7 ms·

California can't save every burned town

72 points by lxm 4y ago

JetAlone 4y ago
>Which ones should make the cut, and why? Favour the ones that openly support coastal policies. You get to keep living where you want, at considerable cost, if you say what we want. Hey, it could even be a paradise in those mountains, put in some kind of high speed rail for quick access to a nice golf course nearby, drum up some business and let some big deals take place there.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  Hmmm. Who’s worldview does this sound like? Something something real america…
  - JetAlone 4y ago
    Did I say anything about one of them being real or the other not? The world's become more "coastal" with more communications and infrastructure, for better or worse. If it bothers you so much that I call any amount of attention whatsoever to politicking realistically playing into whose hazardous town gets tax dollars to rebuild it and whose gets left to rot, it says more about you than me.
    - RC_ITR 4y ago
      >If it bothers you so much Literally what made you believe I was bothered at all? Was just noticing something, then commenting on it. Isn't that exactly what a forum is for?
burlesona 4y ago
What would make sense, but I think be laughed out of the room, is to build back a few of these towns as fortified villages with substantial fire-breaks maintained around them. You could preserve a small town life with abundant wilderness around, but it would probably make more sense to consolidate many of these tiny places (less than 1k people) into something like a handful of small towns of 10k. But I don’t think the folks who live in rural CA want to live in a European-style village with big fields separating them from the woods, they want to live in the forest and away from other people. I don’t think it’s wrong to allow people to take risks if they know what they are getting into. At the same time, there’s a point where it doesn’t make sense for the state to socialize the cost of rescuing / protecting people who choose to take that level of risk.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Even if it's not the state insurance will go up for everyone, building materials could go up, etc. No man is an island right?
  - smeagull 4y ago
    Mann is an island.
- sfvegandude 4y ago
  >I don’t think it’s wrong to allow people to take risks if they know what they are getting into. At the same time, there’s a point where it doesn’t make sense for the state to socialize the cost of rescuing / protecting people who choose to take that level of risk. You just described how I feel about the entire state of Florida.
- carabiner 4y ago
  > Or would that money be better spent fortifying a larger, more urban community outside of a high-risk fire zone or restoring forests and watersheds damaged by wildfire, rather than, say, paying for new underground power lines and broadband internet service in the mountains of Greenville? This question is entirely what the article discusses. Moral, economic considerations are discussed. You should read it.
  - burlesona 4y ago
    I did read the article, and I didn’t think that one sentence in the entire story really constituted digging into the idea of intentionally closing down several small towns and combined them into a new intentionally fire-resistant settlement, nor why that idea would be resisted by the people in the towns. Your comment is rude, and against HN guidelines.
- paulcole 4y ago
  It’s going to be an unpopular opinion, but caring about what people want is a luxury that we just won’t have (to anywhere near the extent we have it today) in the near future as climate change continues. Many millions of people in the US are going to have kids and grandkids who have a drastically different life than they imagine for them. And not in a good way.
mistrial9 4y ago
The opening paragraphs here make it clear that this is a representative of greater Los Angeles speaking about public budgets used for Northern California construction. If anyone has any doubt about the orders of magnitude difference in spending and taxation between those two, lets review: * Los Angeles Basin estimated population - 13 million * Plumas County 2020 regional population - 19,790 and for YNews interest, there is something odd about that one county Here is an excerpt from notes on the Planet Explore 2022 event Day 1: The first section featured Will Marshall, co-founder and astro-geek. Will's stage performance was not bad, considering he had 20 long minutes of rehearsed script to read on stage, alone to a camera. The one odd thing I would call out is that the co-founder of Planet, on stage, in a perfectly scripted and rehearsed presentation, mysteriously misnamed the California county that "requested imaging from Planet." (the county was named Plymouth by Will, but there is no Plymouth County here.. the real name is Plumas perhaps? for the Dixie fire?) Speaking of the Dixie fire ..... edited for brevity
tjr225 4y ago
