California Is Built to Burn
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
The town has a single, two-lane road for access, and nearly every house sits in the shade of oak trees and dry vegetation.
I understand the aesthetics, but that sort of naivete is absolutely irresponsible. CA is filled with towns like this. Fortunately it looks like the state might start enforcing fire codes, but I suspect the blowback from people living in these towns will effectively kill the enforcement.
As to how? Like many other govt infrastructure projects, eminent domain. Except this land nobody will be living on, it will probably just be uninhabited farm or forest land or already owned by the state.
Thinking of how to deal with edge cases is not hard people.
Fire breaks are good if you can get them and maintain them, but you’re probably better off addressing that and other factors through the Insurance market.
You also still need to actually maintain the forests to reduce risk. That means allowing some fires to burn so there isn’t a massive fuel build up, and removing dead trees which will burn and explode instead of leaving them as mulch. You still need a market based solution to encourage people to cull the woods near their property though because sometimes the only thing keeping responsible property owners from culling the woods near their property lines are their own neighbors who outvote them when it comes to making a decision. California is very democratic like that.
It won't be governments which remove these towns. Or at least their structures.
But the government doesn't allow that to happen by over-regulating the insurance industry.
Firefighters were shocked to enter the town and see so much foliage unburnt between the ruins of smoking buildings. You can see some of those pictures on the Wikipedia page for Paradise, CA.
While the trees and dry bush do provide the bulk of the fuel for fires, man-made structures are far more flammable than the forests that surround them, especially in the towns consisting of older structures that don't have modern anti-fire alterations.
I'm not sure why firefighters would be shocked as the fire scientists at (e.g.) the USDA Forest Service have been doing research on this for many years:
CA forests are built around wildfires, and have adjusted to them over the centuries. We have not.
(The firefighters were shocked because they weren't expecting the trees in the town to be almost untouched, given the devastation in the surrounding forests.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_California#/media/Fi...
You can see that the outer layer of the trees burned but they retained their form.
Seeing this I can imagine that tree rings for the sequoias probably have a lot to teach us.
Lack of insurance, or rather, uninsurability, tends to reduce mortgage availability. Banks don't like smokey assets.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/homeowners-insurance/californ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/climate/california-home-i...
And I'm still stacking the deck a bit against the tornados by counting total area. Total inhabited human area would be even more lopsided against the fires.
Of the the world's 62 strongest officially rated tornados occurring between 1950 and 2013, 59 occurred in the US. Here are the numbers, but note, some tornados crossed state lines. See [1] and [2].
Louisiana 1
South Dakota 1
North Dakota 2
Missouri 2
Michigan 2
Illinois 2
Indiana 3
Minnesota 3
Ohio 3
Tennesse 3
Kentucky 3
Wisconsin 3
Mississippi 4
Iowa 6
Texas 6
Alabama 7
Oklahoma 7
Kansas 8
It looks like there are a number of tornados that don't have "accurate" official ratings so additional states could be on the list, e.g. Arkansas, Nebraska, Massachusetts.
F3, F4, and F5 are all serious tornados, but F5 tornados are especially scary with maximum wind speeds over 260 mph and reaching 318 mph.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_F5_and_EF5_tornadoes
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_Alley#/media/File:Torn...
one thing about tornadoes that's different than fire is sheltering in place is always your best bet except for the most extreme (EF5 guidance is be underground or attempt to get out of the way)
Yes, tornados can be deadly, yes, they're violent and sudden. But with alerts and shelter (a strong room or cellar ideally), eminantly survivable. Unlike erathquakes or hurricanes, damage isn't even especially widespread. A few hundred metres, at worst a kilometer outside the track, life goes own, modulo power outages and hail damage.
Floods, hurricanes, rising seawater, and wildfire are far more addressable risks. Arguably drought, heat, and disease as well.
I agree with you - I think a lot of these areas aren't proactively managing this due to the blowback.
[1] https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-re...
From the about 1875 to 1930 there was a major burn every few years. There has now not been on since the 1930s, a few grassfires excepted.
