“No one should be permitted to construct homes in the ‘fire plain’ any more than we permit home construction in a flood plain,” says my friend, George Wuerthner. Wuerthner recently edited a book on wildfire policy which included a contribution by me about wildfire budgets.
Now Wuerthner contributes an op ed to the Eugene Register-Guard arguing that “measure 37 exacerbates fire hazards” because it allows people to build homes on their own land in places where Oregon’s land-use laws had previously forbidden such construction.
Wuerthner accurately argues that drought is the main cause of fires in much of the West and that, once fires start in droughty seasons, they are very difficult to suppress. But he adds that, recently, much of the effort to suppress fires has focused on protecting homes that have recently been built in the “fire plain,” that is, in forested areas. “Many recent firefighter deaths are a consequence of trying to save some isolated house or cabin in the woods,” adds Wuerthner.
This isn’t quite true. There were some firefighter deaths last year in a fire aimed at protecting homes in southern California, but these were not “isolated cabins” but suburban homes built in fire-prone chapperal forests. Historically, most of the homes burned by wildfire are in these chapperal forests, which are very different from the Douglas-fir forests of the Pacific Northwest or the forests of just about anywhere else in the country.
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But let’s grant that there are more homes near federal lands. Should such homes be forbidden because the Forest Service doesn’t know how to control its wildfire problems? No, there is a much simpler solution, one that doesn’t force private landowners to suffer from national forest mismanagement.
That is to simply encourage homes in the wildland-urban interface (the technical term for what Wuerthner calls the fire plain) to have non-flammable roofs and to maintain firesafe vegetation within 150 feet around the home. Grass lawns and a few isolated trees with no low-hanging branches are firesafe; thickets of trees and shrubs are not. Homeowners should also be discourage from piling firewood outside their homes.
Forest Service research clearly shows that nonflammable roofs and firesafe vegetation are all that is needed to keep homes from burning, no matter how big the wildfire. So why do we need to ban such homes?
The Register-Guard, which hates measure 37, is eager to have more arguments against the law. But this is not one of them.
Good thoughts, Randall. People have known for thousands of years what burns and what doesn’t. Cavemen didn’t have to worry about their caves burning down in a forest fire. It is stupid to build, buy, permit, insure or finance flammable homes in a forest.
Houses built of concrete with earth covers and steel shuttered windows can survive fires. People inside the fireproof houses can survive the noxious fumes from fires if they have oxygen or compressed air tanks (SCUBA).
Tad,
I appreciate your comments, but you are greatly exaggerating the requirements for firesafe homes. Wood homes can be perfectly safe from wildfire provided they have nonflammable roofs and the vegetation around them is cleared.
The two main ways fires spread are by firebrands — burning embers that are blown by the wind — and radiant heat. Firebrands are a danger if they light on your roof, which is why you need a nonflammable roof.
Radiant heat is a danger to your walls. The way to avoid that danger is to clear most of the flammable vegetation within 100 to 150 feet of the home. A grassy lawn is okay as well as some isolated trees and shrubs. Piles of firewood, thickets of trees with low-hanging branches, and dense shrubs are not okay.
During a fire, people may need to evacuate to avoid smoke inhalation. But I’ve known many people who refused to evacuate and did quite well in the face of otherwise devastating fires.
For more information download articles by Jack Cohen, the Forest Service researcher who showed that the most cost-effective way to protect structures is to make the structures fire safe, not to treat the public forest lands.
“No, there is a much simpler solution, one that doesn’t force private landowners to suffer from national forest mismanagement. That is to simply encourage homes in the wildland-urban interface (the technical term for what Wuerthner calls the fire plain) to have non-flammable roofs and to maintain firesafe vegetation within 150 feet around the home. Grass lawns and a few isolated trees with no low-hanging branches are firesafe; thickets of trees and shrubs are not. Homeowners should also be discourage from piling firewood outside their homes.”
I’m not sure that “encourage” and “discourage” are strong enough, especially if such measures increase the costs of building and maintaining the home. Homes are routinely built in flood-prone areas without voluntary flood mitigation features that add to constructions costs.
Why not require the use of such features? You refer to these voluntary measures as a “solution”, but how are they solutions if they’re not used? I would think that protecting the lives of the homeowners, their neighbors, and firefighters is sufficiently important to justify regulatory intervention to require the use of the safety features you mention in order to secure a building permit. Do you really oppose all building standards and regulations? Do you really think everything should be voluntary?
First, this a great website/blog.
Second, in the Idaho Panhandle you cannot get insurance for your house if you don’t adopt many of the measures antiplanner describes above. The same holds if you build outside of a fire district boundary; the counties themselves won’t stop you from building – but you cannot count on having any fire protection service.
The volunteer fire department in Bonner County also encourages people who live outside towns, but within the fire district, to also make sure that the road(s) leading to their property are accessible to fire equipment. Apparently many people who live in the forests like to have trees immediately adjacent to their homes and to have small, overly twisty roads that cannot handle emergency equipment. As a result their homes burn while the fire department is still trying to make it up the road to their house.
Thanks to SKPeterson for your comments. You are right: the insurance companies are beginning to require that homes be firesafe. This is new: until 2000 or so, there were just too few houses burned in the wildland-urban interface for them to bother. But the Los Alamos fire woke them up.
Which is why we don’t need government regulation to require that people’s homes be fire safe. If they want insurance, they will have to make them fire safe. (Or there may be some insurance companies willing to sell them insurance at a higher premium if they aren’t fire safe.)