It is a completely absurd conundrum. You can’t on one hand be a libertarian turd living in the fire interface demanding independence from taxation and government and on the same hand demand support from the government when you have to deal with the realities of the situation you created for yourself. I have sympathy for anyone who has lived through a disaster because I have as well. The only feeling I had after my disaster was that I wish my government was better funded and more well run because the haphazard mess we have now is wildly dysfunctional. That and a little anxiety but it gets better. Don’t live in the west in the mountains if you aren’t prepared for wildfires. It’s beautiful, sure, but it is wildly unsustainable. You are more or less on your own.
- alvah 4y ago
  "You can’t on one hand be a libertarian turd" Even ignoring the slur (I have many disagreements with libertarians but don't see the need for ad-hom), where did you get this? Ctrl-F in the article for "libertarian" has 0 matches.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Can you quote one or two of those libertarian turds?
crooked-v 4y ago
> Residents of rural communities are “pissed off,” Weber said with her characteristic, sometimes foul-mouthed frankness. “They feel the pain that they no longer can live the life they wanted to live.” This quote makes me tremendously unsympathetic. The overwhelming majority of people have to compromise their lives in one way or another, and "have you considered living in a small town that isn't in a wildfire zone" is hardly anything compared to what some people have to deal with.
- sbf501 4y ago
  Remember in the 80's when republicans were aghast at musicians raising aid to help the starving people in Ethiopia, all the while screaming the Sam Kinnison line, "Nothing grows here you live in a f*king desert!!!"
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    Remember in the 80's when republicans were aghast at musicians raising aid to help the starving people in Ethiopia No, I don't remember this. It sounds made up. Do you have a citation?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - sbf501 4y ago
      > No, I don't remember this. It sounds made up. Do you have a citation? Nope: documenting all of the awful and shitty things conservatives said on the radio wasn't a thing back then.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        You're not wrong about that. Compared to the 1980s we've got a fantastically accessible record of all kinds of political bleating. If only we were using it to hold politicians and political parties accountable. At this point they just lie straight to our faces and no one loses their careers over it, or even their supporters. Only half the country at a time even consider it a scandal and it's never the half that would have voted for the liar anyway.
thaumaturgy 4y ago
This is kind of a weird op-ed. It frames this as though the costs are all red marker, but the costs of rebuilding include labor and materials and help to reinvigorate local economies. I'm sure there is a net cost, but it has been serviceable so far. Insurance isn't mentioned at all in the article. WUI areas have become nearly impossible to insure, even if you're doing all the things right for making your property fire-resistant (and most homeowners in these areas aren't). As long as California's housing market stays red-hot, there will still be another sucker willing to pay for California's state-insurance-plan-of-last-resort, but someday, somehow, something's gonna change and all of a sudden a lot of people won't be able to afford homeowner's insurance, and that's going to gut a lot of the fire-prone small towns. Newer state building codes are much more fire-resistant. Structures in the town of Paradise that had been built in the last 10 to 15 years largely all survived, even when all neighboring buildings were destroyed. New construction going into these places isn't going to burn the same way the old construction did; future costs will be less devastating, and it takes time for fuels to build up to the levels necessary for apocalyptic events. The state, also, is slowly getting less dumb about preventative fuel maintenance and the issues around prescribed burning are getting worked on. "Should these places exist at all" is about as fair a question as whether Phoenix or Las Vegas or New Orleans should exist, but it's kind of a boring argument because there's no state-run central planning that is going to forcibly relocate everyone or refuse to rebuild any of them again. A more interesting question is, "what do the changing conditions over the next 10 years mean for where I should live?"
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  The difference with major cities is a) it's a lot harder to somehow abandon large populations than small ones, and b) the cost vs benefit ratio is probably there for big cities in a way that it's not for small towns in the mountains. Spending a billion dollars to rebuild a town with a population that numbers in the hundreds is horrible economic value. In contrast, New Orleans is big enough to where spending billions on flood protection may be still be worth it on some level. That said, it'd certainly be nice to find a way to have cute little towns in the mountains that wasn't dependent on enormous subsidies from other cities.
