Except that the intact home that you’d come back to would now be located in an unpleasant charred landscape for several decades. It might be better to set the extra money aside and build a cheaper home that will burn when the trees burn.
It might even be cost effective to add a high pressure misting system to trees close to the house. they’re not that expensive depending on how many trees are involved.
Then those people can just STFU when their houses burn down because they put them out of reach of emergency services.
How do you work that out compared to other disasters? There really isn’t anywhere that you live that is free of hazards. In my town we built a massive dam system to mitigate 500 year floods but that’s pretty rare. (flood size that only happens every 500 years). It covered many counties so it was a massive project that couldn’t be reproduced today.
It’s a trade-off, just like most of Life. I sympathize on the wild fire, since 2 years ago I was under evacuation warning for the El Dorado fire for a week. But building up-slope in a fire area far removed from any services just for the view is a bigger swap than I’m willing to make. There is also a massive USA CoE dam in the nearby mountains to prevent another 500 year flood like the one that drove the Mormons back to Utah in the 1800s. I’m also smack-dap on top of the San Andres fault. I mean dig straight down and you’ll hit it. I may the insurance, secure everything in the house that I can and hope The Big One hits New Madrid again instead of SoCal.
Our area burned while we were building our house. The house survived, but most of our property was burnt and 30 of our neighbors lost their homes. It’s very surprising how quickly it’s coming back, 2 years later.
We built with a fire-proof roof, no soffit vents, tempered windows, metal and fire-resistant siding, an irrigated buffer and I own a tractor with a 6’ mower, a generator, and a pump… Basically there’s almost nowhere in the intermountain west that is safe from fire. Maybe the compete deserts? All of MT, ID, CO and WY is fire country. Most of CA, UT, OR, WA and NV is also. Relocating a hundred million people would be tough.
Feasible or desirable according to who? The owner of the house?
People living in high rise apartment buildings pay* for the building’s fire protection. The FD can’t really extinguish a kitchen fire on the 37 floor, so you have sprinkler systems, smoke detectors, fire extinguishers.
If you want to live far away from a public road in the wilderness, the onus should be on you to make that place as safe as possible. If you want emergency services, then those supplying that should have a say.
Hence, a moat.
*Either when they bought it or through rent.
Right, so we start with fire prone, but how about Hurricane prone and then flood prone and etc. Soon, you can’t build anywhere.
IF - and it’s a big if - someone who does that subsequently hires an electrician to go over their work and suggest/make needed corrections I’d be OK with that… but how often do people do that?
Build far enough out and you can legally do that, but that doesn’t mean you should do that.
The landscape won’t remain “charred” for decades - regrowth starts quickly. You’ll have a lot fewer trees, that is true, and you might want to take down burned timber before it falls on your house or you. It will be a different landscape.
As far as fireproofing - build out of concrete, stone, metal, etc. instead of burnable stuff like wood. Won’t look as picturesque as a log cabin, but that’s the breaks. Speaking of breaks, you’ll want a firebrake around your home, a swath free of trees, vegetation mowed short, etc. And other suggestions made here.
Oh, sure, the building codes in any given place should require mitigation against whatever sort of disaster is likely in that place. That’s perfectly reasonable. I was commenting on the idea that people shouldn’t build in disaster-prone places at all.
Regrowth starts, but the blackened trunks of large trees remain for a long time, certainly more than 10 years. Some standing, some fallen in a ugly mess. And you won’t have anything resembling the canopy of the mature forest where you built your house for many decades.
Feasible for the government. If you own 25,000 acres in the wilderness, the government isn’t able to send out inspectors to find out where you may have built a house, hunting lodge, fish shack, or guest cabin.
On the other hand, you won’t have a flammable forest canopy literally hanging over your head, either.
Yes, it will be a different landscape. Nature is like that sometimes.
Yes, different as in unpleasant for humans to live in. I’m not criticizing the processes of nature, for goodness sake.
I’m in Bend, Oregon right now, I’ve been hiking around the Sisters Wilderness. The Pole Creek fire was exactly 10 years ago. There are photos of the area here, including some recent ones. Bear in mind that charred deadfall has been actively cleared from the trail here. Nice mountains, but I don’t think most people would want to build their dream house and live among the dead trees here for a few decades more.
https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/oregon/middle-sister-via-pole-creek-trail-4072/photos
Sure–there’s an austere beauty there. Some of the burns around SW Montana are breathtaking.
There are people who think the prairies are horribly ugly.
There are people who think deserts are horribly ugly.
Rinse and repeat for most landscapes.
If you build in a forested wilderness area wildfire is a known risk, just like living where I do tornadoes are a known risk, and in California earthquakes are a known risk, and in Hawaii volcanoes and lave flows are a known risk. If you can’t handle a particular risk live elsewhere.
Does that mean that no building codes apply?
No, you must get a septic permit and an electrical permit, assuming there is a toilet and power inside of it, but that’s it.
The couple in the article really wanted a log cabin (log mansion?), and it did look beautiful, but…Yeah. Flammable af.
We were not disputing whether beauty is subjective. We were talking specifically about the appearance of a burned forest after a decade or two. Look at the recent photos of the 2012 Pole Creek fire that I linked to. What proportion of people who wanted to live in a forest do you really think would be happy with living in a place that looks like that?
I’m the one pointing out the risk of what a forest landscape will look like for decades after a fire. You were the one minimizing the change.