Environmentalists Block Fire Management in Yosemite

Cherokee Nuneswrote:

The thing to remember about defensible space around your property is the defense part. It's supposed to provide space and time to those who may be defending your home from wildfire, whether that's you with a garden hose or a team of firefighters making a last stand to save your neighborhood.

There's no promise, much less a guarantee, that maintaining a defensible space around your home will prevent your home from catching fire. But itnshould be part of a fire defense system, as should back up power, water availability, irrigation, fire-resistant building design and materials, etc. 

And even in the Paradise area, there were well defended homes that were saved. But those homes were not packed into tiny lots next to dozens of other homes that had little to no defensible space around them.

This. Defensible space isn't going keep your home from burning down, but it gives firefighters a chance to protect it. Its a triage system for protection. Look around the neighborhood and evaluate what can be done at each place with the time, equipment, personnel available. If all that needs to be done is a sprinkler system to protect a home that's easy and quick install with only a few people. If they have to do 4 hours of saw work just to get a look at how to protect a structure, that's a big time investment. If a road into a neighborhood is super winding, narrow, and there's no available water store that could be a no go all together due to firefighter safety concerns.  

Bolting Karenwrote:

This. Defensible space isn't going keep your home from burning down, but it gives firefighters a chance to protect it. Its a triage system for protection. Look around the neighborhood and evaluate what can be done at each place with the time, equipment, personnel available. If all that needs to be done is a sprinkler system to protect a home that's easy and quick install with only a few people. If they have to do 4 hours of saw work just to get a look at how to protect a structure, that's a big time investment. If a road into a neighborhood is super winding, narrow, and there's no available water store that could be a no go all together due to firefighter safety concerns.  

Just like wearing a mask at the grocery store?

Princess Puppy Lovrwrote:

Do you have evidence that fire hardening your own home makes it more wildfire proof? . 

Uh… yeah. There have been hundreds of real world examples of how fire mitigation lowers the risk of your home being burned in a wildfire. Conflagrations are different. Though they too are, to an extent preventable. Fuel breaks, wide clearance around your home, materials and suppression equipment (hoses, sprinkler systems) all play a role in that. You can’t tell me it has no or even little effect. I’ve seen a single person with a garden hose prevent his house from burning while all his neighbors houses were on fire. His house was well prepared with 500ft clearance and no close neighbors. I’ve also seen well cleared homes burn. But there was always an ignition source. A pile of wood, storage shed, pine needles in the roof valleys, under the deck etc. 

You are right though. Most of the property needing attention isn’t privately owned, or at least not by a home owner. Most of it is either state owned, or owned by a timber company. And yes, both share in that responsibility. The solution is multi tiered in in that capacity. Though there are many other facets involved. The individuals living in those areas need to prepare their own properties best they can. Then the communities need to prepare the lands around and within them, which brings us to the state, which needs to help and allow various mitigation strategies to be done, as well as find solutions, funding and ways to clean up the areas extending from those communities outward.

Unfortunately, some of the best methods like using logging companies, selective harvesting, prescribed burning, chipping, biomass fuel and yes, even prison labor are unfavorable to some. People fear what they don’t understand after all. So nothing gets up and rolling. We’ve known fire suppression was a time mob for 50 years and did nothing. Now that it’s blowing up, everyone wants to place blame on something or someone else. Same as it ever was. At this point, it’s all going to burn. Your favorite climbing areas, historic towns and beautiful vistas. It will all burn soon. Hopefully they can save some patches here and there so you can remember what it used to be like. 

Down here in Australia we seem have a longer history of both hazard reduction burns (starting controlled fires in calm cold weather on purpose, to burn up deadwood and undergrowth) and back burns (starting fires out in front of uncontrolled wildfires to burn up the fuel before they arrive)

We start a LOT of fires on purpose and there's a long backlog of prescribed burns every winter (ironically if winter is too wet, its often described as a bad thing for the next summer fire season, as they can't do as many hazard reduction burns). To the point the Rural Fire Service is joking called the "Rural Fire Starters".

 While I guess this is pretty progressive management compared to the USA, it definitely has disadvantages. It's a big risk if things get out of control - fire-fighters have been injured, died, and prescribed burns have escaped containment and turned into damaging wildfires. It's always awful when fire-fighters die in line of duty, but it's particularly awful when the fire was started on purpose.

Secondly, as hazard reduction burns are done on calm days, the smoke hangs around and is often capped by an inversion layer, producing awful, Beijing quality smog. It was once estimated that 16 deaths are caused a year in Sydney from inhaling hazard reduction burn smoke. It's better than the smoke from real wildfires, but it's still pretty bad, again it's more annoying when the fire was started on purpose.

Thirdly, if the fire is bad enough, in extreme conditions, it roars right through whatever pissweak preparation you thought you managed. Weeks of hazard reduction burns, back burns, fire breaks, cleared gutters, up-to-date modern house construction, that pink fire retardant powder they drop from the air, worth very little for the truly catastrophic fires.

Tradibanwrote:

Just like wearing a mask at the grocery store?

What?

Bolting Karenwrote:

What?

It's an analogy.

