That article contains this interesting nugget of information: "the proposal [...] is backed by an organization called Build with Strength. The campaign, led by the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association..."
So it seems this may have more to do with $$$ than actual safety.
Playing devil’s advocate, if I’m in a concrete business’s government relations office and I see a fire safety proposal that would help my company’s sales, I’m going to pitch in to help. That doesn’t necessarily mean the proposal was corruptly originated or advanced. (It does merit closer inspection.)
This is tautological. Whether they’re safe to live in is the entire debate. (Wood-frame house in a suburb has a different risk profile from one in a dense neighbourhood by brush.)
Safety standards evolve as the environment changes and our tolerance for risk, mediated by technology, decreases.
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.
It's also probably drastically cheaper for everyone than more frequent inspections.
> The simplest way to counteract this bill would be to demand it require county inspection of all concrete homes after earthquakes
They would likely need to be inspected after wildfires as well. Concrete won't burn, but I believe prolonged exposure to high heat can weaken or crack it. That might go doubly so for something like a single-family home. There's a lot less concrete to absorb the heat, and the upper layers have nowhere to vent the heat. I wonder if it would crack at the foundation as the roof expands, but the floor doesn't because it can vent heat into the ground.
Neither are relevant to #2, as neither focuses on the relative safety differences of concrete versus wood frame houses.
(Your second point suggests that sprinklers are necessary for all types of frames, whether wood or concrete or other, which removes the first point from consideration as a “wood frame only” cost, at least not without diving further into the comparison.)
Casually discussing #1 is easy, while casually discussing #2 is nearly impossible. For example: which is higher precedence in a relative comparison: fire or earthquake safety?
Assumption-by-framing that precedence is a frequent source of political manipulation by well-funded buyers, and it’s very effective. Identifying such a framing bias in the proposed legislation would be grounds to kill it in committee, if discovery of such a bias were politically unprofitable for the committee.
It just seems to be accepted as “ok” that houses are constructed from wood and can fairly trivially burn to the ground - especially given the standard of electrical wiring often found! I for one welcome any ban on wood housing construction and hope it spreads far and wide - and certainly will never spend money on a house that fundamentally represents the second of the Three Little Pigs.
(Edit: Perhaps LA also has earthquakes to consider - that’s fine and a trade-off worth discussing. Where I live earthquakes are non-existent, yet it’s still basically impossible to buy a house constructed properly)
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/...
I'm also curious where your figure of 928 fires per day in the US comes from, maybe I overlooked it but I didn't see the USA statistics in your link. FEMA puts the figure at 1.3 million per year, or over 3,500 [1] per day. It's likely that there's a significant difference between the definition of a "fire" between the US and UK sources.
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)
If a California wildfire comes through and ravages the area, your fireproof building will still be there, but the walls will heat soak can and then set things on fire inside a fireproof building.
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.
Los Angeles doesn't have frequent earthquakes, but because it's near a fault-line, that tail risk has to be addressed (the same way one wears a seatbelt, even though car accidents happen only a couple times in an individual's life).
Even the smallest of residential houses here (Serbia) are constructed with reinforced concrete as the base and reinforced concrete pillars, with brick walls filling in between the pillars and floors and ceilings: basically, a house is a reinforced concrete box that can move independently from the ground, and that's supposed to guarantee earthquake stability (it's definitely not done for fire reasons, since roof construction is still predominantly wooden). Construction standards have been heavily modified post-1963 Skopje earthquake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_Skopje_earthquake).
Buildings such as Ušće tower, built in this style, have not survived a big earthquake, but I imagine surviving a couple of tomahawk missiles is a good enough reassurance of stability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U%C5%A1%C4%87e_Towers#NATO_bom... (though I am fully aware that earthquakes and missiles are completely different when it comes to shocks a building experiences).
Interestingly, concrete based construction is one of the cheapest around here, possibly because most houses are built that way.
So I wonder, how prevalent is reinforced concrete use for houses in USA and esp California? Are there many houses and buildings built with insufficiently-reinforced concrete? I know that wood is a predominant construction choice, but what type of reinforced concrete are you comparing it to?
Where I'm from organizations which have both "National"(or adjective referring to the nation in question) and "Association" usually settle on being a corrupt clique - without any influence in matters other than their internal ones.