The West’s Infernos Are Melting Our Sense of How Fire Works | Hacker News Reader

The West’s Infernos Are Melting Our Sense of How Fire Works

wired.com

58 pointslxm33 comments

Holy shit. But we know how to fix this, or at least mitigate it. Just do the controlled burns already.

That will help but it won't fix it

There is no fixing it. California is made to burn, the last century or so was unusually wet but California is now returning to a more typical dry tinderbox climate. (And AGW will likely make it worse than ever before.) Californians will need to figure out how to live with the fires, or move.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_California#P...

Are there other parts of the world with a "dry tinderbox climate"? What does it look like, and how are people there dealing with it?

I don't think so. I'm pretty sure it's just a stage on the way to desertification. Most of Nevada would be an example of where CA is probably heading.

Yes, Australia and Siberia are also particularly prone to fires. Taiga biomes and Mediterranean climates in general are associated with wildfires.

To be frank I don't really see how California could deal with it. The state's population ballooned during an unusually wet period; if California had not been so unusually wet during the later half of the 19th century into the 20th century, I doubt it would be so heavily populated today. Encouraging people to leave small towns and come to defensible cities is probably the most realistic 'solution.'

It should be noted that California's sprawl into fire zones is built on a mix of economic and legal incentives - development, insurance, and fire suppression all hide the true costs of living in a place that is known to burn. Malibu has burned many times, but if you can afford a good policy, you don't "lose" your wealth - thus Malibu has ended up with high-end developments.

Wait a second. Shouldn't the magic of the "free market" mean that fire insurance explicitly does not hide the cost of living in someplace that has a fire issue? The insurance company has to take in more than it pays out, even considering that they invest the premiums to maintain buying power, or juice profit margins a bit. In general, your premiums should be roughly equal to your risk (amount of loss, weighted by probability of loss), plus a bit to go toward the company's bottom line.

I don’t think the insurance market in California is a free market.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/california/california-bill-b...:

“Amid mounting cries of California homeowners being denied wildfire insurance in high-risk areas, lawmakers want to require insurance companies to cover all existing homes, as long as they meet new safety standards.

The measure, coming after years of deadly fires causing insurers to turn down more customers, would also require insurance companies to give homeowners financial incentives for fire safety upgrades. Existing homes that meet a new state standard for “fire-hardening” would not be denied coverage under the law.”

And no, I don’t think insurers will be allowed to counteract by raising premiums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Department_of_Insur...:

“On November 8, 1988, California voters passed Proposition 103, by a narrow margin (51%), on the promise of providing consumers with a 20% rate rollback”

I don’t understand how insurers still want to do business in California unless there already was something seriously wrong with the insurance market before 1988, leading to high profit margins. But frankly, I don’t understand these ballots.

Yes. But the free market is not magic nor perfectly efficient in short term reality, and there are many factors at play. Consider: after 9/11, or after covid, terrorism and pandemic insurance policies rose in price significantly.

The actual risk of these events is not higher just because a particularly notable event just happened - but the price still rose because of psychology. Lots of people wanted insurance from major events that were in their psyche and companies all rose prices and pocketed pure profit because they could.

Some insurance agencies in the UK have been driven bankrupt by Corona: they didn't have an accurate model of the risk. This kind of event is how a market would correct itself: insurers losing money until they leave the market or raise prices. It takes a really long time

If temperature keeps accellerating, most area around belt of equator is going to have increases of wildfires and firestorms, though area around poles warms up faster. Every energy increase from here on is going to be unprecedented for the past 10000 years. See David Attenborough's latest documentary on Netflix.

> tinderbox

The summer fires in the Bay Area began with a rainless lightning storm, almost unprecedented especially in the summer, that began fires over a wide area simultaneously, followed by hot weather.

It's unprecedented because recorded history in California only goes back a handful of generations; ridiculously young compared to most of the world. Paleoclimatological evidence suggests that it used to be common and climate science says that it's likely to become common once again.

Acknowledging that is the fix. Let it happen a little bit at a time so it doesn't turn into the kind of statewide apocalyptic fire they talk about near the end of the article.