01100011 4y ago
People need to take the CalFire defensible space guidelines seriously: https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/communications/defensible-space-prc-4291/ https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/communications/defensible-s... Drive into any nice, quaint community at the interface between wilderness and development and you'll see homes surrounded in close proximity by fire vulnerable vegetation. I get it, it looks nice. But there's no way you should be able to get insurance if you allow it. Not only that, many of these mountain towns are serviced by a limited number of roads, sometimes only one. A wall of fire can easily overtake the population even with advanced warning due to traffic issues. Climate change is a threat, but fire is also part of the CA ecosystem in many places. It isn't going away and we need to be intelligent in how we anticipate and deal with it.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  This desire to live in wildfire prone forests bemuses me. Yes, trees are pretty, but... well, fires. Australia's bushfires often destroy houses built in very similar areas, lovely and leafy, surrounded by trees that have evolved to burn. I'm not sure if it's a holdover from the mindset that we can fully and effectively manage nature, or just because we prefer to live in hope, and the trees are pretty. But damn, either way, how much effort and risk is taken on to protect people living in areas prone to fire out of choice? In NZ, we've begun some "managed retreat", which is naturally contentious when it's your house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matat%C4%81 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matat%C4%81
- willidiots 4y ago
  I live in the WUI among trees. We've already spent $20,000 removing some fuels, and are spending $30,000 to remove more. This is in a county with a median annual income of $26,000. We can only afford this because of my remote tech worker salary. My neighbors aren't as privileged. The state could contribute more funds to these efforts, helping property owners reduce the fuels around their homes and improve defensible space.
bourgeoismedia 4y ago
https://apple.news/A8aiwLR-iQ7GKarGTp6nU6Q https://apple.news/A8aiwLR-iQ7GKarGTp6nU6Q
radium3d 4y ago
Sounds like something an insurance company that just wants to receive money but never pay out would say
ahaucnx 4y ago
One solution could be to make the building code much stricter and only allow to build houses that are build with materials that could survive a wild fire much better [1]. These houses would most likely be a lot more expensive to build but could be offset by surviving wildfires. Additionally if these houses are buiild with thicker walls they can retain heat in winter and remain cool enough in summer that air-conditioning is less needed. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/realestate/disaster-proof-housing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/realestate/disaster-proof...
- Eleison23 4y ago
  Why not do the opposite and build homes out of soft wood, paper, and cloth. This should drastically lower the costs of construction, and it would place no imaginary illusions on the residents that their structures could survive a disaster. Therefore the residents would be inherently better equipped, both mentally and physically, to recover from the next disaster to destroy their homestead. Is it too much to ask people to adopt a more ephemeral, nomadic lifestyle in the face of changing conditions on the ground?
  - jaclaz 4y ago
    You mean people could adapt to living in yurts or gers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurt
- jaclaz 4y ago
  I don't think that - short of an underground bunker - there are fire-resistant structures that can survive a "serious" wildfire. The classification of fire-resistant is usually 30/60/90/120 minutes, meaning that the structure should not collapse before that time, but norms say nothing of the residual structure integrity, and the cost of inspecting, assessing and repairing a structure affected by a fire can in many cases exceed the cost of re-building it from the ground up. Set aside wood/timber, the other three common construction methods, steel, reinforced concrete and brick/stone masonry are all affected by the heat of a (large) fire (in the case of masonry it is the mortar that loses some of its properties), i.e. the structure won't have the same strength as before.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
If you think California is dry now, you ain't seen nothing yet. It's going to get a lot dryer. Plan for it, or regret it.
mitchbob 4y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/3xpgv https://archive.ph/3xpgv

