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Streamline rebuilding after the LA fires? Yes but . . .

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced that permitting will be streamlined for anyone rebuilding a home after the LA fires. For some reason conservatives are taking a weird victory lap over this, which is kind of crazy. Have they ever paid attention to a natural disaster in California before? Permitting is always streamlined. And for homes near the coast, the enabling act for the Coastal Commission has always said no permission is needed as long as you rebuild to about the same size as the house that was destroyed.

So there's nothing to this. But I still need to be a spoilsport. There's no way we're going to stop people from rebuilding in fire prone areas, but there's something we can do: insist that new homes be hardened against fire.

Here's the thing: In fires like the ones in LA, most of the damage is caused by showers of burning embers that are blown into neighborhoods by strong winds and then spread from there. These embers can travel a mile or more, so clearing brush at the wildland-urban interface won't do much when winds are as heavy as they were last week. The only thing that works is hardening every house within a mile or two. This includes things like fire-retardant roofs and siding, automatic sprinkler systems, cleared zones around property lines, and so forth. And it has to be done universally for it to be effective.

So yes to streamlining rebuilding permits, but with one exception: every house has to be rebuilt to fire-hardening standards. This costs money and won't be popular, and for that reason it probably won't get done. But it's the only real answer. If we ignore it, this will happen all over again no matter how many airplanes we buy or how big our reservoirs are.

The LA Times ran a good piece about this a few days ago based on interviews with Jack Cohen and Stephen Pyne, a pair of experts on urban fires. Here's an excerpt:

“The assumption is continually made that it’s the big flames” that cause widespread community destruction, [Cohen] said, “and yet the wildfire actually only initiates community ignitions largely with lofted burning embers.”

Experts attribute widespread devastation to wind-driven embers igniting spot fires two to three miles ahead of the established fire. Maps of the Eaton fire show seemingly random ignitions across Altadena.

“When you study the destruction in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, note what didn’t burn — unconsumed tree canopies adjacent to totally destroyed homes,” he said. “The sequence of destruction is commonly assumed to occur in some kind of organized spreading flame front — a tsunami of super-heated gases — but it doesn’t happen that way.”

“In high-density development, scattered burning homes spread to their neighbors and so on. Ignitions downwind and across streets are typically from showers of burning embers from burning structures.”

....The 1991 Tunnel fire in the Oakland and Berkeley Hills marked the start of the modern era of urban fires, destroying 2,843 homes. More recently, fires devastated Gatlinburg, Tenn., in 2016, the towns of Superior and Louisville in Colorado in 2021 and Lahaina, Hawaii, two years ago.

“It’s not just a California quirk,” Pyne said. “California, I think, gets there first in exaggerated forms, but this is a national issue. And, in fact, it’s becoming an international issue.”

....“We don’t necessarily need a trillion-dollar program and a fire czar to get control of the fire problem,” Pyne said. “What we need are a thousand things that tweak the environment in favorable ways such that we can prevent these eruptions.” For example, municipal and fire prevention agencies must give property owners advance — and continual — warnings to clear dead vegetation and to wet dry brush within 10 feet of the house with periodic, prolonged sprinklings.

34 thoughts on “Streamline rebuilding after the LA fires? Yes but . . .

  1. DButch

    I read that LA Times article, reprinted in the Seattle Times a couple of days ago.

    Very interesting information on "the new normal" and some of the landscaping and home building techniques that need to be adopted to create sturdier homes and other structures.

  2. Obstinate Grouse

    It’s all about the building codes (zoning is much harder once people are in place). Just follow the lead of Chicago after the Great Chicago Fire when everything but the stone Water Tower Place burned. The codes need to be adapted to local circumstances but it doesn’t add much cost on new construction compared to trying to retrofit.

    1. J. Frank Parnell

      Or we could follow the example of Florida in the sixties and seventies, when after a hurricane they would have a building code holiday to encourage reconstruction.

  3. Honeyboy Wilson

    If any insurance companies still offer fire insurance in those areas, they can insist on such building materials and procedures as the cost of being insured.

    1. J. Frank Parnell

      On the west coast earthquake coverage can be exorbitant unless your house meets the currant code. Then it is just expensive.

  4. cephalopod

    Maybe CA can create the "Eaves Police" and make homeowners enclose the eaves on their homes (a common location for embers to collect and start fires).

  5. emjayay

    Not really fire related but the strip of wall to wall houses in the lower part of Malibu along the PCH squeezed in between the highway and the beach that all burned should not be rebuilt and should never have been allowed in the first place. But it would cost a million or two per lot to condemn and buy the property, and obviously the owners are all multimillionaires and money=power.

    A lot of coastal building often on glorified sand bars along the Jersey coast and in the Rockaways and Staten Island should not have been built in the first place or rebuilt either. But mostly it was. Some lots in Staten Island were bought out though.

    1. emjayay

      Wow that comment just skipped to being posted with no editing allowed and left out half of it.