Houses extend far up the mountain. Streets are narrow, steep, and twisted. Trees grow two, and sometimes within structures. Wood and cedar construction are common.
Yes, the fog helps. But it won't protect forever.
So, why if instead to chop them (and having each house slurping energy like an entire city), we just search a way to reduce the fire hazard in the trees, and include them in the mix?
The absence of safe areas or escape roads seems a fixable problem.
This is what louvers and (eave) overhangs are for. You'd only need some trees for westerly windows once the sun gets closer to the horizon.
As an added benefit you can get some solar gain during the winter months if desired if you get the overhand length right (plenty of online calculators).
Houses next trees instead are shadowed some hours a day, they are more fresh inside and heat less, so are much cheaper to keep at habitable temperatures in hot areas.
Trees are also great blocking street noise and removing contamination.
We just can not remove plants from cities without suffering negative collateral effects
Radiant barriers are a thing, especially in the Sun Belt. Plenty of products that have foil lining, but it can also be done as a stand-alone product: just add a small (rainscreen) air gap between the foil and the cladding.
In the western part of the country we have Jeffrey Pines [1].
They have branches that start really high up and their bark is super thick so they are considered fire resistant trees - highly fire resistant as adults.
"Jeffrey pine's ability to shed burning bark scales as a means to reduce fire damage has received mention in the literature, and firefighters have reported observing fires extinguished by shedding bark scales" [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinus_jeffreyi
[2] https://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/pinjef/all.h...
Keeping people out of harm's way is a necessary, but not sufficient, step to manage California's fire problem.
Fires have health and economic impacts on people who aren't in immediate danger of being burned to death and the only way to minimize these impacts to reduce the number of fires.
Reducing the number of fires isn't really a viable strategy; the flammable material just accumulates more and more. California has always had wildfires, they're just a part of the ecosystem. A lot has been written lately about how the strategy of trying to suppress every fire the last century is a big part of why we have so many giant, out-of-control wildfires now.
That said, there is still the problem of rural residents who never wanted to live in the city to begin with. Nature lovers, independent types, and folks with jobs outside the city are still often living in unsafe conditions and providing them with affordable urban housing isn't going to convince them to relocate.
Here's something I'm wondering: why are there no suburban or exurban developments that strive to build new versions of Downtown Palo Alto or Downtown Mountain View, with walkable commercial areas, some apartments and condos near these commercial areas, and some modestly-sized houses built a little further away but still within walking distance to the commercial core? Suppose developers built a "New Palo Alto" near Tracy or Hollister, which is within commuting distance from Silicon Valley. I'd buy in a heartbeat.
We really love blaming extremely complex problems on simple political boogeymen. And when you really think about it, that is all by design.
If insurers won't insure, that might change attitudes pretty quickly.
For the road component, this was mentioned in the PBS Frontline episode "Fire in Paradise" about the Camp Fire:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3OX1PR2SCM
Basically for an event that occurs maybe once in 50 or so years, it's hard to justify the cost of widening it when it would otherwise receive so little traffic.
Personally, from what I've learned as a layman due to all of these news stories, it should at least be prudent (and feasible) to do controlled burns during the wet season around these types of towns to get rid of some of the dry vegetation.
Other than that, 'clear-cutting' about 30'/10m from houses would probably help a lot as well:
* https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/Fire-causes-and-risks/...
The winter months used to be spent executing forestry management, 'raking' with bulldozers and diggers designed to clear the fuel that builds up on the ground and becomes a major fire hazard in the summer and fall months. (You can easily find video of forestry raking and controlled burns online, the same term is used in the UK). Controlled burns to clear fire roads and areas in order to prevent fie spread complete the winter cycle.
We are now years behind in clearing the undergrowth that are a major cause of fires. Whether it is federal or state land the environmental lobbyists have been highly effective in challenging these ancient practices, believing they harm our planet.
