What would it take to make U.S. cities fireproof?
What would it take to make U.S. cities fireproof?
The biggest wildfires burning in Southern California are still out of control. The cost of the damage in Los Angeles County keeps racking up — the most recent estimate is $57 billion. If that turns out to be true, that would make this wildfire destruction the costliest in U.S. history.
That’s partly because of climate-driven weather conditions. It’s also partly because of shortcomings in infrastructure. It’s a story we’ve seen in California, New Mexico, Hawaii and more.
Let’s start with the immediate answer: Fire-prone areas could use more firefighters, said Greg Pierce, an urban planning professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“There’s of course a reason why we don’t have more firefighting, because it’s incredibly expensive,” he said.
And most of the time, you wouldn’t need those extra people. For example, the Lahaina fire in Hawaii lasted less than a day.
There’s also the issue of getting enough water to the flames.
“Water systems are, quote, unquote, overdesigned to address your run-of-the-mill house fires, small fires … but not near the capacity that you’d have to have for a wildfire,” Pierce said.
In LA, some fire hydrants ran dry. Pierce said once the fire sparked, it was going to be devastating no matter what.
As for avoiding the devastation next time, Erica Fischer said the key is mitigation. She teaches civil and construction engineering at Oregon State University.
“The whole goal of home hardening and mitigation within the community is to decrease the intensity of the fire and make it so that we can fight the fire,” she said.
And since most buildings are homes, that means getting residents on board. Stephen Collier, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, said one deterrent is cost.
“If we’re talking about home hardening, that that’s tens of thousands of dollars, even hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he said.
Another deterrent, he said, is aesthetic: Residents resist home hardening because they don’t want to destroy the big tree in the front yard or get rid of their beautiful wooden porch.
For better or worse, Collier said the insurance crisis in wildfire-prone areas has started to force these mitigation efforts to happen anyway.
“Whether it’s because you got nonrenewed or because all of a sudden you’re paying $5,000 or $12,000 in insurance … people are just aware that this is something that they need to do because of insurance,” he said.
Collier said the last solution that nobody wants to talk about is rethinking our current land use. Because fewer homes in fire-prone areas means fewer resources spent fighting to save and rebuild them.
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