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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

In addition to everything that's already been said about fires in CA, one thing I like to bring up is the obliviousness of many people living in the 'wildland interface'. I go hiking a lot at the old mercury mine near San Jose. On my way, I pass through the town of New Almaden. Cute town. 25 mph speed limit signs every 20' reminding you to slow down.

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.

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Precisely true. For a state so prescient about the effects of climate change, it's downright hypocritical to foresee droughts and fires but then allow that zoning (it's the same to worse in Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt). All the towns built flush to or into ther forest, little access, and no buffer. They're big on the dramatic things like establishing a carbon exchange or banning gas cars 15 years from now, but obvious and pragmatic preparedness escapes them. Time to balance "heads in the clouds" with "feet on the ground".

That definitely comes down to the simple fact that those changes being made to address climate change fears are new. Building all the communities was done a while ago.

Those towns are quite old. Once a town exists, in a non-totalitarian country, it is virtually impossible to get rid of it, no matter how impractical.

folks shouldn't be trying to get rid of those towns wholesale, just price in the risk and the externalized costs appropriately. easier said than done of course, as our legislative and regulatory apparatus has been broadly subjugated to real estate interests.

Pricing in the externalities of peoples’ houses is a bit of a Pandora’s box, and I can understand why no-one’s too eager to do it. If you’re going purely utilitarian, well, that’s rural housing out the window for a start. Essentially all of it.

Plenty of rural housing has minimal fire risk, especially if homes are built from fire resistant materials and homeowners take proper responsibility for clearing defensible space.

Assume houses/buildings in those areas WILL burn down each year and price insurance accordingly. Then have regulations (and government enforcement) that owners must have insurance.

It's not about getting rid of the village, but legislating that the town needs a gravel firebreak around their city limits, which might get rid of the 'we are in the middle of a forest' feel that they are going for. Somewhat like building codes so people don't live in toothpick houses that burn away or shake away in a flash.

Again, though, the houses already exist. The firebreak might be doable, but who’s paying for it?

The city and the people who live in it? Municipal bonds? Firezone income & sales taxes? It's like a special assessment in a condo when you haven't been managing your reserves properly and by law / ADA you MUST fix your elevator to make your building accessible for people who cannot walk up stairs.

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.

If we're talking about New Almaden, it isn't even a city. Just an unincorporated small community in Santa Clara county. There is no realistic way to fund major fire safety projects there. The county is tapped out, there is no way to raise taxes significantly, and other more heavily populated areas have higher priority.

Sure there's a way to finance it! Make everyone else in the country subsidize New Almaden! Works for hurricane and tornado areas too!

We made roads & electric services to that place, I think a small gravel firebreak for their small community is not so much of a stretch.

You’re assuming city limits exist. There’s a lot of places with names and lots of people in California that are just part of the County.

"If you live in a place that is wooded, you must have a firebreak or or be within a firebreak perimeter unless your housing can mobilize in 1 hour, such as a RV / tent, etc"

Thinking of how to deal with edge cases is not hard people.

Not disagreeing, but you need a means of taking enforcement action. Legislation is meaningless without enforcement. Millions of people live in places that are for all practical purposes, towns, but without all the trappings of a town like a municipal government, local PD, fire department, etc. and rely on the County for these services. That’s hardly an edge case.

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.

California's become used to rebuilding to address threats following earthquakes. It will come to do so to wildfire..

It won't be governments which remove these towns. Or at least their structures.

In the absence of government intervention, renters/homeowners insurance rates would rise to reflect actual fire risk. This would naturally result in people leaving risky towns.

But the government doesn't allow that to happen by over-regulating the insurance industry.

In the Camp Fire that killed 100 people, the trees in the town of Paradise didn't burn. The buildings did.

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.

The trees were alive and had moisture, whereas the buildings had dead leaves and pine needles that were dry, so when fire brands/embers landed on them they had lots of kindling.

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:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL_syp1ZScM

Yes, my point was that trees are not the risk, the buildings are.

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.)

Yeah, a lot of trees are pretty fire resistant as well. Not all trees are kindling.

fascinating:

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.

Better managing fire trap towns would reduce the risks to human life but doesn't do anything about CA fires burning down natural landmarks or blanketing the entire west coast, from Alaska to Mexico, in toxic smoke every summer.

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.

>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.

California does not do fire management properly. It's old info, just not applied because tourist boards complain about the controlled burns.

Can one ballpark how many million acres must burn on average to reach steady state given the transformation of sunlight into captured energy via photosynthesis on the impacted areas? Can we say that a noble management goal is for precisely that amount to burn every calendar year? This feels like a simple control volume analysis.

We need to increase, not reduce the number of fires. But the fires should be frequent, small controlled burns to reduce the fuel. We'll just have to accept poor air quality in those areas on some days.

Definitely irresponsible. These homeowners should know about defensible space. [1]

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...

People really love the aesthetics of having lots of vegetation near their homes, even if it does make them death traps in a wildfire. Mill Valley had an enormous fight last year about an ordinance to require 3 feet of defensible space. Getting 30 or 100 feet would require cutting down every tree in town.

I know Mill Valley is probably helped a bit by the fog, etc. but visiting there for hiking etc. feels more uneasy with every passing year. The amount of brush in the hills/on those back roads in the canyons is enormous.

On a visit a decade or two back, there was a rather sobering history of fire on the mountain (Tamalpias) at a popular stop.

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.