      Billions of federal dollars were spend after hurricane Sandy replenishing beaches in the Rockaways which is mostly a big sand bar. Sand bars naturally move and come and go but we covered it with wall to wall buildings. Not the only example.

      New Orleans is another example. It's sinking and is mostly way below sea level at this point but instead of turning half of it into a park we spent billions on dykes and pumping stations because, you know, it's special.

      Particularly with Trump wanting to end anything having to do with addressing climate change putting the US back four years, within a couple decades we and the rest of the world will be forced to give up on saving endless trillions of dollars of coastal buildings anyway.

      1. tigersharktoo

        Please do not let CF-DJT and the GOP and the incoming Sec of Def. know that we spent billions of dollars on Dykes.

        They are already in an uproar about 1 or 2 or 10 transgendered competing the College level sports.

        Billions on Dykes? Their heads will explode. Hmm, maybe your desired outcome.

      2. KenSchulz

        Longport, New Jersey is the southernmost town on the barrier island it shares with Atlantic City and other towns. The southernmost avenue in Longport is 11th Ave. Where are 1st through 10th Aves.? You might well ask.

      3. J. Frank Parnell

        Speaking of Sand Bars, wait till a grade 5 hurricane nails Palm Beach. It will take more than marking up a map with a magic marker to save Mar a Lago.

      4. bethby30

        A big chunk of the Netherlands has always been below sea level but they know how to manage it and their engineers are in demand in other places facing that problem.

  6. harrymilleriii

    Eaves are the most common entry to homes by fire embers (as noted above). That is a design flaw that should be eliminated.

    Also, maybe these areas could lead the way in putting power lines underground. That is another all too common source of ignition.

    1. Crissa

      Eaves stop storm ingress into siding. So they're a two-edged sword. On one hand, they keep windows and walls from degrading without warning but on the other they can catch flame columns.

    2. bethby30

      Germany and the Netherlands have buried a lot of their power lines and have far fewer outages than the US does. Ice storms and high winds cause far too many outages in the US.
      After a major storm caused massive outages here in NC a few years ago people were surveyed to see if they were willing to pay a specified increase in their monthly bills to pay for burying the lines. There was an overwhelmingly positive response but Duke Energy refused to consider it and our government wouldn’t force them to, naturally.

  7. rick_jones

    For example, municipal and fire prevention agencies must give property owners advance — and continual — warnings to clear dead vegetation and to wet dry brush within 10 feet of the house with periodic, prolonged sprinklings.

    Three warnings a couple months apart and then a lien against your property to pay for the work.

    1. Bardi

      It used to be in SoCal, firemen would cruise the neighborhoods and writeup areas they thought vulnerable. The homeowner used to have a few weeks to handle the situation, then the marshals would come through and if the owner's efforts were insufficient, contract for the work, billing the homeowner. (I used to clear brush for homeowners in the City of Rolling Hills area).

      1. Crissa

        That's expensive to do with litigious residents.

        CalFire gave us report cards late year... but they can only do it if there's no extra fires they have to be at.

  8. Art Eclectic

    If you operate on the assumption that rich people will pay any amount of money to build in terrible areas, the only way to mitigate is code and everything has to be fire resistant. Put all the electrical underground as was previously mentioned.

    Insurance rules might not even help because you're largely talking about people who can self insure. Building code and code inspectors who can't be bought.

  9. jrmichener

    There will be fires started by the next big earthquake and you have to assume that water firefighting will be unavailable due to broken mains / bridges. You must have passive fire resistance. And it isn't hard when you are building as long as you plan for it - fire resistants walls and roofs, fire resistant eaves, and fire shutters will provide a lot of resistance - and that is with wood frame construction. If you are using reinforced concrete, fire resistance is easier. And you need the mandatory vegetation clearing.

  10. Joseph Harbin

    These Homes Withstood the LA Fires. Architects Explain Why
    In Pacific Palisades and Malibu, some houses with fire-resistant designs remained standing amid neighborhoods of destruction.
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-13/los-angeles-wildfires-why-these-homes-didn-t-burn?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=citylab

    I forget if this article has been discussed here before. In any case, it's outside the paywall and worth a read. It mentions one house that's standing amid neighboring houses that burned down.

    Luck was the biggest factor, Chasen concedes, but it wasn’t providence alone. If it weren’t for several fire-resilient design strategies, the home would have been destroyed.

    ...Some of the fire-proofing decisions made by Chasen stand out in the picture. The yard is a protected area free of vegetation, fenced off by cast-in-place concrete garden walls, with landscaping in a sparse Mediterranean desert style. The home’s owner has been through fires before, so he was prepared: He removed trash cans and other loose items from around the house and even left the side gates open, knowing that a fire can spread along a fence to a house.

    “We were unfortunate that the neighbor parked the car adjacent to the house. There’s molten aluminum in the picture, 1,200 degrees,” Chasen says. “That wall prevented a lot of that heat from getting to the house.”

