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Comment by ivalm | Hacker News Reader

Isn't part of the problem that the water pressure (if everyone turns these one) is bad which hinders firefighters when they need to tap the water supply to fight fires. They specifically ask people to turn off sprinklers/water hoses/other water use cases before evacuating.

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I recently read something (cant find the link, sorry) about having a generator and pump on-site, and then pumping water from your swimming pool to your sprinklers. I suppose not everyone has a pool, but collecting rainwater etc in an underground sump could be sufficient.

You could even imagine a closed-system that collects rain/sprinkler water from the roof guttering and drains around the property and channelling them into the pool/sump. You'd lose a lot of water to evaporation/steam in a fire I guess, but it could buy you some time.

The other alternative I guess is just dont build your house out of combustible materials. I guess some stuff might just melt in hot-enough conditions, but by that stage where ceramics and metals are just melting in ambient temperatures I think its pretty much a game-over situation regardless... but before that extreme you can probably get a lot of mileabe by building your houses out of brick (there seems to be a lot of brick foundations left in the footage I am seeing on TV)

I'd say very few people, relatively speaking, have pools in CA.

California has the most residential pools of all the states - over 1.5 million inground and aboveground units.

PDF warning: http://www.apsp.org/Portals/0/2016%20Website%20Changes/2015%...

Well, yes. But California _also_ has the highest population of the states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...

Might be more fruitful to look at a per-capita metric?

Imagine a state that has only two houses, both with a pool. 3 people live in one house, 1 person lives in the other. That’s 0.5 pools per capita, but for our purposes is a sufficient number of pools - 1 pool per structure.

Silly metric though. We have the most people/homes so of course we have the most pools. Arizona kicks our ass in the number of pools per person though.

So, we're in the low double-digits in terms of percentage? Seems like relatively few.

As in, it's not uncommon to live here and not know anyone with a pool.

Depends on the neighborhood. They're fairly common in upper-middle class or nicer neighborhoods.

Upper-middle-class or nicer neighborhoods are a fairly small share of all neighborhoods.

> but before that extreme you can probably get a lot of mileabe by building your houses out of brick (there seems to be a lot of brick foundations left in the footage I am seeing on TV)

Brick construction itself is seismically unsound, which makes it a bad choice for California. You can use brick cladding to make a building more fire resistant, though, but this isn't a panacea.

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