Meta: can’t actually read this. There’s a half screen popover for... something, cookies maybe? Then a full screen popover to sign up for spam. I’m not willing to do work to read popsci.

Does the Wired web team think they have done a good job? I understand the incentives but are they proud of what they have created?

Use firefox reader mode.

or ublock origin, or outline.com

This is seriously the only way I'm able to read three quarters of the websites I visit on mobile these days.

Wired's content is of a piece with their web architecture, so it's not worth griping about. Other websites are available.

I scrolled through the front part of the article seeing 3-4 lines at a time before I realized I could roll down the thing covering up the bottom (since it has a down caret instead of an X, I didn't see it as closable). I never did go back and read the part I missed.

It seems to crash or otherwise reload frequently as well, at least in Safari on my iPad.

After a while I put it in reader mode, until it reloaded crapify mode again :-(

Note to Wired staff: surely you can do something that would make people want to return to your site, rather than viewing it as a last resort?

Surprised there doesn't appear to be a wildlands firefighter reserves program where normal people are trained to firefighting skills and then have a refresher course for a week before sticking us in the flames.

California would rather use inmates as an almost-free resource to fight fires. Works even better than volunteer force.

Only this time, the inmates were already released because of COVID-19.

I hope it's not lost on people the fact that we essentially have a population of slaves bound to risk their lives protecting wealth and property they can't partake in and that probably shouldn't be situated, geographically, where it is in the first place. Also note that they're on work release, so it's unlikely that these people are particularly notorious criminals. They're (mostly) men who made mistakes and had their freedom stripped away profoundly for it. That's the state/region that birthed the Information Age and all its "progress."

Hopefully some will take that policy into account next Tuesday.

Colorado has had 3 of the top 4 biggest fires in its history this year.

Two of them are 10 miles from merging.

One went from ~1000 acres to 100,000 in a single day (ballpark). All of this during a time typically considered outside of fire season.

Yep. Our cabin, that we had just finished building, burned down in the Cameron Peak fire. Our neighbors lost their primary house. We were prepared to weather a ground fire, but this one was leaping crown-to-crown. We will rebuild with non-flammable materials.

Do you get disaster relief when this happens? Or do you have to just pay massive premiums?

Thinking about a cabin myself at some point and wondering what the economics look like.

We basically paid for the land and got a half-finished cabin shell for free. Spent two summers finishing it up real nice and then woosh! No insurance, I guess we lost about 20-40k of materials and tools that were there. The most painful part of fixing it was getting all the building permits sorted out.

Oh well, the Buddha teaches us that all things are temporary. I did enjoy the weekends hammering away with friends and family.

I am looking into shipping container construction now. Cabin 2.0 will solve all the design flaws we inherited from Cabin 1.0, and no doubt introduce new and exciting flaws!

Sorry to hear that.

Did you get your irreplaceable's out? Decent coverage? Really hope it's not too much of set-back for y'all.

Don't worry about us, worry about the people who lost their real house. We had no insurance because it was a cheap (~30k) cabin. Mostly just tools and household items up there. Gonna go up this weekend and see If i can find all my axe heads and hammer heads. Attempt to re-temper and re-handle them.

The Buddha teaches us that all things are temporary. We will rebuild in a way that is more compatible with fire.

> This becomes especially pressing, says Westerling, when you consider that every future fire season in the American West is likely to be worse than the last, on average. “How do you adapt to that? It’s not just California,” he says. “It would be the whole West Coast and the Rockies and parts of Canada and Alaska all going off on a regular basis. So just the magnitude of managing fires over that geographical scale simultaneously is staggering, right down to the psychological impact of living with that.”

So we're just at the tip of the iceberg, and experts (from a different part of the article) are saying the worst is at least 10 years away.

It raises the question of how much of the current "fire climate" comes from the atmospheric climate and how much from accumulation of bad fuel management.

I believe the scientific principles of human contribution to climate change are solidly established. But climate change is not the only problem we face.

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