What the government could do is say, “We will no longer go to extraordinary lengths to stop fires from burning your home. So you better make it fire safe.” Enforcing that, however, will require divorcing fire funding from Congress, because as long as Congress signs the check members of Congress will insist that the Forest Service protect everyone’s homes regardless of the cost.
Should everything be voluntary? No. But before we mandate solutions to every problem, we should explore alternatives to see if some voluntary solution would work better without the unintended consequences of mandates.
“But before we mandate solutions to every problem, we should explore alternatives to see if some voluntary solution would work better without the unintended consequences of mandates.”
That’s perfectly reasonable. But you seem to give the impression that either (1) we’re just getting started at this thing called “society” and thus don’t have any evidence regarding the willingness of the private sector (in this case, developers, builders, homebuyers, etc.) to adopt voluntary safety measures that increase the costs of building and buying homes, or (2) that we do have such evidence, the preponderance of which indicates that the private sector IS typically willing to voluntary increase their own costs (and decrease their own profits) in the name of protecting against uncertain threats (e.g. wildfires, floods, etc.). Neither of those claims seems reasonable to me.
Wanting people to do the “right thing” voluntary is an ideal. To a large extent, the existence of government is a reaction to the reality that people don’t always choose to do the right thing (however it’s defined). You seem to impute altruistic motives to real estate folks, and give the impression that they would love to reduce their own profits voluntarily if only government wouldn’t force them to. That seems naive. From what I’ve seen, developers are generally “profit-maximizers” who seek to minimize costs and only do what is necessary to get the project built. There are no doubt some who pay out of their own pocket to do better, but I view them as the exceptions.
You are correct about me, Randall, I sometimes go to extremes on safety. I have been a skier and ski jumper, a bicycle and motorcycle rider. I started wearing a helmet when riding motorcycles in 1959, long before helmet laws. My five patents are on motorcycle safety inventions.
My family lived on a ridge next to a canyon in San Diego in a house with a cedar shake roof. I was concerned about firebrands igniting our roof if a canyon fire were to come up through our backyard. I was glad to replace that roof with one with asphalt shingles. Those old shakes really burned easily in the fire rings on the beach. About the same time we replaced our roof California outlawed new shake roofs.
I have heard stories of forest firefighters who survived being overrun by fires by lying down under a fire blanket and other stories where they didn’t survive under the fire blankets.
I suppose it is a matter of how much one wants to pay and what level of risk is acceptable. People are irrational about safety and health. As examples look at death statistics – in the USA thousands are killed each year by fires, traffic accidents, sports injuries; hundreds of thousands by hospitals (bad drugs, medical mistakes) and unhealthy lifestyles (putting wrong things or wrong quantities in our bodies, not exercising enough).
Some people don’t want to disturb the forest by clearing the land and putting in roads accessible by fire trucks; they want to drive their jeep to their little cabin under the trees. I say let them live that way but make their cabin fireproof.
I also say let people live on the floodplain, as long as they live in a house that floats and has debris guards to keep the flood debris from hitting their anchor rodes and making their home float downstream. (I am designing a typhoon -proof housebarge.)
“What the government could do is say, “We will no longer go to extraordinary lengths to stop fires from burning your home. So you better make it fire safe.†Enforcing that, however, will require divorcing fire funding from Congress, because as long as Congress signs the check members of Congress will insist that the Forest Service protect everyone’s homes regardless of the cost.”
I meant to comment on this earlier, but forgot. It doesn’t seem realistic to me to expect government agencies and politicians to refuse to help someone whose house is burning down, even if they previously claimed that they wouldn’t provide such help. It’s all well and good to warn people ahead of time that you’re not going to put out their fires and so they better make their house resilient to flames, but when the fires starts, it doesn’t look so good for politicians wanting to get re-elected and/or move up in life if they refuse to help. Unless I’m mistaken, it’s not uncommon for the federal government to help people rebuild from flooding even if those people didn’t have flood insurance. Government responds not only out of political expediency, but also out of genuine compassion.
“I also say let people live on the floodplain, as long as they live in a house that floats and has debris guards to keep the flood debris from hitting their anchor rodes and making their home float downstream.”
Do you mean to communicate the belief that people should be allowed to place themselves at risk if they want to? That is a fairly common belief that rears its head in the context of natural hazard mitigation. It appears to rest on an assumption that is problematic in my view.
Assumption: “Individuals who locate in risky areas are only imposing costs upon themselves.” This is a problematic assumption because it’s not true. If you build in a floodplain, chances are you will displace floodwaters that would have flown where your building is but now must flow elsewhere, possibly onto neighboring properties. Also, pieces of your building can break off and become battering rams for other buildings. Plus, developing in floodplains can harm the natural features of floodplains that serve to reduce the incidence and severity of flooding, not to mention that serve as habitat for wildlife. Finally, I may be wrong, but I’d have to think that taxpayers play some role in helping people whose homes are destroyed by flooding. Together, these issues argue against the notion that individuals who choose to locate in floodplains are only subjecting themselves to risk.
To D4P:
When I wrote, “..a house that floats and has debris guards..” I meant a house that wouldn’t be damaged by a flood or be a hazard to anyone else’s property downstream. Did you miss the “housebarge” and “debris guard” parts?
People take risks all the time. It is part of life. We have financial risks, relational risks, health risks. Most of us are irrational about risks because we are confused by the media or our own ignorance. Many cigarette smokers are afraid of flying, for example. Many overweight people are afraid of walking and biking but those activities would extend their lives. If you drive a car you are endangering other people. How much you endanger them depends on where and when you drive, what you drive, and how well you drive.
Good engineering can solve a lot of problems such as making homes safe from the forces of nature. There are many other problems such as irrational thinking where engineering doesn’t help much.