Salamanizer Skiwrote:

Uh… yeah. There have been hundreds of real world examples of how fire mitigation lowers the risk of your home being burned in a wildfire. Conflagrations are different. Though they too are, to an extent preventable. Fuel breaks, wide clearance around your home, materials and suppression equipment (hoses, sprinkler systems) all play a role in that. You can’t tell me it has no or even little effect. I’ve seen a single person with a garden hose prevent his house from burning while all his neighbors houses were on fire. His house was well prepared with 500ft clearance and no close neighbors. I’ve also seen well cleared homes burn. But there was always an ignition source. A pile of wood, storage shed, pine needles in the roof valleys, under the deck etc. 

Maybe I was being a bit dramatic but I think trying to mostly manage a fire with personal responsibility is similar to managing heart disease with diet alone; while it helps, it seems the least important of the possible management strategies. 

The issue is that the boundary between examples and actual data is problematic. Even 200 examples I wouldn't really count as good data. The datasets we have so far indicate the most significant factors of predicting wildfire destruction/damage are what I listed earlier (WUI). Often there is a disconnect between the science in a study and the real world implication. One possible disconnect, is that no one studies non total destruction factors of homes. For single homes that survive while all others burn, we often see extremely significant smoke damage. Like 150k on a 600k home. Which even perfect fire suppression doesn't really help. We also often see neighbors trees catching on fire and falling on an adjacent house. In these cases often we see a home with good fire protection is damaged. 

You are right though. Most of the property needing attention isn’t privately owned, or at least not by a home owner. Most of it is either state owned, or owned by a timber company. And yes, both share in that responsibility. The solution is multi tiered in in that capacity. Though there are many other facets involved. The individuals living in those areas need to prepare their own properties best they can. Then the communities need to prepare the lands around and within them, which brings us to the state, which needs to help and allow various mitigation strategies to be done, as well as find solutions, funding and ways to clean up the areas extending from those communities outward.

Absolutely!

FrankPS wrote:

We were talking about protecting homes. Now, you've changed to talking about stopping/preventing wildfires. Different subject.

Post limit!

Edit: I don't think anyone claimed "defensible space" stops 100% of home fires. But it gives you a better chance, increases your odds and allows firefighters to possibly defend your home. Of course it won't stop some conflagrations from destroying your home. Tell Cal Fire it doesn't help. Ha ha.

Yeah but the whole point I was trying to make is that personal responsibility isn't the most effective home protection approach. In a thread discussing homes burning down, discussing wildfires is a proxy to that discussion. Sure fire proof your home, but I think most agree that managing the forests is more important. If homes were the worst catalyst of wildfires, we would see far more homes burn down do to poor maintenance (protection class and other insurance industry metrics) than other homes with good classifications. We do see this for normal fires, however not wildfires.

Bb Cc wrote:

Fire that burns up versus fire driven sideways. The same affect happened in Paradise (canyon channeled high winds) with homes lighting up like briquettes in a bbq. Very horrific, again lots of videos around.

Also the Beachie Creek fire on Oregon.  "The winds were 50-75 miles per hour, and the fire growth rate was about 2.77 acres per second in areas of the Beachie Creek fire. This allowed the fire to reach over 130,000 acres in one night."

Princess Puppy Lovrwrote:

Yeah but the whole point I was trying to make is that personal responsibility isn't the most effective home protection approach. In a thread discussing homes burning down, discussing wildfires is a proxy to that discussion. Sure fire proof your home, but I think most agree that managing the forests is more important. If homes were the worst catalyst of wildfires, we would see far more homes burn down other homes. 

Well yes, you are correct, and I don’t think anyone is trying to argue otherwise. But I see a lot of people siting conflagration as an example of why fire mitigation and home preparation doesn’t work. Again, conflagration (a large fire which sweeps through an urban interface)  is something totally different. The threat of those can be reduced too, but once they start, they are very difficult to stop. Colorado Springs is a good example of a place which has taken those preventative steps after a devastating fire swept through there years ago. The Bear Creek fire in Ashland OR, Paradise, Greenville are good examples of the opposite. Though not many saw it coming, the Bear Creek greenway was an overgrown mess which served as a fire highway when the perfect conditions of dry, hot weather and extremely high winds pushed the fire up that fuel laden wind tunnel, creating a blast zone for Phoenix. Paradise and Greenville everybody saw coming. The forested lands around and within those communities was long known to be a risk of conflagration. All of them had projects in the works, but little to nothing actually got done for various reasons. Kool is another one which hasn’t burned yet. It’s a well known hazard, so is Murphys, Downieville and many of the small towns along the HWY 49 corridor. Most of them have projects “in the works” too. We’ll see I guess.  

Santa Rosa lost whole neighborhoods, and that was suburban, I believe. I remember a fire in the Oakland hills 30 years ago that was really bad, not sure how wooded it was.

The Oakland fire was in 1991 and 2,843 single family homes and 437 apts./condos were destroyed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_firestorm_of_1991

It must have been studied and something learned from it. From the wiki: 

On June 12, 2008, a brush fire ignited in almost the exact location of the starting point of the 1991 fire, but owing to a rapid response, the preventive measures implemented after the 1991 disaster, and the lack of significant winds, the fire was confined to 2 acres (0.81 ha), with no damage to any structures, and was extinguished within 90 minutes.[12]

In 2015, a $4 million federal grant to prevent fires in the Oakland Hills ignited debate over whether to cut down trees in the region. The city and its fire department say clearing young eucalyptus trees and other non-native plants would deter another deadly firestorm like the one that whipped through the hills in 1991