PG&E is not the electric utility in that part of California. Outside of the city of Los Angeles, it’s Southern California Edison. L.A. has its own Department of Water and Power.
Got it, thanks. I’m sure their lawyers are having lots of meetings.
And here they go.
It seems to me a utility that’s paying out so much money in lawsuits that it goes bankrupt does not really have the finances to begin a major effort to bury transmission lines - which brings its own set of hazards in areas prone to landslides in wet years, not to mention people getting all upset over the mess when treed and lanscaped areas are being dug through with trenches.
Well, PG&E, which serves most other areas in California, has been heavily sued and been thru bankruptcy, but is progressing with their undergrounding plan.
But as far as I can tell, when a building burns up like that from the inside, the fire is more or less contained in its footprint, right? From what I understand, the fires right now are basically operating as a chain reaction - houses burn down, the wind blows the embers to the next block of house, which burn down themselves, and so on and so on. That wouldn’t happen with concrete buildings. Maybe one solution is for the county to have strips of high-rise apartment building blocks built that would serve as “firebreaks” between wooden neighborhoods?
The heat from those wildfires is insane. Fire “resistant” is not fire “proof”, and I can’t imagine any fire resistant home that could withstand that kind of inferno.
It’s not about protecting houses - it’s about protecting the next block of houses. Concrete buildings might burn, but they don’t create flying embers that spread the fire further. Strategic placement of less-flammable buildings can help limit the spread of wildfires, IMHO.
Ah, okay, thanks!
I don’t think structures have ever been a significant source of the flying embers that make these wind fueled fires so devastating. Every neighborhood essentially has a fuse made of palm trees (100,000 in LA alone) that connect to a wilderness area. Even if that wasn’t the case, 80mph winds and the embers they carry are not going to be thwarted by any wall of high rise structures unless the buildings are built to record breaking heights.
Don’t forget the eucalyptus trees. Those are so full of oil that they quite literally can explode.
Eucalyptus trees are known to explode during bush fires due to vaporised eucalyptus oils producing an explosive mixture with air.
When you burn eucalyptus logs they give off an oily smoke that leaves a sticky residue on anything it touches, and occasionally they will violently splinter off producing a shower of hot, sticky embers. The wood makes great kindling because it will burn even when moderately wet but you definitely don’t want a eucalyptus tree on fire near your house.
Stranger
I’m not really putting too much stock in the construction materials there as to why it was safe. Fires don’t behave predictably and there’s plenty other examples of singular houses untouched in a burn down neighborhood. If you notice in the picture the neighbor’s garage is similarly unburnt.
Few of us would want to live in a Maginot Line-type bunker, and that’s what it would take to be fireproof, plus eliminate all vegetation.
Experience in the Australian bushfires was that embers could readily travel for kilometres ahead of the main fire front, although most fell within the first few hundred metres. That’s from full eucalyptus forest, but even street trees will produce the same effect at lower density.
The only good reason to stay in an approaching fire is to deal with embers landing on your roof and guttering while the fire brigade is still busy two blocks away. The messages we get at the start of fire season are always to clean out your gutters and anything combustible around the house because of ember risk.
This is misrepresented. There are unaffected trees behind and on the far side of the unaffected home.
The siding appears to be wood, which is never fireproof. The roof structure is almost certainly unventilated/polyurethane foam insulated. Fire most often spreads by running up the siding and entering the attic through the soffit. No attic certainly reduces vulnerability to fire. Fire code here in Alberta requires unvented soffits and fire rated sheathing facing adjacent properties, I assume the same code was propagated across North American municpalities. Other than that the air tightness of a net zero home is going to have some advantage over conventional construction by limiting opportunities for fire to enter and pass through, but I doubt it is much of an advantage.
Fire breaks, non combustible finishes and substrates have obvious advantages. Fire suppression systems are becoming more common for single family residential. I don’t know a lot about cobstruction in LA, but I would think there is already a high use of masonry and other non combustible building products. I don’t know that a whole lot more can be done when there is a wall of fire moving through a neighbourhood.
I look at a lot of house fires. My role is mostly to provide scope of repairs and estimate, but I am in the loop with the fire department, investigators and engineers. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to observe how a fire tears through a home though.
Yet the experts think otherwise. Embers from the vegetation AND from structures are how this spreads so quickly given high winds.
Similarly, after hurricanes in Florida, there is footage on the TV news showing a devastated community with one or two houses remaining standing. There are definitely things that can be done to make homes resistant to whatever disaster is likely in that area.
Same thing happened on Long Beach Island NJ during superstorm Sandy. It just usually had little to do with individual house construction, similar construction each of the homes, but just where the bigger crests happened to fall.
And people still paying top dollar for homes there.
Yeah…down here in South Florida it’s not uncommon to refer to a house as pre-Andrew or post-Andrew building code, when discussing hurricane resistance status.
Hurricane Andrew wiped pretty much wiped Homestead off the map.
That said, it’s still a different ball game compared to the intensity of those fires.