Fire and wind are certain to shape the future of Los Angeles as the world warms.
Los Angeles had started taking steps to prepare. But there are lessons it can learn from other cities adapting to extreme fire weather: managing yards; taking care of neighbors; making it easier to get out of harm’s way.
One big challenge, among many, is that plans like these need to be widely adopted. One home is only as safe as the home next door. “If your neighbor doesn’t do anything, and you do, if that home burns it will create so much radiant heat, yours will burn too,” said Kimiko Barrett of Headwaters Economics in Bozeman, Mont., a company that advises cities on reducing wildfire damage risk.
Neighbors matter. Building codes and zoning rules matter. But perhaps most of all, money matters. Building for an age of fire can be expensive, and often out of reach for many homeowners living in fire-prone communities.
Look hard at the landscape
Boulder County, Colo., has learned some big lessons from recent fires.
Pine needles and debris around a house quickly spread flames. Juniper bushes explode in fire. In fact, county officials call junipers “gasoline plants.” Firewood stuffed under a deck can ignite and destroy a house.
The county has spent several years persuading people to clear debris and rip out junipers. Voters have agreed to a sales tax hike to help pay for it.
Los Angeles has its own problem plant: palms. Many palm species, once they catch fire, are very hard to put out. In fire-prone areas, they should be avoided entirely, according to the Los Angeles County fire department.
San Diego county prohibits greenery — even shrubs — around a five foot perimeter of a building and requires that tree canopies be at least 10 feet away.,
Berkeley, Calif., sends fire inspectors into its most fire-prone neighborhoods to suss out signs of danger: dead brush less than five feet from a house; flammable vegetation that leans over the fence line and threatens a neighbor’s property; high shrubs that can send flames racing up a tree.
There are constraints. Live oaks are protected by law, which means they can’t be cut down. And local communities like Berkeley are still waiting for California state officials to issue regulations to implement a 2023 law designed to minimize fire damage by prescribing landscape-management standards. The city is due to tighten its regulations in the coming weeks, requiring homeowners to keep a five-foot fireproof perimeter around every house in the most fire-prone neighborhoods in the hills. That means no shrubs, no propane tanks, no wood mulch. Violations will be fined; the City Council has yet to determine how much.
“If I can hold a lighter to it and it can smoke and flame, it shouldn’t be there,” said Colin Arnold, the assistant fire chief responsible for the city’s most fire-prone areas on the edge of the wilderness, known as the wildland urban interface
Build safer houses
Houses are flammable, but it’s possible to make them less flammable.
Concrete, stucco, and engineered wood are better than old-fashioned wood frames. A few architects, including Abeer Sweis, in Santa Monica, work with compressed soil, also known as rammed earth, which offers both protection from fire and avoids the emissions of concrete. Roofs made of clay tiles, concrete or metal hold up well to flames. Laminated glass windows can reduce the radiant heat that presses up against a house during a fire.
Design matters, too. Eaves and overhangs can trap embers, which is why architects building in fire-prone areas like them to be sealed. At a time when insurance coverage is becoming increasingly hard to procure in fire-prone communities, Mitchell Rocheleau, an architect based in Irvine, Calif., says fortifying your home is a “physical insurance policy.”
Vents are frequent culprits. . Low-cost fixes, like fire-resistant vents with mesh screens, can keep big embers from flying in, but they’re not always effective, Ms. Sweis said, which is why she prefers vents that are coated with a material that melts in the heat and closes up.
Building codes increasingly mandate noncombustible roofs and siding. (California has among the strictest.) The problem, though, is that most homes in the United States were built before modern building codes. Upgrading an existing house for the age of fire means getting rid of flammable siding and roofs. That’s an expensive proposition.
Boast about improvements
Think of it as a fire-smart version of keeping up with the Joneses.
Boulder County has a way for homeowners to get certified by a nonprofit group, Wildfire Partners, for fireproofing practices like junking junipers, choosing less flammable shrubs, installing a fire-resistant roof or slathering fire-resistant sealant on a deck.
