We do need to acknowledge that certain climates like historical fire zones and the swamps of south florida were never well fit environments for development. We need strategies for moving people out of those areas rather than dumping money into trying to artificially make them fit our preferences.
These are places that took relatively minor damage from lower-intensity fires in past years. A lot of places that burned are well into town.
There is some amount of moving people out of the wildland-urban interface that makes sense, but we also need to act by:
- Going ahead with building codes which make buildings more resistant to wind-blown embers from fires which might be a mile or more away
- Ending the use of fossil fuels, so we don’t make the situation worse
- Actively managing vegetation to prevent fuel accumulation where this makes sense.
Climate change is certainly exacerbating the situation but from what I’ve read these areas are also historically acclimated to burning https://www.coastal.ca.gov/fire/ucsbfire.html
Yes, there’s a history of lower-intensity fire, of the sort which doesn’t threaten structures at scale.
Right but if the low intensity ones are repressed that leads to higher intensity ones plus climate change exacerbates the situation making former low intensity ones higher intensity due to increased drying and erosion cycles. Makes the most sense not to allow development imo.
Chaparral and grasslands (what that area has) regrow pretty quickly. This isn’t problem of fuel accumulating over decades as has happened in the Sierras. You’d need to be removing vegetation every year, which would also kill off the native plants.
The frequent burns are what’s killing the native plants. Burns aren’t supposed to happen this frequently, and invasives are crowding out the drought resistant natives.
Reparations from the state to the property owners in Los Angeles are in order, and soon. They are already late.
Had to wait to the end for the reveal to happen. The rich people who built multi million dollar mansions in extreme fire risk country deserve to raid state funds, because nearly a century ago California was at the forefront of oil extraction. Yes, this makes total sense. No mention of Texas, Alaska, or any other state still all in on oil, of course. Or the responsibility of the US as a nation to curb oil usage. “Climate change is happening, so California owes me money because I am rich and own a house there.”
This whole article is one laundry list of rich people complaints about California with a few obvious solutions (wow, after a major fire you think buildings should be fire hardened? You don’t say) sprinkled in to make it seem reasonable.
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