Los Angeles is gearing up to ban wood-frame construction

Debate #1: Are wood frame houses unsafe in Los Angeles, such that they should either be condemned and razed, or be subject to mandatory annual LA county safety inspections?

Debate #2: Are concrete houses so much safer than wood frame houses, that wood frame houses should be banned?

Right now, the concrete industry is backing a bill that endorses the view "#1 No, #2 Yes". Their detractors think that their view on #2 is biased, and that it is actually "#1 No, #2 No". I think that in reality it's "#1 Yes, #2 No", and that there's not enough political will to evaluate at all whether wood frame houses need more frequent fire inspections.

LA county is also in earthquake, flooding, tsunami, and wildfire territory, so any decisions that decrees one solution for all problems is automatically suspect simply for being incompetent versus the spectrum of safety scenarios available. For example, wood is more likely to survive earthquakes, while concrete is more likely to sustain damage; earthquakes happen constantly in this region, so much so that USGS has an entire California subsite dedicated to it.

Cynically, I expect the concrete industry is trying to say that concrete houses won't burn in wildfires, but by the time a change in building code reaches actual newly built homes in any given area, that area will already have had it's superfire and be relatively low wildfire risk for the next couple decades (since it'll be a long time before that much dry tinder can accumulate again).

The simplest way to counteract this bill would be to demand it require county inspection of all concrete homes after earthquakes, at which point the county would have to consider the real cost of structural collapse of concrete homes in salaried inspector terms, and reevaluate its stance on earthquake risk prevention versus fire risk prevention with respect to building materials. But I don't think anyone's thinking in those terms, which is unfortunate. If you live in LA, write your legislator a handwritten postal letter about it.

Where on earth did you move to where house fires are this common? I've never heard anyone talk about the possessions that they lost in a house fire because house fires are so uncommon.

Could be a function of media. US media loves to scare its audiences.

The USA has 928 fires per day for 139 million houses.

So if hastily googled statistics are to be believed, you’re over twice as likely to have a house fire in the USA.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire

Fire safety is great, and if that's what you prioritize buying in your life, all the more power to you.

But focusing so heavily on one variable for something this complicated on a societal level seems like it would lead to a bad outcome because design and engineering always contains multiple competing tradeoffs.

Fire safety is certainly an important consideration when it comes to building, but is far from the only tradeoff to consider: what about building cost, environmental impact, building speed, repairability, and many other variables?

These numbers are pure fiction, but what if improving fire safety by 25 times increases building costs by 4 times, hurts the environmental impact by 5 times, makes the building twice as hard to repair when something breaks, and triples the construction time?

Our sticks n bricks will generally get you a longer time to get out than timber only but that also depends on safe methods of egress and lots of other factors. Bear in mind that our floors are mostly wooden joists. On the ground floor (US first floor) we plank with chipboard and finish with carpet or laminate or tiles. The first floor (US second) has joists with wooden planking faced with carpet or laminate or some tiles, the lower surface is plasterboard. Our internal walls are mostly stud wall ie wooden too.

It's the plasterboard (drywalling) that slows fires inside a house. Dense gypsum is a really good way to slow fire down. It won't stop it though. Also you need to consider steelwork. My home has been extensively modified internally and we have a lot of "steels" - mainly to stop the first floor from falling into the lounge and kitchen and to hold the roof up. Ironically, we have a C section steel running along the long axis of the house with wooden props to the roofing purlins to assist with additional snow loading. This is in south Somerset! We have modern insulation in a 1920s house which means that snow doesn't instantly melt on the roof anymore. Some of the original roof insulation was hay - I pulled it out myself.

The UK is generally a lot safer weather, earthquake and wildfire etc wise. However we can't be complacent and neither should you. For fire it is quite easy to form a simple home evacuation plan. It will only take you a half hour. Get a fire blanket for the kitchen. Sort out your fire/smoke detectors and test them occasionally. Get at least one fire extinguisher per floor. You can get "water mist" extinguishers that will cover everything in the home apart from self igniting metal fires. I was recommended them by a Fire Brigade official. Get an escape ladder for upstairs if required. You can get single use ones for about £50 that take up a tiny amount of space in the bottom of a wardrobe and hook onto the window cill. Make sure your windows will permit egress!

It is easy to compare construction methods and see one as better but it isn't that simple. If you live in a place where your home is easily destroyed then cheaper and quicker reconstruction is indicated along with quick evacuation. I should also point out that quite a lot of people around here live in mud huts: wattle and daub (mud/clay with straw and horse piss, OK any piss will do) with thatched roofs and a lot of timber.

I could go on ... 8)

Walls would have to be made of iron to soak enough heat to burn anything inside. Typical walls are made of good isolators, you would need several days of constant fire to conduct that kind of heat. Windows on the other hand are typically what lets the fire inside. They just break after less than a minute of high temperature flame.

4" brick gives you less insulation than even 1/4" of foam.

Edit: I see someone else beat me to it. I'm a slow typer today...

TL;DR, when the use of land is broadly limited, on the macro scale, the demand still exists and shifts the price of all land up on the supply-demand curve. The dynamics of limiting individual parcels or small sections of land often have the opposite effect, though.

The notion that you're personally always going to be able to see past propaganda is not giving enough credit to people who are good at propaganda. Everybody who falls for propaganda thinks they're smarter than that. Sure, they can spot the stuff that was meant to take other sorts of people in, but everybody has weaknesses.

But even assuming you could, you really can't do the research on everything. The world's too big. No matter what the topic, we all need filtering heuristics. And you give a really good one:

> Can I understand why they reached a different conclusion than me?

Often the answer is, "Because they were paid to." Or, "Because somebody was paid to amplify wacky outliers." For advertising, PR, and propaganda, all of the actual material can be taken with a grain of salt and the conclusions can be ignored, because the conclusions were foreordained.

As an example, take something you aren't personally well-disposed toward. Say, Q. How much time do you spend reading their ever-metastasizing set of theories and beliefs? How much have you personally refined your beliefs based what you read of theirs?

I'd hope the answer here is approximately zero, because a) it isn't worth your time, and b) there is a non-zero chance that it turns any given reader, yourself included, into a believer. That's the point of most propaganda, after all.