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by marze 519 days ago
Everyone with a fire-hardened house should be feeling good. If all Pacific Palisades houses were fire-hardened, the fire would have burned vegetation but few houses.

Even modest fire hardening would help. If a wood-frame house burns, it is a danger to all nearby houses. Hardening reduces the chain reaction potential.

2 comments

There's just not enough talk about this. This is the actual failure of government, not focusing enough on surviving fires
How is it a failure of government? The people of these areas reasonably have not wanted spend large amounts of their money to prevent unusual disasters like this one. Do you spend that in your community?
the cost would be enormous. it’s in an earthquake zone and it needs to withstand that. there’s already way too few houses for people at a reasonable cost. they’ve already evacuated and only a handful of lives have been lost to the people that stayed behind. it’s not normal santa ana winds it’s the hardest winds i’ve seen here in decades... probably 100 years or more. people are the important thing here.
How effective is fire-hardening in these conditions? And how much would it cost? And finally, does anyone know how fire-hardened structures have actually performed?