Why Fires Spread Quickly in Modern Cities (nature.com) 95
Scientists warn that the devastating fires that killed at least 24 people and destroyed more than 12,000 structures in Los Angeles represent a new type of urban firestorm, distinct from traditional wilderness blazes. In densely populated areas, buildings themselves become fuel, creating a chain reaction of destruction, researchers reported Friday in Nature.
The fires were intensified by steep terrain, powerful winds and a climate pattern of extreme wet-to-dry conditions that created abundant fuel. Researchers say such urban fires are likely to become more frequent as populations expand into wildland areas and climate change accelerates.
The fires were intensified by steep terrain, powerful winds and a climate pattern of extreme wet-to-dry conditions that created abundant fuel. Researchers say such urban fires are likely to become more frequent as populations expand into wildland areas and climate change accelerates.
Oooh ooh me me I know (Score:4, Insightful)
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Because planning boards allow to much density, when it comes to structures that are better fit of low density applications.
There is nothing wrong with a stick built house using mostly wood and common drywall, with plastic siding materials and asphalt roofs. There is a problem when you put 100s of them all lined up with maybe 6 feet between them! That is a going to allow one to ignite the the one next to it easily.
This applies to your typical 3-4-5 apartment buildings complex as much as it does to single fa
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Not sure TFS title makes sense. Many other cities and countries have mentioned that maintaining and cleaning the bushes helps a lot while it wasn't done in California, apparently for ideological reasons. Also, having water to put out the fires helps a lot too. It's the first time in my life that I see fires occurring in a city where they attempt to put them out with water bombers airplanes.
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Re: Oooh ooh me me I know (Score:1)
Nonsense. Next you'll be telling me that firetrucks weren't stopped at the California border because their emissions are too high!
Re: Oooh ooh me me I know (Score:2)
I see Reuters reporting California officials stating SMOG and emissions checks were intentionally skipped for donated or loaned out of state vehicles. Another statement saying zero vehicles were sent back or went unused, and Oregon fire officials confirming all fire trucks they sent to California were accepted and fielded.
Re: Oooh ooh me me I know (Score:2)
I forgot the /s evidently
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Next you'll be telling me that firetrucks weren't stopped at the California border because their emissions are too high!
Here you go: No, California Didn't Turn Away Fire Trucks From Oregon Over Smog Certification [snopes.com]
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It is NOT plausible. The fact that you think it is plausible says a lot -about you.
Re: Oooh ooh me me I know (Score:2)
Next you'll be telling me that the 117 million gallon Santa Ynez reservoir was full of water. Wait... no, it was empty.
Restrictions designed to prevent smoke (Score:2)
It makes way more sense than your response which is just parroting refuted, false, political claims. For example California made it easier to controlled burn a few years ago ...
LOL. Some massive projection going on in your post. Now for a dose of reality:
"The reason California hasn't conducted more of these controlled burnings comes down to existing environmental laws in the U.S. that have posed bureaucratic obstacles to prescribed fires. It often takes years for proposals to go through reviews before any controlled burning can actually take place."
https://www.newsweek.com/contr... [newsweek.com]
The sanitized spin from the CA gov: "Prescribed burning takes place after careful planning and
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Fuck off, Trumper.
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I live in California in a wildfire prone area.
All of the local agencies (fire department, building department, regional planning agency, etc.) are adamant that I need to keep a well defined "defensible space" (clear flammable material) around my house and this is backed up with inspections.
Our "ideology" is to prevent wildfires. What's yours?
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They have plenty of water. California reservoirs are full, the drought ended a couple years ago.
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First off, please stop spreading fake news. Newsom has already addressed all of your misinformation/disinformation here: https://gavinnewsom.com/califo... [gavinnewsom.com]
A lot of the property up in the hills is large private lots, so who is going to clear the brush? California already has the leading forestry maintenance in the U.S. in terms of spend and expertise, and that includes clearing brush. The right-wing media apparatus just heard of this term, "brush clearing", and decided California doesn't do it, and that that
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They had plenty of water, the problem was that water delivery mechanisms were over stressed by the volume of fire fighting. They lost water pressure, basically. No city on earth has a water delivery system capable of delivering the volume of water necessary to put all of those fires out at once.
Re: Oooh ooh me me I know (Score:2)
"There is nothing wrong with a stick built house using mostly wood and common drywall, with plastic siding materials and asphalt roofs. "
There is nothing right about your comment. In serious fires, burning embers can be distributed for MILES by explosions of propane tanks and such, and they can land on asphalt roofs and cause homes to burn down. If you had been in any of these big fire events you might have something useful to add here, but you clearly don't.