72 points by lxm 4y ago

>Which ones should make the cut, and why? Favour the ones that openly support coastal policies. You get to keep living where you want, at considerable cost, if you say what we want. Hey, it could even be a paradise in those mountains, put in some kind of high speed rail for quick access to a nice golf course nearby, drum up some business and let some big deals take place there.

RC_ITR 4y ago
Hmmm. Who’s worldview does this sound like? Something something real america…
- JetAlone 4y ago
  Did I say anything about one of them being real or the other not? The world's become more "coastal" with more communications and infrastructure, for better or worse. If it bothers you so much that I call any amount of attention whatsoever to politicking realistically playing into whose hazardous town gets tax dollars to rebuild it and whose gets left to rot, it says more about you than me.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    >If it bothers you so much Literally what made you believe I was bothered at all? Was just noticing something, then commenting on it. Isn't that exactly what a forum is for?

burlesona 4y ago

What would make sense, but I think be laughed out of the room, is to build back a few of these towns as fortified villages with substantial fire-breaks maintained around them. You could preserve a small town life with abundant wilderness around, but it would probably make more sense to consolidate many of these tiny places (less than 1k people) into something like a handful of small towns of 10k. But I don’t think the folks who live in rural CA want to live in a European-style village with big fields separating them from the woods, they want to live in the forest and away from other people. I don’t think it’s wrong to allow people to take risks if they know what they are getting into. At the same time, there’s a point where it doesn’t make sense for the state to socialize the cost of rescuing / protecting people who choose to take that level of risk.

themitigating 4y ago
Even if it's not the state insurance will go up for everyone, building materials could go up, etc. No man is an island right?
- smeagull 4y ago
  Mann is an island.
sfvegandude 4y ago
>I don’t think it’s wrong to allow people to take risks if they know what they are getting into. At the same time, there’s a point where it doesn’t make sense for the state to socialize the cost of rescuing / protecting people who choose to take that level of risk. You just described how I feel about the entire state of Florida.
carabiner 4y ago
> Or would that money be better spent fortifying a larger, more urban community outside of a high-risk fire zone or restoring forests and watersheds damaged by wildfire, rather than, say, paying for new underground power lines and broadband internet service in the mountains of Greenville? This question is entirely what the article discusses. Moral, economic considerations are discussed. You should read it.
- burlesona 4y ago
  I did read the article, and I didn’t think that one sentence in the entire story really constituted digging into the idea of intentionally closing down several small towns and combined them into a new intentionally fire-resistant settlement, nor why that idea would be resisted by the people in the towns. Your comment is rude, and against HN guidelines.
paulcole 4y ago
It’s going to be an unpopular opinion, but caring about what people want is a luxury that we just won’t have (to anywhere near the extent we have it today) in the near future as climate change continues. Many millions of people in the US are going to have kids and grandkids who have a drastically different life than they imagine for them. And not in a good way.

mistrial9 4y ago

The opening paragraphs here make it clear that this is a representative of greater Los Angeles speaking about public budgets used for Northern California construction. If anyone has any doubt about the orders of magnitude difference in spending and taxation between those two, lets review: * Los Angeles Basin estimated population - 13 million * Plumas County 2020 regional population - 19,790 and for YNews interest, there is something odd about that one county Here is an excerpt from notes on the Planet Explore 2022 event Day 1: The first section featured Will Marshall, co-founder and astro-geek. Will's stage performance was not bad, considering he had 20 long minutes of rehearsed script to read on stage, alone to a camera. The one odd thing I would call out is that the co-founder of Planet, on stage, in a perfectly scripted and rehearsed presentation, mysteriously misnamed the California county that "requested imaging from Planet." (the county was named Plymouth by Will, but there is no Plymouth County here.. the real name is Plumas perhaps? for the Dixie fire?) Speaking of the Dixie fire ..... edited for brevity

tjr225 4y ago

It is a completely absurd conundrum. You can’t on one hand be a libertarian turd living in the fire interface demanding independence from taxation and government and on the same hand demand support from the government when you have to deal with the realities of the situation you created for yourself. I have sympathy for anyone who has lived through a disaster because I have as well. The only feeling I had after my disaster was that I wish my government was better funded and more well run because the haphazard mess we have now is wildly dysfunctional. That and a little anxiety but it gets better. Don’t live in the west in the mountains if you aren’t prepared for wildfires. It’s beautiful, sure, but it is wildly unsustainable. You are more or less on your own.