    Other design factors are more subtle. Along the side of the house there are no eaves or overhangs, which can form eddies or trap embers blown by high winds. The house doesn’t have any attic vents to allow sparks to get inside the roof, which is metal, with a fire-resistant underlayment. And the house is simple: front-gabled without multiple roof lines, dormers or other pop-outs, which are vulnerable intersections in a fire.

    Still other elements are invisible — yet critical. The walls of the house have a one-hour fire rating. The deck is Class A wood, as resistant to ignition as concrete or steel, Chasen says. Tempered glass protects the interiors. And the front of the house was built with heat-treated wood, shielded from flying sparks and embers by the extruding walls and roof line.

    “All of that is best practice for cutting a fire,” he says.

    1. Art Eclectic

      Similar article: https://www.realtor.com/advice/home-improvement/passive-house-survives-fire-in-california-how-it-avoided-destruction/

      We are planning a passive house for our retirement.

      There are ways to build resilient structures, this isn't new. Cost is a different discussion, but frankly it's not horrible when juxtaposed with losing all of your belongings and insurance maybe only covering part of your loss.

      There are similar stories from homes surviving hurricanes because of resilient construction practices.

      Building code is exactly the kind of thing Republicans are targeting, they complain that the cost is too high to build efficient and resilient. They are going to start chipping away at national codes as soon as the chairs are empty after the inauguration.

    2. lawnorder

      The problem often is that there are multiple ways to damage or destroy a house. You want broad overhangs to deal with rainfall. Wood frame structures are combustible but extremely earthquake resistant.

  11. maco

    probably the biggest culprit is asphalt shingles on roofs and rock and tar roofs. US needs to follow the rest of the world and use concrete / ceramic shingles - they don't burn and last 30+ years.

    the problem is shingle cost and weight. standard wood framing techniques cannot handle the load. roof framing will probably need to be steel. walls need to be 2x6 to carry the weight.

    flat roofs need fire-retardant foam or sprinkler system.

    1. Crissa

      Concrete shingles also fail in high winds. They shatter more easily.

      But my new roof is priced out as concrete shingles.

  12. pjcamp1905

    If Gatlinburg burned to the ground, it would not be any big loss. That's the world's worst tourist trap.

    BTW, despite the tragedy, I do enjoy the picture of burning humps.

  13. D_Ohrk_E1

    This includes things like fire-retardant roofs and siding, automatic sprinkler systems, cleared zones around property lines, and so forth. And it has to be done universally for it to be effective. [...]So yes to streamlining rebuilding permits, but with one exception: every house has to be rebuilt to fire-hardening standards.

    You mean fire-resistant.

    You have to think about what's involved here. It's not like you can just switch out "siding" and the roofing material in the drawings and call it good.

    - UL-rated wall and roof assemblies would likely apply, especially if insurance is involved. More likely, I think California will add a new zoning rule for wildfire zones and require a minimum of UL 1-hour rated exterior walls and roofs.
    - That entails replacing exterior wood-based sheathing with fiberglass-reinforced gypsum panels on the outside face and Type-X gypsum panels on the inside face. $$
    - It also means exterior windows and doors might carry as much as a 60-minute rating. $$$
    - There will be restrictions on landscaping including plant species, too. $
    - Green roofs with succulents might be encouraged. $$
    - Sprinklers in general are already required in residential structures. All of this requires a code review of the drawings via a separate sprinkler (plumbing) permit, typically. And of course, all of this is going to require inspections. $$
    - Sprinklers might trigger an upsized water pipe, too, given how big some of these homes are, ya know? That's an extra effort to replace the line to the main. $
    - I would add, although fiberglass batts might still be allowed, if you want to increase your fire resistance, use rock wool. It's generally impossible to ignite rock wool. $$

    This is climate mitigation.

    Anyway, I'm just not seeing how you can streamline the permitting process. All of this has to be reviewed and inspected. Changes to materials will trigger new details in drawings.

  14. D_Ohrk_E1

    For example, municipal and fire prevention agencies must give property owners advance — and continual — warnings to clear dead vegetation and to wet dry brush within 10 feet of the house with periodic, prolonged sprinklings.

    FTR, Kamehameha Schools had been previously warned to clear dry brush on their property in Lahaina:

    The long-awaited report on the cause and origin of the Lahaina wildfire states the landowner where the fire began, Kamehameha Schools, was previously issued a notice of violation for not maintaining a firebreak.

    The report says the Maui Fire Department ordered the school to cut and maintain a 30-foot wide strip without vegetation behind Kuialua and Hookahua Streets in Lahaina back in 2019.

    The report also shows the firebreak was not maintained on August 8, 2023.

    “When we give a notice of warning, followed by a notice of violation, we give direct orders on what to do to the land and to maintain it. Therefore, we shouldn’t have to go back to babysit lots over and over again,” said Maui Fire Chief Brad Ventura.

    County records also show Kamehameha Schools failed a fire brush inspection at that location in 2020.

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