I saw a good commentary about the current disaster situation of the world, that we have the infrastructure that was built for the climate that doesn’t exist anymore. Thus, everything has to be redesigned or, as the article suggests, new building norms are needed for building housing in high risk areas (or not building such housing at all).
Yeah, California already beefed up the building code significantly in 2008, and has another major set of improvements in the works. Problem is that that people (quite reasonably) expect a house to last a century or more, and most of the housing is older than that as a result.
Kinda hard to design your emergency response systems to be ready for biblical apocalypse. Not sure what the plan is for raining frogs or hordes of locusts, but it’s probably insufficient.
The new codes generally require:
- Roofing and siding to be made out of materials that can’t burn
- Vents and holes to be covered with a mesh which keeps out sparks and embers
- Windows to be held in place with materials which don’t fail in fires (if a window falls out, embers blow inside the house)
- Hardscaping for several feet from the house
- Removal of combustable materials such as plants and wooden fences which are too close to the house
- probably a bunch of other details I don’t know about
They’re reasonably effective at keeping houses which are downwind from the fire from igniting; the singleton houses which didn’t burn were built to these kinds of standards.
