Phos Chek is not great for the environment, especially to aquatic life. So ideally there'd be some solution that doesn't use more of it.
agricultural level irrigation at the ready
The fires are exacerbated by California's long term drought, if there's large quanties of water laying around, then they probably wouldn't have such a bad fire season.
Inhabited locations in fire prone areas
I think there should be a re-evaluation of whether or not to let people build or rebuild in especially fire-prone areas.
This is already happening, not by government, but rather by the insurance markets. My friend has lived in a fire-prone area of Southern California for years. His home owners insurances rates have more than tripled in the last few years. He just recently moved (yep, Idaho).
I expect large swaths of the Sierras will soon be uninsurable for all practical purposes. Anybody with a mountain home with a mortgage will be SOL.
A campfire needs tending or it goes out. A bonfire will just burn until it runs out of fuel. A house fire will quickly turn into an inferno. Forest fires are hopefully like nothing you’ve ever seen—the sheer power of them is staggering.
"Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do."
https://www.salon.com/2021/07/20/an-oregon-wildfire-is-so-in...
Spoiler: it turns out that if you have a multi-million dollar insurance policy, the insurance company sends over guys to spray everything with fire retardant gel.
Are you willing to move out of fire country for the greater good?
https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-fo...
https://slate.com/business/2021/08/california-wildfires-airp...
And then there's the scale of what you propose.
Thinking about it in terms of victory and defeat isn't very helpful IMO. The reality is pretty clear: humans need to adapt to climate change. We are already past the point of no return, and in places like California the effects of climate change are mounting at a faster rate than we can realistically mitigate them.
> We need to think of solutions to fires like this. 1. We need to apply Phos-Chek from ground based units. 2. Building codes need to be updated to only allow fire resistant structures in wildfire prone areas. 3. Inhabited locations in fire prone areas need need active fire suppression infrastructure around them (agricultural level irrigation at the ready). 4. Forest management around inhabited areas need to reduce forest fire fuel.
I'm an advisor and investor in a company that serves this market and while all of the things that you mention can help, they are not "solutions" per se. For example:
1. "Fire resistant" structures are not fire proof. Many rural homeowners in the most vulnerable areas don't have the income to make significant upgrades to their homes. A lot more funding for retrofit subsidies would be required and then you need adequate man power to run inspections and perform upgrades.
2. California already has water problems. "Agricultural level irrigation" in every rural community simply isn't realistic.
2. Forest management could definitely be improved, but it's costly and labor intensive. Where are you going to get the labor?
The sad truth is that a lot of places in California (and the Western US in general) are becoming uninhabitable. Lots of people will need to relocate, or they'll eventually be forced to.
But even putting the costs aside (which are out of the reach of many/most California rural homeowners) do you have the ability (expertise, materials, LABOR) to demolish and rebuild thousands upon thousands of homes scattered throughout California?
It's simply not as easy as having the "technology" and snapping your fingers. Forget building houses. Even finding someone to drill a well for you on short notice these days is next to impossible.
Direct source: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/08/09/how-wildfire-restored-a...
I always find it odd & off-putting when people demean or pass judgement on others' professions -- eg social apps & rocket ships -- especially if they ironically work in similarly "mundane" fields themselves. It just doesn't seem very constructive.
(Also: not sure I'd agree with the equivalence of the two examples, but that's another topic.)
But it would probably still help. It doesn't have to be perfect to help firefighters out.
https://www.thisoldhouse.com/roofing/21018219/fire-resistant...
When Paradise was burning I was thinking if I lived in a fire prone envionment; I would have sprinklers on roof of my home. It would be a simple 1/2" copper pipe feeding a few sprinkler heads on the roof. Maybe a few mercury switches placed around the property, or remotely controlled through the phone line, wifi, or sat phone enabled? Nothing too elaborate. It wouldn't protect everyone. It might save a few house fires that were started with embers though?
I know there one company selling roof fire sprinklers. I know of one small city who's experimenting right now with roof sprinklers. Hell, I wouldn't mind firing a bunch of Firefighters, and seeing that money go to Roof Sprinklers. (I haven't quite figured out exactly what Firefights do all day, with the hard exception of Paramedics. Buildings in cities don't burn like they used too. Wood stick homes in the country are another story.)
I heard one guy say that there wouldn't be enough water pressure if everyones roof was on, but that doesn't make sence either. Not everyone's roof sprinklers would be going off simultaneously if properly implemented, and designed. Firehouses could be in charge of which houses sprinklers go off?
Right now in CA, if you live in a fire prone area, Insurance (Property) is not suspose to be higher. As much as I despise Insurance companies--this provision needs to be nixed. (I don't think it will happen because Insurance companies use it to raise our city insurance rates, and politicians have northern cabins.
