “To me there’s nothing explainable in logical or scientific reason of why my house would not have burned.”

Many experts say luck does play a part. After all, wind can shift 180 degrees in a split second, pushing fire away from your house and towards a neighbor’s. But they also say there are many ways that homes can be made less vulnerable to fire.

Read more at https://apnews.com/article/fireresistant-wildfire-homes-architects-burn-survive-afdb21168c499a3e790daabb2692cf7e

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Climate Change & Energy, Forests, Land UseTags , , , ,

California is years behind in implementing a law to make homes more fire resistant

Tran Nguyen, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Reeling from destructive wildfires, including the deadliest in California history, state lawmakers in 2020 passed new requirements for clearing combustible materials like dead plants and wooden furniture within 5 feet (1.5 meters) of homes in risky areas.

The rules were set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2023. But as Los Angeles grapples with blazes that have destroyed thousands of homes in what could be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, the regulations still haven’t been written. The state Board of Forestry and Fire Protection has no firm timeline for completing them.

“It’s frustrating at every level of government,” said Democratic state Sen. Henry Stern, who was part of a group of lawmakers who authored the legislation. “I feel like a failure on it, being quite frank.”

Most of the neighborhoods ravaged by the Palisades Fire are in areas that must follow state requirements to keep the immediate surroundings of their homes free of combustible materials and would be subject to the new rules because they are deemed at highest fire risk by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The fire, driven by hurricane-force winds that spread embers by air, destroyed at least 5,000 structures across areas including Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Topanga Canyon.

Read more at https://apnews.com/article/california-defensible-space-zone-zero-ember-resistant-73739a63eafc6239753152f19e7cc81f

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Climate Change & Energy, ForestsTags , , , ,

As California burns, some ecologists say it’s time to rethink forest management

Hayley Smith and Alex Wigglesworth, LOS ANGELES TIMES

As he stood amid the rubble of the town of Greenville, Gov. Gavin Newsom this month vowed to take proactive steps to protect California’s residents from increasingly devastating wildfires.

“We recognize that we’ve got to do more in active forest management, vegetation management,” Newsom said, noting that the region’s extreme heat and drought are leading to “wildfire challenges the likes of which we’ve never seen in our history.”

Yet despite a universal desire to avoid more destruction, experts aren’t always in agreement about what should be done before a blaze ignites. Forest management has long been touted as essential to fighting wildfires, with one new set of studies led by the University of Wisconsin and the U.S. Forest Service concluding that there is strong scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of thinning dense forests and reducing fuels through prescribed burns.

But some ecologists say that logging, thinning and other tactics that may have worked in the past are no longer useful in an era of ever hotter, larger and more frequent wildfires.

“The fact is that forest management is not stopping weather- and climate-driven fires,” said Chad Hanson, a forest and fire ecologist and the president of the John Muir Project.

Many of California’s most devastating recent fires — including 2018’s deadly Camp fire and the Dixie fire, now the state’s second largest on record — seared straight through forests that had been treated for fuel reduction and fire prevention purposes, Hanson said.

Read more at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-21/california-burning-is-it-time-to-rethink-forest-management

Author SuzannePosted on Categories ForestsTags , , , ,

Op-Ed: Wildfire safety starts with communities, not cutting forests

Shaye Wolf, THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Another harrowing fire season and devastating losses of lives and homes sound an urgent alarm that California’s wildfire policy — focused on logging forests in the backcountry — isn’t working. Tragedy after escalating tragedy demands that we change course.

The good news is that a road map exists for fire policy that truly protects communities. Step one: Make houses and communities more fire-safe. Step two: Stop building new developments in fire-prone areas. Step three: Take strong action to fight climate change.

For years, state and federal wildfire policies have promoted logging of our forests. Under overly broad terms like forest management,thinning and fuels reduction, these policies do the bidding of the timber industry and entrenched agencies that are invested in cutting down trees. Yet, as more money has poured into logging, we’ve witnessed the unprecedented loss of lives and homes.

The reality is that no amount of logging can stop fires. In fact, it can even make fires burn hotter and faster. The 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed the Butte County city of Paradise spread most rapidly through areas that had been heavily logged, and we’re seeing the same patterns in this year’s fires.

A study covering three decades and 1,500 fires, co-authored by one of my colleagues at the Center for Biological Diversity, found that the most heavily logged areas experience the most intense fire. That isn’t surprising given that cutting down trees creates more exposed, hotter, drier conditions and promotes the spread of highly flammable invasive grasses.

Moreover, many of California’s fires — including half of this year’s burned acreage — have occurred not in forests, but in chaparral, grasslands and oak savanna. For at-risk communities across much of the state, logging is completely irrelevant to the fire threat.
Continue reading “Op-Ed: Wildfire safety starts with communities, not cutting forests”

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Climate Change & Energy, Sustainable LivingTags , , , ,

Op-Ed: A better way to help Californians survive wildfires: Focus on homes, not trees

Editorial Board, LOS ANGELES TIMES

Firestorms in the West have grown bigger and more destructive in recent years — and harder to escape. Massive and frenzied, they have overtaken people trying to outrun or outdrive them.

Gridlocked mountain roads prevented many Paradise residents from fleeing the Camp fire, which killed 85 people in 2018. This year, more than 30 people have died in the fires in California and Oregon, and again, in many cases, people were trying to escape fast-moving blazes.

There’s much work to be done on how we protect people amid a wildfire, including how and when we advise them to evacuate. But fire experts also are considering different ways to protect communities, and some of these ideas haven’t been given their full due as options for states that increasingly find themselves under siege.

One approach, seen in a bill proposed by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.), is to log more dead trees and dig more firebreaks, among other things. But it’s outmoded and environmentally problematic; environmental groups have attacked the bill for allowing the fast-tracking of logging permits, bypassing the normal review process, in areas far from any towns that could be threatened.

Beyond that, trying to prevent fires can lead to overgrown forests that set the stage for more catastrophic blazes. Rather than going down that road, or cutting trees and brush in order to make fires smaller and slower, the better, more scientifically based approach is to focus more on houses and less on trees.
Continue reading “Op-Ed: A better way to help Californians survive wildfires: Focus on homes, not trees”