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Yes, very true. However, it's not a modern problem, just ask London. Or Dresden.
The more density you allow, the easier it is for fire to spread, so the less flammable materials you should allow.
The building codes in CA actually have improved in this regard since most of those homes were built, so the rebuilds will be an improvement. But we don't go nearly far enough, for example we still permit people to cover roofs with asphalt-based roofing. This is, of course, absolutely insane. We should have mandated m
Re:Oooh ooh me me I know (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oooh ooh me me I know (Score:4, Informative)
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The more density you allow, the easier it is for fire to spread, so the less flammable materials you should allow.
I think this is too simplistic, what is more important is fire proof structures that very strongly resist fire and being set on fire. This means non-flammable exteriors only like metal, ceramic tile, concrete/stucco, cement board, glass, or similar material properly rated. It also means 100% sealing the structure because wind can and does force embers back into houses and attics setting them on fire internally. Further, you create laws restricting vegetation, these dry spells are only getting worse alon
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Take your propaganda elsewhere. This is a lie.
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I've seen TV interviews with a fire chief that confirmed this.
Why would a fire chief lie about her own situation?
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In which municipality was Adam Carolla the fire chief, and for how many years? Oh right, none, so he's been talking out of his ass for over two decades. Got it.
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..or extreme weather and Santa Ana winds. California doesn't have incompetence or underfunded fire depts (see https://gavinnewsom.com/califo... [gavinnewsom.com]) that would increase wildfires, but yes, those could certainly be a problem elsewhere.
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Didn't everyone learn this with the great Chicago fire 150 years ago. One of the reasons bricks in urban areas became more standardized (I believe). That and don't leave lanterns near cows..
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The Chicago fires would not have taught one how to address wildfire conditions in the ex-urbs and greater metro areas built into the hills surrounding Las Angeles. The actual urban areas of Las Angeles *did not burn*. The conditions that caused the severity of the 1871 fire have largely been addressed everywhere already.
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Build like fish in a barrel with no water, this is the result.
Well in this case (Score:5, Informative)
If people are going to foolishly live in Chaparral hills and canyons, rather than the mega-million mansions in style, they might look into living in shipping containers.
Re:Well in this case (Score:5, Funny)
When the main vegetation in the area you build is Chaparral - also known as creosote bush - a plant that has evolved to have burning as an essential part of it's life cycle. What did they think was going to happen.
If people are going to foolishly live in Chaparral hills and canyons, rather than the mega-million mansions in style, they might look into living in shipping containers.
It’s ok, they have been thinned out with eucalyptus. /s
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Altadena, especially, had lots of eucalyptus. Anyone not familiar with it needs to know that eucalyptus trees have two critical properties: 1) they grow fast, and with lots of tiny branches and 2) the wood is so oily it is nearly explosive. At least, as of 40 years ago (when I lived in Pasadena), that was one of the very common trees up the hill in Altadena. People who knew what they were doing spent their lives trimming them to thin them out, knowing how flammable they were.
I suspect that the reconstr
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Altadena, especially, had lots of eucalyptus. Anyone not familiar with it needs to know that eucalyptus trees have two critical properties: 1) they grow fast, and with lots of tiny branches and 2) the wood is so oily it is nearly explosive. At least, as of 40 years ago (when I lived in Pasadena), that was one of the very common trees up the hill in Altadena. People who knew what they were doing spent their lives trimming them to thin them out, knowing how flammable they were.
I suspect that the reconstruction of Altadena will involve a lot fewer of these trees.
Oh yeah, eucalyptus is flammable AF too. I've long said that if people actually want in these areas, they need to take steps to destroy the ecosystem. Eliminate the flammable plants, plant something innocuous, and hope it grows.
It'll be pretty ugly, but otherwise they are just going to have to accept losing their houses, belonging and pets as just part of the price for living in pretty but deadly places.
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Unfortunately, Eucalyptus is not native to CA, and has become invasive growth in a lot of areas. If you've driven by giant Eucalyptus groves anywhere up and down the CA coast, then you'd understand why they get out of hand. But yes, getting rid of them would probably help. You left out that they shed and peel huge piles of kindling as they grow!
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Does not help to put a ton of wood houses into those areas either, this is just adding fuel to the tank!
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Does not help to put a ton of wood houses into those areas either, this is just adding fuel to the tank!
