As a thought experiment, I wonder what it would cost to build a European village scale town for 22k people (the population of SLT) and then literally build a moat around it as a firebreak.
But it would probably still help. It doesn't have to be perfect to help firefighters out.
https://www.thisoldhouse.com/roofing/21018219/fire-resistant...
When Paradise was burning I was thinking if I lived in a fire prone envionment; I would have sprinklers on roof of my home. It would be a simple 1/2" copper pipe feeding a few sprinkler heads on the roof. Maybe a few mercury switches placed around the property, or remotely controlled through the phone line, wifi, or sat phone enabled? Nothing too elaborate. It wouldn't protect everyone. It might save a few house fires that were started with embers though?
I know there one company selling roof fire sprinklers. I know of one small city who's experimenting right now with roof sprinklers. Hell, I wouldn't mind firing a bunch of Firefighters, and seeing that money go to Roof Sprinklers. (I haven't quite figured out exactly what Firefights do all day, with the hard exception of Paramedics. Buildings in cities don't burn like they used too. Wood stick homes in the country are another story.)
I heard one guy say that there wouldn't be enough water pressure if everyones roof was on, but that doesn't make sence either. Not everyone's roof sprinklers would be going off simultaneously if properly implemented, and designed. Firehouses could be in charge of which houses sprinklers go off?
Right now in CA, if you live in a fire prone area, Insurance (Property) is not suspose to be higher. As much as I despise Insurance companies--this provision needs to be nixed. (I don't think it will happen because Insurance companies use it to raise our city insurance rates, and politicians have northern cabins.
And lets say you have to keep it wet for 24 hours until the fire danger passes. That's around 40,000 gallons of water.
Where are you going to get that water? You can't count on the local utility keeping pumps running. If you're lucky you have a well, but a good residential well would yield around 10gpm, and if you and your neighbors are all pulling out water at the max rate together for hours or days, it may run dry while you wait for water to percolate in.
So you need a huge tank of water - a 50,000 gallon tank is around 35 feet in diameter and 7 feet high. Hope you have a big yard and lots of money, the tank alone will probably cost $30K. So figure around $50K to install the system. I hope you have a big back yard for it.
That bunch of firefighters you want to get rid of help protect many square miles of land, putting that $50K sprinkler system on 10,000 homes would cost $500M - that's a lot of firefighters and equipment.
I think there are better ways to keep your roof from burning, but even a metal roof is no guarantee that your house will survive a large wildfire unless you also keep the land devoid of fuel. And you could still fall victim to a piece of flying ember that happens to land on a vulnerable spot of your house.
Probably not of much value as roofs are (or can be) relatively fireproof.
The issue is vents, decks, windows to some extent.
And sure, the idea of replacing the fire department is probably not great, but it wouldn't hurt to have a bunch of these around.
Houses burn (usually) because they have vented attics that embers can blow into. Fire screening your attic or not using vented attics altogether, along with concrete and masonry construction and reasonable vegetation management go a long way toward protecting structures but the fact that structures are there in the first place is the problem.
You can't take an ecosystem based on periodic fire cycles and turn it into a suburb and expect everything to continue to work. Forests need to burn a little bit all the time or they will burn a lot all at once.
(my broad understanding is that property insurance is a relatively functional market where they won't underwrite a policy that doesn't make sense)
I wouldn't be surprised to see wildfires go a similar route in California if the situation isn't resolved.
As someone else said, it's easy to have either extremely high insurance rates or unavailable insurance if you live in the wrong area on someone's map. The result was FAIR plans with add-ons from insurance companies.