alvah 4y ago
"You can’t on one hand be a libertarian turd" Even ignoring the slur (I have many disagreements with libertarians but don't see the need for ad-hom), where did you get this? Ctrl-F in the article for "libertarian" has 0 matches.
tomcam 4y ago
Can you quote one or two of those libertarian turds?

crooked-v 4y ago

> Residents of rural communities are “pissed off,” Weber said with her characteristic, sometimes foul-mouthed frankness. “They feel the pain that they no longer can live the life they wanted to live.” This quote makes me tremendously unsympathetic. The overwhelming majority of people have to compromise their lives in one way or another, and "have you considered living in a small town that isn't in a wildfire zone" is hardly anything compared to what some people have to deal with.

sbf501 4y ago
Remember in the 80's when republicans were aghast at musicians raising aid to help the starving people in Ethiopia, all the while screaming the Sam Kinnison line, "Nothing grows here you live in a f*king desert!!!"
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  Remember in the 80's when republicans were aghast at musicians raising aid to help the starving people in Ethiopia No, I don't remember this. It sounds made up. Do you have a citation?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - sbf501 4y ago
    > No, I don't remember this. It sounds made up. Do you have a citation? Nope: documenting all of the awful and shitty things conservatives said on the radio wasn't a thing back then.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      You're not wrong about that. Compared to the 1980s we've got a fantastically accessible record of all kinds of political bleating. If only we were using it to hold politicians and political parties accountable. At this point they just lie straight to our faces and no one loses their careers over it, or even their supporters. Only half the country at a time even consider it a scandal and it's never the half that would have voted for the liar anyway.

thaumaturgy 4y ago

This is kind of a weird op-ed. It frames this as though the costs are all red marker, but the costs of rebuilding include labor and materials and help to reinvigorate local economies. I'm sure there is a net cost, but it has been serviceable so far. Insurance isn't mentioned at all in the article. WUI areas have become nearly impossible to insure, even if you're doing all the things right for making your property fire-resistant (and most homeowners in these areas aren't). As long as California's housing market stays red-hot, there will still be another sucker willing to pay for California's state-insurance-plan-of-last-resort, but someday, somehow, something's gonna change and all of a sudden a lot of people won't be able to afford homeowner's insurance, and that's going to gut a lot of the fire-prone small towns. Newer state building codes are much more fire-resistant. Structures in the town of Paradise that had been built in the last 10 to 15 years largely all survived, even when all neighboring buildings were destroyed. New construction going into these places isn't going to burn the same way the old construction did; future costs will be less devastating, and it takes time for fuels to build up to the levels necessary for apocalyptic events. The state, also, is slowly getting less dumb about preventative fuel maintenance and the issues around prescribed burning are getting worked on. "Should these places exist at all" is about as fair a question as whether Phoenix or Las Vegas or New Orleans should exist, but it's kind of a boring argument because there's no state-run central planning that is going to forcibly relocate everyone or refuse to rebuild any of them again. A more interesting question is, "what do the changing conditions over the next 10 years mean for where I should live?"

TulliusCicero 4y ago
The difference with major cities is a) it's a lot harder to somehow abandon large populations than small ones, and b) the cost vs benefit ratio is probably there for big cities in a way that it's not for small towns in the mountains. Spending a billion dollars to rebuild a town with a population that numbers in the hundreds is horrible economic value. In contrast, New Orleans is big enough to where spending billions on flood protection may be still be worth it on some level. That said, it'd certainly be nice to find a way to have cute little towns in the mountains that wasn't dependent on enormous subsidies from other cities.

