From today’s Washington Post. I recommend that you read the whole story about the fires.
An unidentified motorist was caught in flames outside Santa Clarita, a city north of Los Angeles that summons the iconic suburban landscape of Steven Spielberg movies, its rows of almost identical freshly built houses snugged as close as possible against the surrounding tinder-dry hills.
That boundary defined the topography of the unfolding disaster. Two of the four counties — San Bernardino and Riverside — burning most fiercely this week are among the fastest-growing in the United States, bedroom communities that push what ecologists call the "urban/wildland interface."
The move into the hills is for homes that are more affordable, but they are also more vulnerable. An inventory by University of Wisconsin researchers found that about two-thirds of new building in Southern California over the past decade was on land susceptible to wildfires, said Mike Davis, a historian at the University of California at Irvine and author of a social history of Los Angeles.
"It gives you some parameters for understanding the current situation," Davis said. "Another way to look at it is you simply drive out the San Gorgonio Pass, where the winds blow over 50 mph over a hundred days a year and you have new houses standing next to 50-year-old chaparral.
"You might as well be building next to leaking gasoline cans."
That’s at www.washingtonpost.com. Some amazing stuff in that piece.
7 responses so far ↓
Not quite the same thing, but since you are a blogger now - you might get a kick out of this.
http://queenscrap.blogspot.com
The taking of a single family home, and converting it into 4 apartment/condos - while paving over any greenspace on the property (have to have somewhere to park those SUVs) has begun to take it’s toll on the area - in the form of major flooding.
Give us the means, and we will find the way. Stupid double edged swords!
Thank you for that synopsis of the fires. I will try to crawl out from under my rock and read the entire article at another time. I promise!
Interesting article. So is this what the conservationists call “letting nature take its course”? Does it make sense to let 2/3 of the building take place in the logical path of wildfires?
This is awful, unreal & devastating! It is so sad to see these pictures, not to mention what some of the homeowners, (anybody) is saying as we see the latest news.
This is tragic, God Bless them all !
Joe,
Interesting article, but having lived in that neck of the woods, I have to note that it isn’t a whole lot different from folks living beside the Shenandoah where it floods, in Tidewater where the hurricanes come, in LA where the earth moves, or in the shadow of Mount Rainier which is a dormant volcano… No where is immune. It is more a question of how we build and whether we deal with the immediate environment in an intelligent manner…
But, maybe the topic should be, if I knowingly build/buy there why is it the taxpayer’s burden to bail me out when the predicted outcome really happens???
Win
I feel tremendous sympathy for anyone who has experienced loss, and especially loss due to things beyond their control, like natural disasters. However, the part that gets to me about the fires in CA stems from the fact that they could have been prevented… or at least greatly reduced in scope if only two things had been done. Those forested areas should have been properly ‘managed’ through prescribed burns and balanced thinning to reduce fuels and remove old growth timber. Second, if folks want to live that close to ‘nature’, they must be made to construct at least a 100′ barrier between themselves and the forests they live nearby, while also recognizing that it should not fall to state and federal agencies to unduly risk lives to save property which was built ‘at risk’ in the first place. Most of the property owners could have built their homes elsewhere, but they chose those locations (What’s the avg home cost in that area?) and most of them have adequate insurance to cover their losses. This is a different situation than New Orleans. I applaud conservationists and nature lovers for wanting to preserve the natural, untamed beauty of our forests, but when will they acknowledge that by “letting nature take its course” they submit themselves to not just the good things…, but also the bad. Anyway, enough from up here on my soap box.
I agree. The irony was that the story said those homes were more affordable, presumably because they were built far out from the city and suburbs. I don’t see how they’re more affordable if they have to be built twice, and, like you, I fail to see the wisdom of choosing that location and of making all of us pay the natural consequence of that choice.
It’s like the beach house that gets flooded. I’ll never own a beach house, and if I could afford one, I wouldn’t put it where it’s likely to be destroyed. So those can afford them and build them on the dune line should be responsible for their replacement once they’re gone.
That’s my soapbox moment for today.
After going to the Virginia Tech game last night, I’m focusing my ire on the three-man rush, which I’ve never liked and which once again gave a game that was in hand to a team that had been outplayed for 56 minutes.
Actually, that’s my soapbox moment. Maybe my Lipitor moment, as well.
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