Always keen to cut costs, the state now spends far more seasonally on fire fighting, a hugely lucrative business, than preventative investment in land management. We are at a crisis point but the governor choses to claim it is 'global warming' that is causing these massive fires, when in reality the far greater issue, which could be quickly rectified, is lack of forestry and vegetation management.
We are now in a situation where logging mills have burnt in Oregon, making it even harder to keep up with processing wood and adding to the cost of housing. While California burns we are importing construction timber from Canada.
in that, they discuss controlled burning among other things.. they reference Dr Scott Stephans who was lead author on
'Drought, Tree Mortality, and Wildfire in Forests Adapted to Frequent Fire' February 2018 / BioScience
where it is stated, summary first paragraph :
Massive tree mortality has occurred rapidly in frequent-fire-adapted forests of the Sierra Nevada, California. This mortality is a product of acute drought compounded by the long-established removal of a key ecosystem process: frequent, low- to moderate-intensity fire. ... The scale of present tree mortality is so large that greater potential for “mass fire” exists in the coming decades, driven by the amount and continuity of dry, combustible, large woody material that could produce large, severe fires. For long-term adaptation to climate change, we highlight the importance of moving beyond triage of dead and dying trees to making “green” (live) forests more resilient.
I'd just been discussing the general failure of moralisingpathologies (disease, mental health, personal failings, and more, when I saw the same attitute had been applied to wildfire and forestry management:
[F]ire was seen as a social problem, a problem of social order and disorder. [Bernhard Eduard] Fernow looked at the American fire scene and declared that it was all a problem of "bad habits and loose morals.”
You don't solve systems problems by punishing or torturing them. You address specific mechanisms, risk factors, transmmission vectors, and feedbacks.
The other is thinking of wildfire as similar to an epidemic:
To me, Fire is the other contagion. Wildfires can be described as a kind of infection! But fire is a lot like a virus. It's not alive, but it depends on the living world to spread.
Both seem useful models to apply elsewhere.
You left out the part where the person whose attitude is described in that quote came from a climate where "the only fires that occur in your part of the world are ones set by people." So, the problem wasn't necessarily driven by a bad moral habit of ascribing all problems to bad moral habits. He applied an idea that made sense in one context in a different context where it didn't make sense, because "he and his colleagues were smart, committed people, but they had no sense of how fire actually functioned outside of Europe."
You don't solve systems problems by punishing or torturing them
Unless you have more information that this guy had a sadistic authoritarian streak that influenced his policies, I think this is a harsh interpretation.
The simplest way to get people to take wildfire management more seriously is to raise their insurance premiums unless they mitigate the risk. I see tons of homes across the west in the exact same situation as the homes that are burning in CA,OR,WA right now. No one takes it seriously until the fire is bearing down on your town. At that point, it's far too late.
Forest management alone at any level cannot prevent these massive fires from happening.
There is this deep, visceral resistance to acknowledging the impact of global climate change and humanity's role in causing it.
It certainly feels trite having to repeat it ad nauseam: global climate change is and will continue to cause extreme and unusual weather events including blizzards, hurricanes, droughts, floods, famines, and wildfires. And yes, it will still get "cold" in the winter -- that does not disprove global warming and the resulting climate changes.
Do you have a source for that?
Even with climate change, surely there are ways to mitigate it with the better forest management everyone is talking about? So that they're no longer "massive" but merely "regular"?
Why does it have to be either/or? Climate change is a global issue, California fires are a local one. And Californians seem to be the most climate-conscious of people in any state.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/Are...
FWIW I never said it had to be one or the other. But it certainly is the case that one of the two (climate change) is consistently downplayed and dismissed entirely as a major contributing cause. There are of course more contributing factors than just two, such as power lines sparking the fires.
It is not physically possible to manage the amount of forest in CA to the degree that it solves the problem. Help mitigate? Sure. Remember, you're talking something like 30 million acres.
Experts acknowledge that forest management is important and a necessary component. But again...57% is the Federal government and 33% is private.
