Why Isn't CA Fireproof?

I mean the Houses of course. Given the fire danger i would build with NOTHING that would ever burn, nor would I have ANY plants around my house, WHY? they just attract snakes and scorpions. Color your gravel green, everybody needs a pool and some Koi ponds too, I thought Zen rock gardens were a thing out there

I understand that total fireproofing, particularly in these kind of large area fires, is harder than just saying, but I understand it CAN be done. Why isn't it? And why hasn't it been part of the Building Code heretofore?

 

I, for one, can’t figure out why the power lines are not buried in CA.
I live in a 50 year old neighborhood in Illinois and I don’t see any overhead wires - everything is underground. Chicago proper is a different story - most of the houses outside of downtown are using overhead wires and every time it storms these people lose power.
If the state is so prone to fires, why not bury them, make it a requirement for new construction?

 

I have friends in Orange County who are staunch Conservatives that have gone to great efforts to have in their yard all kinds of native vegetation to provide as much habitat as they can, it's not much but they are providing habitat enough for a threatened native tortoise species. So by all means environment loving liberals should go ahead and clear all the vegetation from around their homes. It's called hypocrisy.

 

No, it's called common sense.If you live in a desert (which CA is) have a desert environment. Deserts do have wildfires, I believe, but big boluses of highly inflammable materials called houses aren't usually found there so they don't usually amount to much, or at least damage much.

Do these friends of yours share their houses with the tortoise, so they can't fireproof the structure, or make it of non-burning materials?

 

I've often thought of this. It would cost several billions, i've been told, And we have to send that money to Ukraine and Afghanistan

 

A better question is they dont practice better land management, such as controlled burns. Prevent a buildup of fuel sources, to begin with. It is effective prevention.

 

Why don't they rake?

 

That's only done in Finland, and even there it's only customary among one tribe, the Dolts.

 

Because most houses don't catch fire due to external exposure to flames. From what I've read most houses burn due to burning embers being blown through cracks and crevices and setting them on fire inside. I've read that short of having stainless steel shutters all over the house that there is little you can do.

You can have all the vegetation cleared up and it will have a good chance of saving your home but few people want the area for 100 yards around their homes turned into a barren wasteland.

 

Note, back in the 1990s I think it was I read about an insurance company that offered special fire protection to homeowners in California. It was expensive. Something like 1-2,000 a month but if fire threatened an insured home the company sent a special twelve man team to the home. Cutting and dragging away all flammable material from near the insured homes. According to what I read the special insurance team saved all seven of the homes they responded to protect plus an eighth home in close proximity to one of those they went to protect.

 

$8T right down the ME toilet.

 

https://www.billygoat.com/na/en_us/products/brushcutters.html

You got to knock it down before you can rake it and haul it out.

 

People that want kindling around their CA home should have masonry walls and metal or tile roofs.

 

Nevada is burning also and the Amazon welcome to the Earth..

 

Can't you have the inside fireproofed too? There are liquids you can spray for like wool and cotton. It might be expensive but worth it

Egypt is an Oases in the Sahara , it hardly ever rains there, why don't they burn down periodically?

 

You try getting an environmental impact statement through the lunacy that is the state epa in California. We're talking people here that are dead set against removing the dead wood from old growth forests that turns them into catastrophes waiting to happen.

 

For the life of me I can't figure how the Amazon RAIN forest could burn very much at all, but it must, they've been clearing it that way for years.

 

Okay first the temperatures inside a good wind driven forest fire can easily exceed a thousand degrees this exceeds the flash point of many common building products, And can even cause conglomerates like concrete to explode.

 

This is what happens when you let politicians do what is rightfully the job of scientists and engineers.

 

So it can burn stone? I understand really high temperatures can badly damage almost anything but it could keep the house from burning down entirely, and particularly prevent the structure from contributing to the overall conflagration all that much. I daresay that not many of the filled pools sustained all that much damage, even when the house burned to ashes.

 

Answer is easy. Most of the homeowners are white and the lefty communist California governments wants them to burn so they can turn the land into Mexican tent cities

 

One suspects that most were well less than half full after theand something like a koi pond would be thee boiling point of water being way less than a thousand degrees and by the way I for one would not want to breathe that air even through a respirator. I don't know what happens when you vaporize water purified with chlorine but it probably isn't good for you.
There are several different types of stone used in construction granite sandstone marble limestone just to name a few, How heat resistant they are and how easily damaged is at least in part a function of their porosity. The more porous they are the more easily they will be damaged by excessive heat.

 

In CA the environmental wackos got it into their heads that fire is part of the natural life cycle of the for forests, and so because leaving dead would about helps fuel fires it must not be moved. The scientific evidence, at least what I've seen thus far, suggest that there is some truth to that but the reality is that the story may well be far more complicated than the supporters of the theory are willing to admit at the moment.

The chief problem with science at the moment, like the chief problem with other human endeavors is that it's human beings doing it.

 

That can actually happen?

 

I know why.