Hacker News Reader

Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

In addition to controlled burns, I think it’s also worth mentioning that many of the inhabited forested areas of California should probably not be under human habitation due to the systemic fire risk (which is like building a house in a flood plain). Maybe it’s possible to make those communities safer by thinning out the forests, I don’t know. I do know that it sucks to have many fires be an emergency (requiring lots of spending, making it untenable for them to run their course, costing a lot of money to address) because some people decided to build a community in the middle of a forest that naturally would tend to burn down every few decades

View on HN

The situation would probably be a lot better if the human habitation in those areas was built with resisting forest fire as a primary design criteria. If they were built with fire as a fact of life, fire could be allowed to regularly sweep through & clear the fuel load.

Seriously, it’s not like CA doesn’t already have codes that make stuff quake-ready. I live in a flood plain and huge amounts of stuff is built up off the ground enough for a few feet of water to not be a problem, though sadly this is not actually enshrined in codes AFAIK.

After reading this article I take away the opposite conclusion: with controlled burning these communities could dramatically reduce their risk. What would be helpful is a law requiring controlled burning for human habitation.

Controlled burning would prevent neighboring fires from encroaching but they don’t stop the community itself from becoming a tinderbox, which it will since it’s basically a forest with houses in it. I don’t even know if it’s possible to do a controlled burn in a reasonably densely populated area.

I live in the mountains of Colorado and most homeowners do their part to remove fuels around their home. One major reason is insurers will require it.

It's unmanaged public land that tends to be most dense and fuel rich.

In the interior of British Columbia we had massive forest die-off from Pine Beetle, that was caused by a lack of fires combined with warmer than normal winters. All of that fuel came down to the forest floor where it was a huge fire risk and was cleaned up manually. Now we have some newer growth but way more open grassland. Fires here move a lot faster but don't tend to be as dangerous and controlled burns are much easier. Trees that survive are younger and much thinner coverage, way more deer and cougars and less bears; a lot more birds. It's been pretty unique to watch an entire ecosystem change in 10-20 years; much less than a lifetime. Plus it turns out that historically these areas were predominately grassland not forests!

In the 2018 Camp Fire, the towns burned worse than the "unmanaged" public forests.

This is the only correct response to the issue. Stop ripping up the redwoods for your driveways and power lines. Let the mountains be.

The problem is not only new construction but what to do, and what policies to have, about all the people and capital tied up in forested communities already. For example Paradise is actually a pretty decent-sized town basically in the forest; it should be obvious just looking at it on the satellite that it’s going to be affected by fires frequently. I doubt it’s politically tenable to have the policy become to just let places like that burn down or even to make them cut down the forests (which to them is the draw of living there). Just look at the Wikipedia page about what Paradise was going to do after the fire: focus on fire resistant construction and wider roads for evacuations. No measures from preventing the same thing from occurring again and again

The only way a town like Paradise can exist is with a lot of state subsidies. The state should just flatly refuse to maintain SR-191.

I read a long article on Paradise. The town was developed by a group of libertarian developers who took a lot of pride in working around California's regulations on subdivisions. California has rule that kicks in when a property is subdivided more than four times. They worked around that by subdividing the property 4 times, wait then do it again 4 times. Ended up with houses on lots that are too large for the owners to maintain. They don't have fire hydrants. And often there is only one exit.

Paradise also is a bad location that is subject to dangerous wind conditions.

One thing I noticed when looking at zoning regulations in Nevada county is they don't allow for subdivisions that are defensible. Defensible means clusters of houses on small lots. With fire hydrants. But you can't build that anymore.

There's a hell of a lot of welfare libertarians in rural norcal. See: State of Jefferson.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com