Logically, there must be some point where the temperature+climate change become so severe that regardless of how much forest is cleared eventually all 30M acres become dry tinder, are consumed, and CA becomes a desert. Global climate change WILL eventually create that situation if not addressed and the amount of change required to cause that situation isn't as high as people might imagine. Some experts think it might already be too late.
Let me DuckDuckGo that for you.
What historic precedent would we have for that? According to this site, clearing forests in the Eastern Part of the US occurred at the rate of 13 sq mi (8320 acres) a day, every day for the fifty year period between 1850 and 1900.
https://www.thoughtco.com/us-forest-facts-on-forestland-1343...
So about 3M acres a year without the benefit of the internal combustion engine. So 10 years to clearcut all the CA forests if we only used axe and mule. I’m guessing a chainsaw and bulldozer could go a bit faster. It’s mountainous terrain so newer custom technology might be needed. And there might be a wee bit of backlash from some ecofolks if we destroyed all the trees, including me.
But physically impossible? That’s hyperbole. In fact, history suggests it wouldn’t be impracticable. It would be expensive. But it could be started today on a pretty significant scale. The science and engineering on how to do it on a sound ecological footing is well-established. The barriers are administrative, logistical, economic and emotional.
Sadly, none of those barriers are overcome by a focus on the climate change debate. There’s only so much attention an eyeball can spend, and if it’s spent on the climate change debate, it isn’t around to focus on fixing any actual current environmental and public health problem.
I think of it as Gore v. Carter. Al Gore argued grand schemes and tons of to-be-mismanaged money for possibly addressing a speculative concern. Jimmy just built another house for a family in need. I miss Jimmy...
And tomorrow, another child dies of lung disease in Delhi...
I do think we're talking past each other though. Perhaps I should have said "practical" instead of "possible". Certainly just about anything is possible with enough money and manpower thrown at it.
I still maintain that forest management alone is insufficient to address the situation. After all, there is little need for forest management if the forest has burnt to a crisp, has become a desert, and no longer exists.
Let's say we devised a perfect management plan, used machine learning to slice the forests up into optimally manageable sections with nearly no chance of spreading uncontrollably. Hell, even throw in robots that automatically "rake" the land.
What happens when the climate becomes such that any segment will burn totally if ignited and all segments will inevitably burn? What happens when the climate becomes so hot that all foliage withers and dies? Problem solved I suppose.
Unfortunately, after decades of lies, propaganda, and lobbying, people (in the U.S. at least) still perceive climate change to be, as you say, a "debate". On that I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree, since IMO it is not a debate and has instead become one of those uniquely American ideological battlegrounds where one "side" has been convinced that being stubbornly contrarian is a sign of intellectual independence and superiority, despite all facts and data to the contrary.
Sure, but you don't have to (control) burn a lot of that. Simply focus on the parts that are where people live, which could perhaps be handled at the local level.
Contract a private crew to do a burn from people's property line to the border of the county: wouldn't this negate issues of state and federal jurisdiction?
You still have to worry about fire brands/embers floating down onto houses, but it would eliminate some of the risks at least.
Yes, but American morality has been warped by its legal code into some twisted version of the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics (https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...) that makes this infeasible to actually accomplish.
In vastly oversimplified terms, the primary American response to any tragedy is to ask the question of who can be sued about this. The person who can be sued is the person who is to be blamed and the system optimizes for the avoidance of blame, not the minimization of harm.
Look at the (lack of) debate around human challenge trials in the US. It's taken as an obvious given that a given entity causing an almost certain X0 amount of deaths is a less preferable outcome than a diffuse and unblamable phenomena causing X000 deaths because in the former case, there's a concrete entity that can be blamed for the obvious infliction of harm but in the latter, it was simply the result of impersonal systems that nothing can be done about.
> Paleoclimatological studies indicate that the last 150 years of California's history have been unusually wet compared to the previous 2000 years.
I'm not denying the seriousness of AGW, I just don't think it's the reason my clothes are wrinkled or my dog ran away.
