Isegoria

Over a century ago, people started to live together more densely than ever before, and this transformed fires from unfortunate incidents to conflagrations that destroyed entire cities:

By the 1870s, “great” fires were happening several times a decade and viewed as a normal part of life in cities.

And then, by the 1920s, it stopped. Why? After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, we finally got serious as a civilization about stopping urban fires. We rewrote building codes to require fire-resistant materials and metal escape ladders; we built professional firefighting forces instead of relying on local fire brigades with, literally, buckets; and we invented new technologies, like automatic sprinkler systems in 1872, motorized fire trucks with powered pumps and engines in 1910, and CTC fire extinguishers in 1912. Chicago never burned down again.

Today, urban fires are treated as a largely-solved problem. Modern urban firefighting forces and infrastructure are designed for putting out fires in homes. In fact, firefighting is so solved that only 4% of firefighting calls are fire-related — the vast majority are medical. Yet, this model of firefighting is not adapted to the challenges we face today.

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Over the past fifty years, people all throughout developed nations have moved into suburban areas, which fire experts refer to as the “wildland-urban interface” (WUI). As far as fire risk is concerned, these areas combine the worst aspects of wildland and urban environments. Because of humans living in density, you have frequent ignition events. But because they are near nature, you are surrounded by kindling. The environment is furthermore relatively sparse, so you can’t have the same firefighting density as in a city. Taken together this means fires can reach wildfire scale with urban frequency.

Simply put, urban firefighting forces are using an old playbook on a new, unsolved problem. 29% of the United States lives in the WUI now, and California has the highest such percentage of any state.

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To allow for more preventative maintenance, there must be reform to both the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The environmental impact statement of a controlled burn takes 7.2 years to complete, which is longer than most fire cycles. Amazingly, under Sierra Club v. Bosworth, a 2007 Ninth Circuit case, there is no categorical exclusion for controlled burns.

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Major urban centers should not just have one reservoir, but at least two for redundancy. All fire infrastructure must go through an audit and, if need be, rebuilt. California throws 21 million acre-feet of water away each year, which is more than enough to fill firefighting reservoirs and use for irrigation to wet our forests. The money is already there—California voters already approved $2.7 billion for reservoirs with Prop. 1 back in 2014, none of which have been built a decade later.

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The homeless cause 54% of all fires in Los Angeles. That number jumps to 80% for downtown fires. In San Francisco, such fires have doubled in the past five years. Throughout California, the homeless plague highway underpasses with fires, some from cooking and some from derangement. Many of the arsonists arrested during these fires were homeless. Unfortunately, the eternal summer of endless fire season means the time for tolerance is over.

Posted in Policy, Urbanism | 4 Comments »