[infecto]

This narrative about building houses out of sticks also rubs me the wrong way. It's an extremely naive take on why it happens. The reason most homes in America are wood framed is really down to economics. Europe does not have as vast of a forest stock for lumber as the US/Canada does. Over time we have specialized in building wood framed homes and because of lumber, its cheaper.

These homes would have been destroyed regardless of building material. The bigger issue is most of these homes have probably not properly gone through fire mitigation steps.

https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/Safer-from...

[friend_Fernando]

See sibling posts for the cost argument.

> These homes would have been destroyed regardless of building material.

That's just not the case. Fire-resistant construction might not always help the first house at the subdivision's edge, but it will help the rest. One analogy is control rods in a reactor.

As I said in another post, the problem with firestorms here in CA is the rate of initial spread. We always get massive numbers of destroyed structures all at once, and <25% containment until the winds subside. The ignition source for most of the structures are burning wood-frame structures. Early on, firefighters can only help evacuate people.

[infecto]

I don’t think that is entirely correct in the cost angle but it’s ok.

As I said before the homes are of course an issue but the larger issue is basic fire prevention, not the fact that homes are as you say “built out of twigs”. It is certainly a factor but the more important piece are all the other steps that go before as I linked earlier.

[throwup238]

This was a freak event with record wind speeds so basic fire prevention couldn’t help short of bulldozing every other house in the affected neighborhoods and salting the earth. After the Camp fire and the lightning complex fires, California insurers got really serious about fire insurance inspections and mitigation. Problem is that normal mitigation like setbacks and vulcan vents don’t help when Santa Ana winds send fist sized burning embers for up to a mile in front of the fire. Only really expensive and ecologically problematic measures like external Phos-Chek sprinklers would help in that case, which is what saved a few celebrity hokes in the Palisades.

Only well funded commercial and government campuses like JPL or the Getty can afford the kind of fire suppression measures required to defend against a conflagration of this magnitude.