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Fire and fury: Blaming the budget is too easy [1]
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Date: 2025-01-11
In the aftermath of the Los Angeles wildfires, the LA fire chief blasted the city for cutting the fire department budget leaving them with insufficient resources to fight this massive fire. Undoubtedly such criticism is warranted at a certain level, but the more fundamental causes of this fire go back much further than recent budget decisions.
Climate change, as well as being dangerous in and of itself, is a multiplier. It exacerbates a number of long-term, problematic tendencies that can lead to disasters like the Los Angeles wildfires.
Problematic tendencies such as building houses in fire-prone regions. According to the documentary Bring Your Own Brigade (which is about the Camp Fire from a few years ago), 40 - 50% of the new houses built in California over the last 20 years are in hazardous fire areas.
This two-hour documentary from 2021 is still available at the above link. The first 40 minutes are footage of the Camp Fire (warning: the burning of Paradise gets very dramatic). The rest is expert analysis.
The experts interviewed make it clear that climate change is only one factor, albeit a major one. There are also other factors like the the Forest Service’s fire suppression policy to protect the investments of the timber barons. The conversion of forests to grassland and grassland to desert, as the Sonora desert moves northward. And several others as well. One expert says that the town of Paradise “was going to burn whether there was climate change or not.”
Yet preventive solutions are already possible. We could build fire-resistant homes, like the one shown in the documentary. This house was left completely untouched by the Camp Fire, while all the others around it burned down. Talking to the filmmaker, the owner of the untouched house calls the burned-down ones “stupid houses.”
So... we could stop building stupid houses. With existing older homes, we could ensure that trees and bushes are farther away, and we could remove gutters. Long-term, we could stop building houses in fire-prone areas.
But none of this is likely to happen on a sufficiently broad scale, for various reasons, some of which are highlighted with depressing clarity in Bring Your Own Brigade.
Thus, “stupid houses” will continue to be built in fire-prone areas, because it’s profitable to do so.
The future
One of the emerging facts about wildfires is that you can’t have your cake anymore and eat it, too. For example, you can’t build an Italian renaissance style house, snuggled in amongst the greenery, located in a hazardous fire area, and expect it to survive like in the old days.
Because the old days are over.
And the future?
I have read the book by John Vaillant, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. I think it gives a foretaste of the kind of world we may be facing.
Vaillant discusses the trend of building houses in the so-called wildlife-urban interface (WUI), which he says has been the “sweet spot” in North American real estate development over the past three decades.
Vaillant describes the WUI as residential areas with “hiking trails out the back door and a scooter-friendly cul-de-sac in front.” Today, he says, more than a third of U.S. homes, and more than half of Canadian homes, are located in the WUI.
Consequently, as the climate continues to warm, fire hazard conditions are set to only grow worse (a point also emphasized by the experts in Bring Your Own Brigade).
How much worse?
Vaillant talks to firefighters who battled the 2016 Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, which can be seen as an extreme case of what the future could bring. The firefighters told him for example that houses in Fort McMurray were burning down in five minutes.
These houses were not small bungalows. We’re talking multistory houses with tiled bathrooms and fully equipped kitchens, and in five minutes they’re gone completely.
One firefighter describes his experience to Vaillant as follows:
“We avoided heat,” Welsh explained to me. “It’s a different type of firefighting: if one house is on fire, you’re going to go in there and try to put that fire out. We didn’t go into any houses. There was no time. There was one point where we were looking at a house—an entire house was disappearing—in five minutes.” I asked Welsh what he meant by “disappear.” His answer was unambiguous: “Fully there, totally normal, to fully gone was five minutes.” “That sounds physically impossible,” I said. “It does,” agreed Welsh. “You throw wood on a campfire and you can sit around that for an hour before it’s just coals. These houses were disappearing in five minutes.”
Another firefighter told Vaillant that houses were disappearing in a similarly short time:
He showed me a picture of a ferocious fire, inside of which the telltale angles of man-made structures were barely visible. “That’s conflagration,” he said. “You’re just not stopping this. It was about three minutes for a house to go. Three minutes.” I wanted to be clear on what he meant. “From something with a roof to—?” “To nothing.”
I wonder if this is the future of wildfires—homes reduced “to nothing” in a couple of minutes. It seems unlikely that fire departments could respond quickly enough if houses are burning down to nothing in such a short time.
Humanity is now releasing CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate ten times faster than the highest rate of the past 250 million years. In a sense, as Vaillant puts it, we have “mortgaged the atmosphere” and now it’s “collecting on those overdue, overleveraged loans.”
You could also compare it to overtaking in a blind curve on a narrow, two-lane rural highway. Maybe most of the time nothing happens; after all, it’s a rural road with little traffic. But if you keep doing over and over through the years, someday your luck will run out.
Trump and the GOP ignore all these warnings, and instead want to double down on oil drilling. They want us to keep overtaking on blind curves.
As one diarist here put it, "Take heart. There will be more fires." There undoubtedly will.
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