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Posted by Bill S on November 2, 2007 at 7:48:07 pm EDT
In reply to Cali wildfires posted by MTB416 on October 27, 2007 at 11:40:17 am EDT

Barb's brother lives in Rancho Bernardo, heavily featured on the national news as being completely burned out. It wasn't of course (you don't expect the media to be anything less than sensational or to report the real truth, do you?). There was indeed a lot of damage, with the fires coming to within a couple hundred feet of his house. But his neighborhood was not touched except for the smoke and ash. They did evacuate for a few days, but are now cleaning up the ash and soot. It was bad, of course, and a couple thousand homes were burned (not the total devastation that the media reported, as bad as it was). Something like 7 people died, 3 of whom had refused to evacuate and 4 illegal immigrants in an encampment (a couple dozen others in the same encampment got evacuated by the Border Patrol and Sheriff's office). There were some whole cul de sacs that were burned except for one or two houses. Most of the houses burned had shake roofs (that is, wood shingle). Only a couple had tile roofs, which don't catch fire from a few embers.

Cleaning out the fallen and dead debris - the only real way to do this is to let fires take their natural course. You can do a better job by clearing zones around the residences and businesses, but people seem to insist on having trees right up next to their houses and not clearing defensible zones. Note I said "better job". As long as the urban interface intrudes farther and farther into what was once wildlands, the problem will exist and will get worse. It's the same as building on wetlands and building substandard levees in hopes you won't get flooded (then building back in the same place every few years when you do get flooded, as people did in Jackson MS when we lived down there for 10 years), or build on the Outer Banks, then keep rebuilding on the same spot after every hurricane. Or as some people in snow country insist on doing, build in avalanche paths, then rebuild in the same place after the avalanche sweeps away your house (happens in Utah, happens in Juneau, even happens in Thredbro, Australia).

You can lessen the risk a great deal by proper choice of location and type of construction - wood shingle roofs catch fire easily, composition shingles less so, and tile and concrete much less so. Clearing the vegetation around your house to leave a 50-100 foot defensible space helps tremendously, more so than clearing fallen and dead debris. Type of vegetation you have in your neighborhood makes a huge difference as well.

You should be aware that, while some of the fires were caused by power lines that were knocked down, many were arson. In a couple of the arson cases, the people starting them went along roads setting a string of fires (apparently one such was done by someone very familiar with fire fighting and deliberately set out to make fighting the fire as hard as possible).

So what are you proposing - all forests should have the trees widely spaced, with green grass all around, as in urban parks or golf courses? What means this

Quote:

properly clean out the forests of fallen and dead debris

By the way, we have earthquakes here, as well (as we did a couple nights ago, though it was just a little 5.6 that only knocked a few jars off grocery store shelves). What do you propose we do to prevent or lessen the intensity of earthquakes? Maybe we can install steel trusses across the fault lines? Put stoppers in the Cascade volcanoes?

Sorry, but Nature takes its course. You can mitigate the disasters by where you choose to build and by clearing defensible spaces. But fires, earthquakes, floods, and volcanoes will happen

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