Aesthetics is one reason, but having houses much more efficient energetically, or shadow in summer is a must in some areas. Trees are not a caprice always, they made the homes much more confortable and pleasant. They provide food also.

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.

> or shadow in summer is a must in some areas.

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).

Roofs and walls at sun absorb heat and irradiate it later inside the home. Louvers just block light inside but can not save from having a roof too hot.

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

> Roofs and walls at sun absorb heat and irradiate it later inside the home.

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.

Some trees are way better than others with fire.

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...

The Great Mill Valley Fire stories will be horrific. They are inevitabble.

Like many of the other issues that plague California, you can chalk this up to Prop 13 and the resulting housing crisis. Once you made housing in the major cities unaffordable through Prop 13 and ensuing aggressive downzoning, the only way to build affordable housing is in new towns and cities outside existing established zones.

As much as I want to hate Prop 13 for everything, I don't think that's the issue here. People going to the exburbs to buy houses seem to choose large, traditional single family homes and you can only fit so many of those into the developed areas. I don't think exburbs like Pleasanton, Temecula, Santa Clarita, etc exist because people couldn't find affordable housing in SF, SD or LA. They exist because people can't find affordable single-family homes with modern amenities for a reasonable price in those markets.

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.

There's one issue: what if the only homes available in exurban areas are large, single family homes? I would love to buy a brand-new modestly-sized single-family house under 1,000 sq ft in an exurb like Tracy or Hollister provided that it's in the high $300K or low $400K range. I believe there are many people who wouldn't mind purchasing a condo or townhouse in an exurb. The problem is I don't see many being built in these areas, although in the downtowns of these places there are older single-family houses that are of modest size. Every now and then I see townhomes in exurbia that start at roughly 1,300 sq ft., but that's it.

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.

You can always buy the land and have a house custom built at whatever size you want.

New Almaden predates prop 13 by over a century.

Sure, but prop 13 guarantees its stasis. Why redevelop your single family home given to you from your parents when it would make your tax burden rise to market rate, which is probably enormous by now?

Is this really true?

We really love blaming extremely complex problems on simple political boogeymen. And when you really think about it, that is all by design.

It's really accelerated in the last 10-15 years here. A ton of new housing has been built in South Orange County which is right against the Cleveland National Forest. I believe the same thing has gone on in San Diego County, which also burned pretty badly back in 2007.

San Diego is an especially bad area because of the network of canyons which bring the wilderness deeper into suburban areas. On top of that, you have coastal sage scrub which can burn intensely and also build up significant fuel loads in a few short years. The solution for coastal sage scrub fire management will likely be different than what makes sense for oak and evergreen forests elsewhere in CA.

North Orange county, too. Up in the Chino Hills and Anaheim Hills area. Family in Anaheim Hills has been evacuated for fires at least 4 times in the last decade and a half.

> I suspect the blowback from people living in these towns will effectively kill the enforcement.

If insurers won't insure, that might change attitudes pretty quickly.

In my experience they will insure anything for the right price

Which will be priced so high or offer so little that nobody will buy it. See: Earthquake Insurance in california.

Serious question: how do people get fire insurance for those houses? Or do they not, and all of those houses are bought and sold for cash and never insured?

Historically, houses in California had been burning rather rarely, even in very fire prone area, so fire insurance is a good business as long as you set your rates appropriatey.

Increasingly they're not. Wildfire has creaated an insurance crisis.

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...

In Los Gatos, some homeowners were denied a few years back and Senator Feinsteinn threw a fit, so the insurance cos relented.

There was also the issue of the insurance companies refusing to pay out claims, paying bonuses to executives, and other shenanigans.

You just apply for it but recently fire insurance companies have been pulling out of the market or skyrocketing their rates. Many homeowners are now simply opting out of it....a very risky move. If I were those homeowners, I would see the writing on the wall and simply move before you become the victim. If a good fire comes through that area, all of those homes will be burned up quickly.

Opting out is usually only an option for homeowners without mortgages. If your fire insurance lapses then the mortgage servicer will purchase a policy on your behalf to protect their asset, and then deduct the premium from your escrow account.

From what I've seen, you can buy a house in california w/ a mortgage without earthquake insurance. Why is that possible then?

> The town has a single, two-lane road for access, and nearly every house sits in the shade of oak trees and dry vegetation.

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/...

Almaden has been there since the 1800s. Lexington wasn't always just a reservoir, it was also once a town, going back to the 1800s as well. Hard to call them "irresponsible", they predate California urbanization.

I believe it was a mercury mine back then (not a paragon on responsibility) and it was much denser than it is now. We got rid of the heavy metal runoff; there is no reason to simply defer to precedent.

I have the same feelings about Americans living in a geographic area called "tornado alley".

Or severe flood zones with federal flood insurance that ensures the same cycle every few years.

In those stick buildings Americans call houses.

"Tornado Alley" is named for its high relative risk, but in absolute terms it's still low. The sum total of area devastated by tornados in a year is probably lower than one of this year's smaller fires.

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.

That's approximately the entire mid-western United States.

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...

It would be interesting to know how many acres of land a strong long track tornado 'destroys' in order to compare it to a fire.

iirc a rectangle of complete devastation about 3/4 to 1 mile wide by maybe 20 or so miles long is about right. Some major tornadoes last longer others do not.

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)

Tornados are comparatively small, short lived, not precipitated by localised human actions (e.g., fuel accumulation, ignition sources, though yes, climate change may have impacts), and don't spread once initiated, as fire does.

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.

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