Certification comes with a yard sign to display. It’s a way to nudge others in the neighborhood to adopt similar practices.
There’s also a potential reward. Certification can be a way to not lose homeowner’s insurance, which is increasingly a risk in many communities in the American West. “The cost of retrofitting is very real,” Ashley Stolzmann, a county commissioner said. “The cost of losing insurance is also very real.”
Upgrade dangerous power lines
Power lines and utility poles have been responsible for some of California’s most destructive fires in recent years.
Much of that infrastructure was built in the 1960s and 1970s and is in urgent need of repair. Utilities have faced a barrage of lawsuits in the aftermath of some of those fires, including in recent days when residents of Altadena sued Southern California Edison claiming that the utility’s equipment set off the Eaton Fire that destroyed 5,000 buildings in the area. (Edison said it is investigating the cause of the fires.)
A range of fixes are possible, from fire-resistant poles to burying electricity lines (very expensive) to covering them in a protective layer (less expensive but less safe).
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set aside $3.5 billion for electricity grid upgrades. That’s a fraction of the $250 billion price tag of the latest Los Angeles fires.
Rethink roads
Cul-de-sacs and narrow, winding streets are a hallmark of many neighborhoods pressed up against wilderness, including the Berkeley Hills. That’s a problem when people need to get out, and first responders need to get in.
“There’s nowhere to put new roads,” Mr. Arnold said. “It’s a very densely packed community built without evacuation in mind.”
If you can’t widen roads, you can keep them clear for first responders to get in and out. The Los Angeles Fire Department prohibits street parking in some neighborhoods on windy days, when fire risk is high.
Rancho Santa Fe, a wealthy suburb of San Diego, has tried to solve the problem by keeping most of its residential roads clear at all times. No street parking is allowed if the street isn’t wide enough for fire trucks to get in and out.
Know when to leave
Bushfires have long been common in hot, dry southeastern Australia. But none scarred its people like the Black Saturday fires that broke out in Victoria state in February, 2009. The blazes killed more than 170 people and led to a rewriting of the state’s evacuation protocols.
On days of high fire risk, people who live in forested communities are encouraged to leave their homes before there are signs of smoke and flame. Warnings are broadcast on television.
Residents are encouraged to have the official state-government emergency-preparedness app, which highlights what areas should empty out when. A look at the app on a recent Thursday morning showed 10 notices across the state, from “leave immediately” warnings in some places to “monitor conditions” elsewhere.
Los Angeles residents, by contrast, received erroneous evacuation warnings by text message on the some of the worst fire days. More reliable was a private app built by a nonprofit group.
“We want people making good decisions before the fire rather than bad decisions during the fire,” said Luke Heagerty, a spokesman for the state control center.
A handful of schools and fire stations are designated as community fire refuge facilities. And for those people who stay behind until a fire reaches their homes, there is the ominously named Bushfire Place of Last Resort. Usually it’s an open field with no trees or structures to catch fire. But as the county fire authority starkly warns on its website, the Bushfire Place of Last Resort sites “do not guarantee safety.”
Build more homes
Los Angeles has long faced an acute need for more housing. For years, it’s met the demand by allowing development in fire-prone areas and allowing homeowners to rebuild after fires have swept through those areas.
The latest fires supersized the need. An estimated 10,000 homes were destroyed, leaving tens of thousands of people in need of shelter and driving up rents and home prices in one of the country’s most expensive real estate markets.
And so among the toughest choices facing Los Angeles now is where to build homes that won’t easily go up in flames.
“You have two options, both of which are politically very difficult, especially right after the fires,” said Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at the University of California Los Angeles. One is to restrict development in fire-prone areas. The other is to allow more dense housing in less hazardous areas in the flatlands, in neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes. That’s been “a political non-starter,” Mr. Manville said.