An out of control fire in Cape Town, South Afirca I well remember my first few trips to South Africa during the dry season, and seeing many wild fires in and near urban and suburban areas. I was very accustom to wild fires elsewhere in Africa, but not in such heavily populated areas. What struck me as most unusual was seeing fires moving into suburban neighborhoods, but with very little (if any) response by firefighters, and no particular concern among the people living in the houses. Had this been California people would have been running around like headless chickens, on the news telling stories of woe, the Governor would be visiting, firefighters would be everywhere. But no, there was no panic, not much of a response, life was going on pretty much as normal, but with lots of smoke in the air.
So I asked about it. “Why don’t you’all run away when the fire comes?”
It turns out that the fences are made of “asbestos” and the houses are fireproof.
A house in California is engulfed in flames I put “asbestos” in quotes because I’ve learned to not assume that words have the same meaning when translating across languages. In this case, the translation from English to English could easily go awry. For all I know, “asbestos” is a South African English word for “flame proof.”
So, that’s a somewhat interesting difference between South Africa and North America. In South Africa, people seem to understand that if you build your house in an area where there are wild fires, you’d better build a fireproof house. Then relax. In California, people seem to build houses ripe and ready for burning down. Do I have this wrong?
Well, it turns out that the difference is greater than I thought, and more interesting that you might think.
An article coming out in a couple of days in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the houses themselves contribute to making the fires worse in the U.S. The little suburban settlements, with their bushes and garages and homes and stuff, are way more flammable than the trees in the forest. So when a wild fire reaches a settled area, it really takes off, and gets much worse.
Here is the abstract from the article:
Using a simple fire-spread model, along with housing and vegetation data, we show that fire size probability distributions can be strongly modified by the density and flammability of houses. We highlight a sharp transition zone in the parameter space of vegetation flammability and house density. Many actual fire landscapes in the United States appear to have spreading properties close to this transition. Thus, the density and flammability of buildings should be taken into account when assessing fire risk at the wildland– urban interface. Moreover, our results highlight ways for regulation at this interface to help mitigate fire risk.
Hmm, maybe this would be slightly more comprehensible if we went to the press release …. Ah here we go. From UPI:
“There is actually more flammable material in a house per square yard than in a forest,” said University of California-Los Angeles Professor Michael Ghil, co-author of the research. “It makes a tremendous difference whether you fireproof your home or not. Neighborhoods where homes are fireproofed suffer significantly less damage than neighborhoods where they are not.”
Ghil and his colleagues modeled the spread of fires and studied data from forest ecosystems in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin.
“The spread of forest fires is not just an act of God,” said Ghil. “Fireproofing houses can make an enormous difference in whether a fire sweeps through a community or not.”
Praise the Lord for Press Releases…
This paper is an “Open Access” paper in the PNAS, so you can read it here.
And, of course, another solution is to not build your home in fire zones. It’s not as if there is a shortage of land in the United States.
YIKES!
How about we LOG all the DEAD WOOD out of the public lands!
Then the fire won’t spread to the “wildland-urban interface!”
I can remember visiting the new home of a family friend in the Oakland Hills back in the early 1990’s. The friend was a successful dentist with degrees from UC Berkeley and UCSF so presumably he’s a pretty bright guy. However, this home was built on the site where only a few years earlier a forest fire had destroyed the previous house & killed the owners :-0
The new home was built to updated code and presumably is more fire-resistant than the old one had been. But I personally would not feel comfortable living there given its history!
Let’s not even mention flood plains and hurricane-ridden coasts. Tornados can be a real bear, too, I’m led to understand.
By the way, the forest fire that destroyed the previous house probably reduced the fuel load in the area considerably. Fire suppression is actually one of the contributing factors to devastating fires. We spent much of the previous century putting down the flames and letting the fuel accumulate, to the point where some fires simply couldn’t be controlled. With some proper vegetation management, that site probably is much safer now than it was when the first one burned down.
That said, stucco and tile roofs forever!
But there is not much one can do with respect to siting a home … other than not living anywhere between Texas and Minnesota … to avoid a tornado….
Yup, better live on the coasts. Oh, wait. One coast has hurricanes and the other coast has earthquakes. Darn…
Actually, I felt pretty safe in this regard in New York and New England. The North Atlantic sends in a regular supply of storms with heavy snow and medium-strong winds, so that over time everything that is not storm-ready eventually blows down or is crushed, but not all at once. So when the occasional really bad storm comes along, both mother nature and the built environment are relatively tempered. At the same time you are never going to get a Cat-5 landfall and there are hardly any tornadoes.
Here in the midwest the tornadoes are a very real phenomenon and other than the obvious (not living in trailer parks) there is not much you can do.
There was an earthquake measuring approximately 9.0 on the Richter scale just north of Boston back in the 1750’s. If there’s ever another one, the devastation would be enormous. Roughly half of the city is landfill, which would liquefy in a large quake :-0
1755, it was more like a 6.0 or 6.2.
The epicenter was likely to have been near Cape Anne or Gloucester (pronounced “Glough-Sta” or “Glaw-Sta” depending of if you are from Bawston or the Nawth Sho-aw).
It did to a lot of damage, and it is true that about half of Boston City proper is on filled land. Fortunately, the skyscrapers are on pilings that go through the fill, through the till, and into the underlying bedrock. Unfortunately, the underlying bedrock is Cambridge Argylite, not an ideal choice…
But, there is hardly anywhere that does not have this one freaky earthquake that happened once.
BTW, only one earthquake that could be felt is known in the oral and written history of the country of South Africa. One.