A 36-unit apartment complex is reduced to rubble after the Camp fire in Paradise, California on Nov. 30. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-halsey-firesafe-20181211-story.html

What does prevent house ignition is fairly simple, and compared with the cost of destructive fires, relatively inexpensive.

Our current approach to wildfire is killing us. Instead of making communities fire safe, we’re mostly trying to manage habitat to suppress fire, and it’s failing to protect our lives and our property. Bureaucratic inertia and hubris are preventing needed change. Until the public understands the true nature of wildfire and demands the same of government, the staggering losses will continue to mount.

The sad fact is that strategies capable of preventing much of the devastation in Paradise and Malibu have been known for nearly two decades. But instead of pursuing those strategies, our wildfire agencies stubbornly pursue fire control. A case in point: After the massive fires of 2017 in Santa Rosa and in Ventura County, the state Legislature stepped in with this response: More money to increase logging and prescribed burns in forests far from where the fires occurred and far from communities with substantial populations.

As Jack Cohen, a former lead fire scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, has demonstrated through decades of study, extreme, uncontrollable wildfires are inevitable, but wildland-urban wildfire disasters are not. To stop those disasters, we must accept some basic principles based on experience and research. First among them is that the wildfire problem is a home ignition problem, not a wildfire control problem.

Embers are the biggest threat. Most structures ignite from embers that can travel a mile or more from the fire front in high winds. Of the 1,650 structures destroyed in the 2007 Witch Creek fire in San Diego County, there were few, if any, reports of homes that burned as a result of direct contact with flames from wildland fuels. Although 100 feet of defensible space around structures is a worthwhile effort, the nearly exclusive focus by wildfire agencies on other kinds of habitat clearance — creating huge fire breaks and logging — isn’t going to prevent wind-driven embers from setting communities on fire.

What does prevent house ignition is fairly simple, and compared with the cost of destructive fires, relatively inexpensive: Retrofitting houses or requiring that new houses be built with such measures as ember-resistant attic vents, nonflammable roofing (not Spanish-style tile roofs, which can trap embers in the spaces beneath the rounded tiles), and exterior sprinklers. The effectiveness of such sprinklers was proved during the 2007 wind-driven Ham Lake fire in Cook County, Minn., where they had been installed on 188 properties. Those properties survived; more than 100 neighboring properties didn’t. Federal Emergency Management Agency hazard mitigation grants had covered the majority of the cost of the sprinklers.

Unfortunately, most wildfire agencies have shown little interest in Cohen’s research. Despite the fact that one of the main goals of U.S. Forest Service vegetation clearance is to protect homes from wildfires, the agency rejects addressing home flammability because it is beyond the “official scope” of the projects. Similarly, after nearly 18 years of scientific input showing that the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s Vegetation Treatment Program isn’t protecting homes from wind-driven fires, the agency refuses to change direction. In a recent Community Wildfire Protection Plan in Santa Barbara County, the only attempt to address home ignition is the suggested production of an educational brochure.

Making homes fire safe acknowledges that we must coexist with fire. But coexistence doesn’t preclude evacuation. Experience shows us that it too needs to be reconsidered. We have known since the 2003 Cedar fire in San Diego County that a large percentage of civilian fatalities occur when people are trying to evacuate during huge, wind-driven conflagrations. Such fires move too fast, warning systems often fail, people panic and the fire overtakes jammed roads.

Poor land planning makes the problem worse. Last summer, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors approved a new housing development in a known fire corridor, with only one way out. Paradise, with only a few roads in and out, had narrowed the main route through the town. These planning failures must be resolved with statewide standards.

Paradise also serves as an example of an alternative approach to evacuation. As the Los Angeles Times reported, heroic first responders “shepherded” evacuees from the gridlocked roadway to a concrete parking lot that was somewhat sheltered from the wind. They saved the lives of 150 people. Every housing development in a high-fire hazard area needs to have such a safety zone, a “fire park.” The Eureka Springs development in Escondido provides a model, a purpose-built large, grassy area that’s easy for everyone in the community to get to.

Every community should consider one more strategy that acknowledges our need to live with fire: forming Community Emergency Response Teams with a dedicated group of specially trained volunteers who stay behind expressly to help stranded people and to extinguish ember-ignited spot fires.

We must focus on why and how our communities burn. Protecting homes and families is not about controlling wildfire, but reducing the flammable condition of our communities and making sure new ones are not built in harm’s way.

The standard procedure to reduce wildfire risk is to clear habitat. We have spent millions of dollars doing this for nearly a century. Nevertheless, our homes keep burning. That’s because while vegetation management such as fuel breaks and prescribed burns can help during non-extreme fire events, they do little to suppress extreme events. But if anyone questions vegetation management in the backcountry, the typical response is that the projects will work as designed for 90^th percentile weather conditions. That’s absurd. Imagine if we designed buildings to withstand only 95^th percentile earthquake movements, or what you would feel as a result of a magnitude 2.5. We need to protect communities from fires that actually do the damage.

How do we do this? As University of Colorado geographer Gregory Simon has observed, since we are choosing to spread cities farther and farther out into wildland areas, we need to recognize that fire disasters aren’t natural, they’re social. And they require social solutions.

Planning agencies need to push back against pro-development forces in government, whose willingness to build in known fire corridors borders on criminal neglect. The recent devastation of the community of Fountaingrove in Santa Rosa, for example, was both horrible and predictable. (The area has now burned twice in 53 years.) Local leaders need to restrict development in such areas.

In the smaller picture, local governments need to impose strict fire codes in new communities throughout California, require older communities to retrofit their properties, and enforce proper defensible space regulations. That means 100 feet of thinned vegetation, not bare ground. Hundreds of feet of bare ground make a home the target for wind-driven embers.

Such policies would cost significantly less than the $9.4 billion wildfire-related claims submitted statewide as of Friday.

We also need to examine the best practices of other fire-prone regions. Communities in Australia often install external, under-eave/rooftop sprinklers, which have proven quite effective in protecting structures during wildfires. (Australians understand that wet homes do not ignite.) Such systems should be standard in all new developments in high fire hazard zones. It is likely they would have protected many of the homes consumed in Ventura’s Thomas fire this week.

Agencies like Cal Fire need to begin addressing the question, “How do we protect lives and property?” rather than “How can we stop a wildfire?” Right now, Cal Fire is focused on the latter, with its misguided Vegetation Treatment Program. A focus on the former would mean at least noting land-use problems in planning documents. It would mean spending as much time and money on helping people retrofit homes as they do on vegetation treatments. Communities including Idyllwild and Big Bear have taken advantage of FEMA pre-disaster grants to replace flammable roofing and install ember-resistant vents. Such long-term solutions, unlike fuel breaks, do not require costly maintenance.

Trees, shrubs, grasses or homes will all provide the necessary fuel for a wildfire. It’s part of California’s story. As we do with earthquakes and floods, our goal should be to reduce the damage when wildfires arrive, not pretend we can prevent them from happening at all. That mindset starts at the planning department, not the fire station.