And they wonder why no one wants to insure them
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The second little piggy (Score:3)
and since the wolf was very late,
it seemed like a winining concept
and then the rest of the town also built their houses of wood.
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I built a house out of thin plywood. It burned down. So I built a second one. It got blown away by a hurricane. Then I built a third one. It burned down, got blow away by a hurricane then it was eaten by termites.
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Re:The second little piggy (Score:4, Informative)
Plenty of block-stucco homes also burned down, with just the walls left standing. Turns out the roof vents and soffits, which are there to keep the attic space ventilated to help cool the home and prevent moisture in the unoccupied/unconditioned attic space, is a major issue when you have high winds blowing tons of embers around. There was one house left standing that was all wood exterior however it had a fully finished attic, so no soffits, and hard-scaped around the house. Fire didn't touch it, but everything around it burned down.
Accompanying citation [latimes.com].
This is News? (Score:3)
This has happened before [london-fire.gov.uk], only 348 years ago. For a more recent - and more localised - disaster, enter "Grenville Tower" into the search engine of your choice. Seventy dead because - as stealth_finger put it - "flammable shit is cheaper than nonflammable".
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Wood reacts far better than brick or concrete during an earthquake and fires commonly effecting major urban areas in California is a fairly new phenomenon. Wood made a lot of sense until only just recently.
Densely populated city? (Score:4, Informative)
Malibu, at least going by all of the photographs, is far from being "densely populated". It looks like the typical American suburban layout of single family homes from everything I've seen.
That's not to say the article is wrong about the materials etc, but I suspect a fire wouldn't have swept through, say, downtown LA (which *is* densely populated) given it's all glass, steel, and concrete.
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The vast majority of Malibu is wilderness.
Lets not forget the flammable hills and canyons (Score:2)
Malibu, at least going by all of the photographs, is far from being "densely populated". It looks like the typical American suburban layout of single family homes from everything I've seen.
Well, a suburb in arid highly flammable hills and canyons where crews no longer remove dead brush, where fire roads are unmaintained, overgrown, and currently impassable. Oh, and also a suburb that has predictable annual periods of extremely high winds.
SUBURBS (Score:1)
This was not in a city. Cities are very resistant to fire.
buildings themselves become fuel, ?? (Score:2)
"buildings themselves become fuel" ? How is that anything new. Everything that burns becomes fuel.
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People seem to be very thinking challenged when it comes to this entire incident. The WSJ had to run a whole article the other day about why filling the tanker plans with sea water is/was only a last resort option. Because so many people were asking apparently.
Le May and Mad Bomber Harris proved this out. (Score:3)
Le May in Japan and Mad Bomber Harris in Dresden proved this.
Tokyo's easy "it's all wood."
But Dresden was brick and stone and it still made for a firestorm.
I guess there's a market in getting grant money for studying things which two crazy old men already proved for you 80 years ago.
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Yeah, no (Score:1)
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Fire-resistant building materials exist. But they are not required by code, and thus in many ways don't exist. For example, California only requires a class B fire rating for roofing, despite many class A materials existing. You can even get class A rated asphalt shingles. Nor do they require simple common sense measures. Soffits love to suck in embers and light attics on fire. It's super easy and cheap to prevent this, just install a screen (like a metal mesh) over any openings. But the building code doesn
This is begging the question (Score:5, Informative)
Fires don't spread quickly in modern cities. Fires spread quickly in situations where they are able to spread quickly. Modern cities are actually far more difficult for fires to spread in than older cities, and quite critically this kind of mass destruction has happened throughout the ages and across the globe.
There's even a wikipedia page listing city destroying fires that go back to the ages of when records began: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] It's hard to keep track of the number of times London has been devastated by fire.
Gale-force winds and terrain are one of the biggest contributors to what's going on in LA right now.
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Correct. The whole premise is a troll.
Re: This is begging the question (Score:2)
"it has been well established that global warming is going to *decrease* the santa ana winds associated with this fire"
Anyone who says they know exactly what will happen when you add energy to a chaotic system is full of shit.
Even if it reduces the average Santa Ana, that doesn't mean there won't ALSO be some STRONGER wind events.
Why fires spread quickly in _USAs_(!) cities? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because they build their ultra-flamable houses out of thin plywood and egg-carton(!).
That's just about as much of a total no-brainer as you will find.
If you'd just build your houses so they don't fly away when a hurricane comes or burst into flames when hit by an ember.
Your "houses" very likely wouldn't even count as houses here, let alone get a permit (this is Germany FYI).