01100011 4y ago

People need to take the CalFire defensible space guidelines seriously: https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/communications/defensible-space-prc-4291/ https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/communications/defensible-s... Drive into any nice, quaint community at the interface between wilderness and development and you'll see homes surrounded in close proximity by fire vulnerable vegetation. I get it, it looks nice. But there's no way you should be able to get insurance if you allow it. Not only that, many of these mountain towns are serviced by a limited number of roads, sometimes only one. A wall of fire can easily overtake the population even with advanced warning due to traffic issues. Climate change is a threat, but fire is also part of the CA ecosystem in many places. It isn't going away and we need to be intelligent in how we anticipate and deal with it.

EdwardDiego 4y ago
This desire to live in wildfire prone forests bemuses me. Yes, trees are pretty, but... well, fires. Australia's bushfires often destroy houses built in very similar areas, lovely and leafy, surrounded by trees that have evolved to burn. I'm not sure if it's a holdover from the mindset that we can fully and effectively manage nature, or just because we prefer to live in hope, and the trees are pretty. But damn, either way, how much effort and risk is taken on to protect people living in areas prone to fire out of choice? In NZ, we've begun some "managed retreat", which is naturally contentious when it's your house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matat%C4%81 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matat%C4%81
willidiots 4y ago
I live in the WUI among trees. We've already spent $20,000 removing some fuels, and are spending $30,000 to remove more. This is in a county with a median annual income of $26,000. We can only afford this because of my remote tech worker salary. My neighbors aren't as privileged. The state could contribute more funds to these efforts, helping property owners reduce the fuels around their homes and improve defensible space.

bourgeoismedia 4y ago

https://apple.news/A8aiwLR-iQ7GKarGTp6nU6Q https://apple.news/A8aiwLR-iQ7GKarGTp6nU6Q

radium3d 4y ago

Sounds like something an insurance company that just wants to receive money but never pay out would say

ahaucnx 4y ago

One solution could be to make the building code much stricter and only allow to build houses that are build with materials that could survive a wild fire much better [1]. These houses would most likely be a lot more expensive to build but could be offset by surviving wildfires. Additionally if these houses are buiild with thicker walls they can retain heat in winter and remain cool enough in summer that air-conditioning is less needed. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/realestate/disaster-proof-housing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/realestate/disaster-proof...

Eleison23 4y ago
Why not do the opposite and build homes out of soft wood, paper, and cloth. This should drastically lower the costs of construction, and it would place no imaginary illusions on the residents that their structures could survive a disaster. Therefore the residents would be inherently better equipped, both mentally and physically, to recover from the next disaster to destroy their homestead. Is it too much to ask people to adopt a more ephemeral, nomadic lifestyle in the face of changing conditions on the ground?
- jaclaz 4y ago
  You mean people could adapt to living in yurts or gers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurt
jaclaz 4y ago
I don't think that - short of an underground bunker - there are fire-resistant structures that can survive a "serious" wildfire. The classification of fire-resistant is usually 30/60/90/120 minutes, meaning that the structure should not collapse before that time, but norms say nothing of the residual structure integrity, and the cost of inspecting, assessing and repairing a structure affected by a fire can in many cases exceed the cost of re-building it from the ground up. Set aside wood/timber, the other three common construction methods, steel, reinforced concrete and brick/stone masonry are all affected by the heat of a (large) fire (in the case of masonry it is the mortar that loses some of its properties), i.e. the structure won't have the same strength as before.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

If you think California is dry now, you ain't seen nothing yet. It's going to get a lot dryer. Plan for it, or regret it.

mitchbob 4y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/3xpgv https://archive.ph/3xpgv