Earthquake: Comes and goes quickly, massively destroys stuff and kills people. Can engineer buildings to a certain degree to lessen damage.
Tornado: Comes and goes quickly, massively destroys stuff, kills people. Cannot engineer buildings to lessen the damage if a direct hit, can build shelters to protect people.
Fire: Moves slowly, destroys stuff, but mostly in remote areas, few casualties. Cannot engineer buildings to lessen the damage.
Flood: Moves slowly, massively destroys stuff, few casualties. Cannot engineer buildings to lessen the damage.
Those seem to be the Big 4 disasters out there. What I find interesting is that there appears to be lots of planning for earthquakes in active areas, flood control in the US is antiquated but also active and tornados no one can really do anything about.
And then there is Fire. My observation is that our state and national fire control plan appears to be “Oh shit, it’s on fire!” Followed by a race to put it out and a wipe of the brow along with a “Hope that never happens again!” refrain at the end.
Question: Is fire, like tornados, just one of these unpreventable disasters that we know are going to strike but never know where or when? Any way to prevent their occurrence or spread? Or would that just cost money that we don’t want to spend?
My guess would be that there’s a great deal of fire prevention work being done in vulnerable areas. I’m thinking of things like controlled burns to eliminate fuel. But the unpredictability of fire, both when it starts and how it moves, makes prediction difficult. Ironically, this is the only one out of the four where it’s possible to prevent it from spreading in a particular direction, at least in theory.
This. You are mistaken if you think of special ways to make buildings able to withstand earthquakes better, which is relativly new and high-tech, and ways to build dams to protect buildings (which goes back to the old Romans or so) and make them fire-proof. With todays tech., we can coat building materials to prevent both water and fire from entering or spreading; we can build special ventilation to get rid of smoke (which is what kills most people in a fire); we can and do (in big govt. buildings) build shutter doors that cut off sections to contain the fire, etc.
Just wanted to add for consideration that “Fire” might be expanded to include “Lightning” which is a force to be reckoned with as well, and which starts many natural fires.
Except for tornados, I’m more fearful and respectful of lightning than anything else. That may be because we get more of lightning than anything else scary from Nature.
I don’t know how residential homes can be designed to mitigate flood damage, but I know that in many areas of the US that are prone to wildfires, building codes require fire-resistant construction and landscaping that keeps large trees and bushes away from the house - so that if the shrubs/trees do light off, they won’t torch the house.
Each of those hazards can be engineered against. It’s not conceptually difficult to make a building withstand a direct hit from an F5 tornado. But it is expensive. More expensive than makes sense for the statistical amount of damage prevented.
The OP uses “fire” but it’s not clear if he/she means wildfire or a building fire. If the latter, they’re ignoring a couple centuries of bulding codes and accumulated experience with building and contents design.
Whole cities used to burn. That doesn’t happen now in the civilized world. Not because of better fire departments rushing in shouting “oh sit, it’s on fire!”. Its because of active & passive design features of cities which make fire much less likely to start & much less likely to spread.
Wildfires are also partly controlled in today’s world. They are a tough problem for a couple reasons. One is the population in wildfire-prone areas is usually pretty sparse & as such it costs a lot per house to prevent. The other is the dichotomy between keeping forests “pristine” and keeping them unlikely to burn.
In the Western US, fire is a natural thing like rain & sun & wind. Any given spot is expected to burn every ~100 years. We can prevent it, but we can’t do that while also not creating side effects. Politically, different groups have different interests.
Aside from the already-existing building and landscaping codes to reduce fire danger, =one thing we could theoretically do is more aggressively stamp out smoking, which provides an ignition source for many fires both indoors and out.
No doubt. But within the past couple months local news had a story of a lightning strike blowing a hole in a roof and striking a man in his chair. Not everybody’s home has adequate lightning protection. And in many cases the “safest place” to avoid being killed by a tornado is in close proximity to lightning hazards like plumbing. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.