Comment by irjustin 10 days ago
At the risk of being an idiot, is the problem firefighting? Is the problem that we're continuing a losing battle? That, even when we had proper forest management, the costs were still shifting towards firefighting? Warming making everything drier on average?
In the end though the only one we're truly hurting is ourselves and our desired life style when it burns out of control.
This is an insurance problem more than anything else.
If insurers were allowed to and incentivized to price accurately, homes in dangerous areas (flood plains, fire hazards) would be too expensive to buy, and people... wouldn't.
Especially given that if you can't get insurance, you can't get a mortgage, which drastically limits your buyers.
I 100% agree with that, but the way pricing works is generally not sufficiently granular. You either get underpriced government backed plans, or a plan that does not take into account your actual circumstances. Eventually sufficient big data might be able to solve the pricing problem. Defensible construction will have cheap insurance and indefensible buildings will not be economically insurable. The problem is insurance is by county (lol) or by "city". Neither work in CA mountains.
Legislation generally opposes granular insurance policies, as it is discrimination.
The bigger the town the easier it gets. Towns have roads and parking lots and cmu commercial buildings that are mostly non-flammable. They also have water supplies and logistics infrastructure. Centralized defense is very feasible. Mountain roads and poor communications cause an underutilization of resources.
That doesn't seem accurate. Commercial buildings aren't necessarily in the outskirts of town. And while the buildings themselves might be slightly more fire-resistant than typical wood frame houses, they're full of flammable materials. Look what happened with the Camp Fire in 2018.
It's simply not possible to make a practical house that won't support combustion. However, we don't need to. The threat is not what happens when the house is exposed to direct fire, but what happens when the house is exposed to ignition sources. And those *can* be stopped. Build your house such that there isn't anything combustible on the outside of the house and all access points are made spark proof.
Our house is not fire engineered--but still it has very few spots that could ignite. That's simply because we have stucco walls and a concrete tile roof. There is some exposed wood but not much. Nor are the vents spark proof.
Unfortunately, concrete tile roofs aren't suitable in many places (they don't like hail) and can't be retrofit onto most houses due to the weight.
True in a mathematical sense but irrelevant in practice. Realistically there won't ever be enough firefighters available nearby to cut an effective fire break around an entire town while a wildfire is burning nearby. Do you have any concept of how much manual labor and heavy machinery this takes?
Firefighting makes the next fire worse. You need to have a theory that doesn't involve more expensive fire fighting every time someone builds a new house. This is general means defending towns and letting the mountainside burn.