More Kalifornia craziness.....California encourages buildings that are sure to burn

[DainBramaged]

Arnie might want to rethink this one. In a classic case of a perverse incentive, California state law actually encourages homeowners to build in brushy canyons prone to massive wildfires like the "Station fire", which burned over 350,000 hectares and destroyed dozens of homes near Los Angeles this month.

In 1968, the state legislature mandated that every property owner must be able to buy affordable fire insurance, no matter how risky their location. An industry-sponsored syndicate, the California Fair Plan, serves as insurer of last resort for those deemed too high-risk for conventional fire insurance. Some 17,400 owners of brushland property now obtain insurance through this route, says Mike Harris, a spokesman for the plan.

That may be a bad idea, because coastal brushland, or chaparral, is naturally prone to infrequent but very intense fires. Unlike in forest, where planned fires can clear out dead wood and keep wildfires small, fire managers can do little to prevent massive fires in chaparral.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17743-california-encourages-buildings-that-are-sure-to-burn.html

[tabatha]

1. Oh, thanks for an accurate description of chaparral,

at last.

[pinto]

4. One key fire fuel in coastal chaparral is creosote bush: an oily low shrub, persistent in drought,

and as flammable as a gasoline soaked rag.

[tabatha]

5. Actually, I thought creosote grew more in desert areas.

Chamise is the highly flammable shrub in chaparral.

[XemaSab]

8. Not to mention redshanks, manzanita, and all the sages

Plus oaks, pines, grasses, all the little forbs... am I leaving anything out? :shrug:

[hunter]

9. You are leaving out eucalyptus! It's not native...

... but it grows a lot of places the chaparral used to grow.

My parents used to live in the chaparral and seeing those trees burn on a neighboring property during a wildfire was amazing. Chevron Oil had planted the trees many years before, Chevron and the oil was forty years gone and nobody had touched the trees since. The trees and the accumulated leaves and branches beneath them went up like giant walls of fire.

[tabatha]

10. Nope,

but I was responding to his mention of a highly flammable bush - which is probably chamise in chaparral.

Eucalyptus is awful in fires, anywhere in the world.

[pinto]

2. Not sure I buy the assumptions in this slim piece. The canyons that fed the Station fire were

scheduled for prescribed burns to reduce combustible low growth - they weren't completed, due to lack of funds or staff, I'm not sure which.

Damage from chaparral fires *can* be minimized by effective no burn (cleared) zones around buildings and inflammable roofing materials.

I don't think the insurance regulations "encouraged buildings that were sure to burn" as the article headline states. People with the money to build in SO CA rural areas will do so, insurance regulations or not. I'd support homeowner compliance with some standard of fire protections.

Also, I support rational wildfire management, which includes controlled burns in developed areas and letting some remote fires run themselves out, as has happened for years and years.

[tabatha]

6. Well, the problem with fires burning themselves out

is that they can then approach homes, especially in the case of sundowners that can grab flames and send them speeding toward the coast where homes are more likely to be built. The wind is a huge factor in not letting fires just burn, because there are very few unpopulated areas - and there are always homes, even if just farm homesteads, adjacent to wildlands.

[juno jones]

7. Inflammable roofiing materials. That's a biggie.

I've been shocked at the number of subdivisions I've seen arid places in the central valley that had cedar shake roofs. A stray spark from any fire source and the thing was ablaze too quickly to save it. Happened to a neighbor of a friend of mine while my husband and I were down visiting her in Lemoore. Some twat shot off a july fourth bottle rocket, it landed on the roof and *poof* there went the house. The firefighters arrived quickly, but it was a total loss.

Maybe the developers in SoCal were more aware of what they were buildingn and where, but I'm not betting on it.

[madrchsod]

3. to bad they did`t read the Spaniards descriptions of the fires

but i suppose that would have stopped anyone from building.