The standard CA marketing package doesn't really talk about our normal climatic variations. I think newcomers to the state are surprised at some of the slightly unusual but not unheard of weather and disasters and seek to blame some new, ominous force.
People thing AWG is just carbon reduction, but it will demand far more change than that.
Yet when the topic turns to historical California, I'm surprised there isn't more acknowledgement of just how much of the California ecosystem has changed in the last couple hundred years, making comparisons not quite as apt. Invasive grasses, as just one example, have completely changed the landscape.
If you think of wildfires as a denial of service attack, you realize firefighters simply can’t solve the issue. Controlled burns don’t work well in California for the exact reasons wildfires are such so dangerous. What’s left is infrastructure of one type or another.
Scrub burns ferociously, far more violently than one might expect, thanks to the volatile oils. For much of Southern California, this is a poorly-manageable threat.
An entrenched crown fire is a true fury, not to be trifled with. The main fire can burn in a location for hours (rather than minutes), and individual trees or roots for days, even months.
The heat from even a modest forest fire is ferocious. I found myself a 1/2--1/4 mile or so from a relatively small burn (an acre or so), and could feel the radiant heat from inside a car.
A hillside on fire, or a fire-front overtaking a position, is like a blast furnace, with temps over 1,500°F. Plus choking, blinding smoke, poisonous fumes, low oxygen, and flying and falling flaming debris.
A 1km deforested buffer might help, along with building codes.
And pasture land is the worst type of buffer, since dry grass burns easily, and quite hot. NorCal, for example, has lots of pasture land, especially in wine country, and that is one of the reasons that Santa Rosa and Napa have been hit with major fires every year for the past 3 years.
There are existing ways to protect a town from burning down, largely related to building designs and materials. The problem is that these all cost money, and the type of people that live in these high-risk mountain towns generally don't have the money to incorporate those features into their buildings.
Isn’t California actually relying increasingly on buying power from other states⁰ (even all the way from Utah) because of the inherent unreliability of renewables (which caused blackouts recently when they and their fossil fuel backups¹ failed in hot weather)?
Edits: Sources:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California says "2018 Total System Electric Generation". California Energy Commission. Retrieved 2020-08-27. "Source: CEC-1304 Power Plant Owners Reporting Form and SB 1305 Reporting Regulations. In-state generation is reported generation from units one megawatt and larger. Data as of June 24, 2019 ... In 2018, total generation for California was 285,488 gigawatt-hours (GWh), ... in-state generation dropped by 6 percent (11,494 GWh) to 194,842 GWh. ... Net imports increased by 6 percent (4,944 GWh) to 90,648 GWh," (emphasis added), and the change seems to have been happening for a while: https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2016/04/03/califor... https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/coal...
[1] Which seem likely to be less robust in the future: “Policymakers also started closing natural gas plants because they produce more CO2 emissions than wind and solar, ignoring warnings that doing so would lead to energy shortages. On Wednesday, California's Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, signed an executive order asking the state legislature to ban fracking oil and gas, the latter of which provided a majority of the state's energy during the recent blackouts.” https://reason.com/video/how-californias-environmental-manda...
Since the 1970s the main change has been the commissioning, and decommissioning, of several nuclear power plants, notably Rancho Seco (near Sacramento) and San Onofre (near San Diego). A third large plant, Diablo Canyon, continues operation. A fourth much smaller plant at Humboldt Bay shut down in 1976.
I don't have a resource for long-term power trends, history, imports/exports, and mix for the state, though I'll keep an eye out.
He told me that by not letting burning take its course, the forest floor accumulates a massive amount of fuel and then when it does burn, it burns much hotter than it normally would and effectively sanitizes the forest floor and regrowth takes years instead of weeks/months because it got too hot and killed everything.
As mentioned in the article, we civilized humans really should be letting things burn, at a lower temperature and more frequently and avoid the fuel build up that scorches our land for years on end. This is the way forward.
More writings here: http://www.stephenpyne.com/
https://longnow.org/seminars/02016/feb/09/fire-slow-fire-fas...