And lets say you have to keep it wet for 24 hours until the fire danger passes. That's around 40,000 gallons of water.
Where are you going to get that water? You can't count on the local utility keeping pumps running. If you're lucky you have a well, but a good residential well would yield around 10gpm, and if you and your neighbors are all pulling out water at the max rate together for hours or days, it may run dry while you wait for water to percolate in.
So you need a huge tank of water - a 50,000 gallon tank is around 35 feet in diameter and 7 feet high. Hope you have a big yard and lots of money, the tank alone will probably cost $30K. So figure around $50K to install the system. I hope you have a big back yard for it.
That bunch of firefighters you want to get rid of help protect many square miles of land, putting that $50K sprinkler system on 10,000 homes would cost $500M - that's a lot of firefighters and equipment.
I think there are better ways to keep your roof from burning, but even a metal roof is no guarantee that your house will survive a large wildfire unless you also keep the land devoid of fuel. And you could still fall victim to a piece of flying ember that happens to land on a vulnerable spot of your house.
Probably not of much value as roofs are (or can be) relatively fireproof.
The issue is vents, decks, windows to some extent.
And sure, the idea of replacing the fire department is probably not great, but it wouldn't hurt to have a bunch of these around.
Houses burn (usually) because they have vented attics that embers can blow into. Fire screening your attic or not using vented attics altogether, along with concrete and masonry construction and reasonable vegetation management go a long way toward protecting structures but the fact that structures are there in the first place is the problem.
You can't take an ecosystem based on periodic fire cycles and turn it into a suburb and expect everything to continue to work. Forests need to burn a little bit all the time or they will burn a lot all at once.
(my broad understanding is that property insurance is a relatively functional market where they won't underwrite a policy that doesn't make sense)
I wouldn't be surprised to see wildfires go a similar route in California if the situation isn't resolved.
As someone else said, it's easy to have either extremely high insurance rates or unavailable insurance if you live in the wrong area on someone's map. The result was FAIR plans with add-ons from insurance companies.
Calling it that can be a trap. Stick to climate change.
The actual problem is climate change in the western part of the United States, coupled with higher population density, poor forest management, and poor power line maintenance.
[0] https://www.drroyspencer.com/2021/08/uah-global-temperature-...
Where I sit, there was ice a mile thick 15,000 years ago. We are still coming out of the last ice age. Besides that, we have just come out of the so-called Little Ice Age, at the height of which people walked from Manhattan to Staten Island on the ice in New York Harbor.
1.5 C per century is inconsequential. Not only that, but I predict that humans will stop emitting CO2 in a few decades, in any case.
What is the delta if you account for the temperatures relating to any significant change in human consumption as opposed to this period which is the only one that coincides with fuel efficiency standards and increased environmental enforcement?
Selecting a very small time period that does not include the industrial revolution, large scale construction (New deal public works, highways) operations, world wars, nuclear energy, adoption of mechanized logistics & transportation, any time at all with unrestricted emissions, etc is nearly useless for analysis.
Why should the delta during 1979-2021 be representative of the overall climatology when the dataset appears to be barely large enough to even begin making any analysis?
At the last glacial maximum, global temperature was about 7°C cooler than today; the “Little Ice Age” wasn't a particular period of global cooling, but a set of unsynchronized localized phenomenon featuring typical less than 1°C of large-area cooling.
> 1.5 C per century is inconsequential.
1.5°C/century of global change is gigantic compared to either of the phenomena you raise to try to minimize it.
> Not only that, but I predict that humans will stop emitting CO2 in a few decades, in any case.
Based on...what?
What will happen is not dependent on the US or the EU. It depends entirely on India and China.
I expect that per capita greenhouse emissions will go down, they have in the US for quite some time.
Clean sheet mitigation results in a lot of ox goring. You probably need more nuke plants, less (or no) immigration from the third world to the first, replacement of coal with natgas, hammer on the Chinese, encourage birth control.
People are generally hard on the environment and there's too darn many of them. Environmental issues are typically used to achieve political/financial power.
Global warming has only increased the Earth's temperature by 1 degree Celsius? That doesn't seem like a lot.
Read Spencer’s book for an alternate point of view. Global warming is real, but it is not catastrophic.
I for one am not a defeatist that will let global warming beat me. We need to think of solutions to fires like this. 1. We need to apply Phos-Chek from ground based units. 2. Building codes need to be updated to only allow fire resistant structures in wildfire prone areas. 3. Inhabited locations in fire prone areas need need active fire suppression infrastructure around them (agricultural level irrigation at the ready). 4. Forest management around inhabited areas need to reduce forest fire fuel.