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No my point is stop overfunding firefighting. Over fund forest management.

• imoverclocked 2y ago
  Unfortunately, it's not a binary tradeoff.
• irjustin 2y ago
  At the risk of being an idiot, is the problem firefighting? Is the problem that we're continuing a losing battle? That, even when we had proper forest management, the costs were still shifting towards firefighting? Warming making everything drier on average? In the end though the only one we're truly hurting is ourselves and our desired life style when it burns out of control.
  • jwlake 2y ago
    Firefighting makes the next fire worse. You need to have a theory that doesn't involve more expensive fire fighting every time someone builds a new house. This is general means defending towns and letting the mountainside burn.
    • ethbr1 2y ago
      This is an insurance problem more than anything else. If insurers were allowed to and incentivized to price accurately, homes in dangerous areas (flood plains, fire hazards) would be too expensive to buy, and people... wouldn't. Especially given that if you can't get insurance, you can't get a mortgage, which drastically limits your buyers.
      • jwlake 2y ago
        I 100% agree with that, but the way pricing works is generally not sufficiently granular. You either get underpriced government backed plans, or a plan that does not take into account your actual circumstances. Eventually sufficient big data might be able to solve the pricing problem. Defensible construction will have cheap insurance and indefensible buildings will not be economically insurable. The problem is insurance is by county (lol) or by "city". Neither work in CA mountains.
        • fn-mote 2y ago
          > the way pricing works is generally not sufficiently granular Is this caused by regulations or the insurers approach? Genuinely ignorant here.
        • WalterBright 2y ago
          Legislation generally opposes granular insurance policies, as it is discrimination.
          • ethbr1 2y ago
            But in the case of home insurance, unlike health, people actually have a choice: build there or do it somewhere else. Artificially forcing blended home insurance rates lessens the pricing signal that this particular area might be too risky to build in. At the end of the day, it's developers and the city/county making money while offloading the risk to insurance companies and government mortgage buyers.
            • WalterBright 2y ago
              There have been endless lawsuits by homeowners alleging discrimination in their insurance rates. All this impairs granular risk assessment and insurance rates. A recent WSJ article was about lawsuits from homeowners who were quoted higher insurance rates because their roof was rotten and/or there were trees that could fall on their house. The same has happened with auto insurance rates (men and women have different accident rates, so used to have different rates), and, glaringly, medical insurance rates.
              • amanaplanacanal 2y ago
                Most medical insurance isn't really insurance, it's more prepaid health care.
                • gottorf 2y ago
                  I've seen people asking why car insurance doesn't cover oil changes the same way dental insurance covers cleanings, so be careful what you wish for, I guess.
    • nradov 2y ago
      Is that even feasible? How exactly would firefighters defend towns from large wildfires. They can't cut an effective fire break around an entire town.
      • jwlake 2y ago
        The bigger the town the easier it gets. Towns have roads and parking lots and cmu commercial buildings that are mostly non-flammable. They also have water supplies and logistics infrastructure. Centralized defense is very feasible. Mountain roads and poor communications cause an underutilization of resources.
        • nradov 2y ago
          That doesn't seem accurate. Commercial buildings aren't necessarily in the outskirts of town. And while the buildings themselves might be slightly more fire-resistant than typical wood frame houses, they're full of flammable materials. Look what happened with the Camp Fire in 2018.
          • LorenPechtel 2y ago
            It's simply not possible to make a practical house that won't support combustion. However, we don't need to. The threat is not what happens when the house is exposed to direct fire, but what happens when the house is exposed to ignition sources. And those *can* be stopped. Build your house such that there isn't anything combustible on the outside of the house and all access points are made spark proof. Our house is not fire engineered--but still it has very few spots that could ignite. That's simply because we have stucco walls and a concrete tile roof. There is some exposed wood but not much. Nor are the vents spark proof. Unfortunately, concrete tile roofs aren't suitable in many places (they don't like hail) and can't be retrofit onto most houses due to the weight.
      • jjk166 2y ago
        The cost of a fire break is proportional to the perimeter, the value is proportional to the area.