Guys, seriously, this isn't rocket-science. AFAICT from here half of LA is gone. The casualties are comparatively low and it's surely a spectacle, but it _is_ painful to watch.
Please, for the love of all that's holy and dear, start building your houses out of bricks and mortar.
You can do this!
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The US was *slower* to adopt building codes. So we have quite a bit of housing stock that wasn't built to modern standards. There are many houses that people with no certif
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Its also helps that most of europe was blown up under 100 years ago. Same reason they have nice trains and such. Had to rebuild them all (with us money)
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Record scratch. California is nice when it's not on fire - or having an earthquake.
Re: Why fires spread quickly in _USAs_(!) cities? (Score:2)
Yeah, make sure you build with brick in prime earthquake country because some one on the Internet said so!
There's lots of options besides sticks and bricks.
Re:Why fires spread quickly in _USAs_(!) cities? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah nah, building your house from brick and mortar is a great recipe for ending up with an burnt out frame standing around. There are plenty of examples of cities built from all kinds of materials (including brick and mortar) which were razed to the ground by out of control fires. Turns out the insides of houses are still flammable, turns out you can't seal houses since doing so makes them a health risk for air quality, fungal growth, etc. Any large enough fire will find a way to fuck up your house regardless of what you build it from.
Why? Cheapest materials used in construction. (Score:2)
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You can get class A rated asphalt shingles. They're not required by code. Nor is ingress protection on soffits or other ventilation openings. "Ingress protection" makes it sound fancy, you can literally just staple a metal mesh over the holes. But it's not required by code.
Cities... (Score:2)
Palisades might be within the LA city limits, but it don't look like 'city'. Suburb, maybe. Density seems to be a factor there.
Will the landowners be allowed to rebuild at the same density? Will they be forced to add fire prevention and safety features? Will that price them out of rebuilding?
Punish the victims. A California Way.
LA is 502 sq miles...world's coolest suburb (Score:2)
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Thank goodness in the US, we have a vast diversity of temperates, land, peoples and general living conditions.
I for one wo
heat (Score:1)
People that have not experienced one of these fires up close seem to be clueless. The issue So Cal is having is a lot about drought, an extended drought, where there is very dry vegetation (all of it everywhere). The second part is the winds. Once you have a fire in these conditions, no matter how it started, the winds carry embers very far. Here is the crux, once your neighbor's palm tree catches fire everything down wind of it is done for - and not only because of embers but specifically because of the h
Cities are designed to be resistant after Chicago (Score:2)
Re: Cities are designed to be resistant after Chic (Score:2)
California deserves whatever it gets (Score:2)
It does not deserve it this time. Climate change was a key element to this disaster and California does well on clean energy: https://decarbonization.visual... [visualcapitalist.com]
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It's not sentiment, it's politics of the most despicable kind. Only the most hateful bigots and sociopaths feel this way.
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Why did rome burn down 2000 years go, why London (Score:2)
Wood being 95% of all houses in a densly populated area. And yes despite the ruins we have left today, 95% of all houses in ancient rome were either wood or had heavy wood structures!
But . . . Regulations! (Score:2)
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Developers rule the roost in Calif. They donate to both R and D, and the crafts unions rule D, and D rules Calif.
old news (Score:2)
As my grandfather used to say, this story had a beard this long when I was this tall.
This has been known since forever, and these fires have occurred since forever. The only thing that has changed is that the zoning laws, especially in California, allow building wood structures so close together that they are essentially the foundation of a bonfire.
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It wasn't always this way. I was in San Diego during the firestorms of the early 00's, and there the fires tended to stop almost dead once they hit the developed areas. But the developments on the edges were typical suburban ones, houses spaced apart with grass lawns between them. That broke up the fuel supply enough that the firefighters could stop the spread from going past the outermost houses. The exceptions were neighborhoods like the Cottonwoods where HOA regulations forbade clear areas around houses,
Not really (Score:3)
In most European Cities, this is basically impossible. Not enough flammable material.
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In most European Cities, this is basically impossible. Not enough flammable material.
I'm guessing you've never seen a house fire with flames spewing out of all the windows, and eventually the roof collapsing inwards. There's plenty of flammable material in a modern European homes.
The problem in California is that there are three potential threats to your home. Fire, wind, and earthquakes. While it would be possible to build homes which could resist all of these threats, (reinforced concrete structures on earthquake dampers) it would cost ten times more than a comparable wooden structure. C