Bobby. wrote on Jan 18^th, 2025 at 7:10am:


Are you seriously suggesting that houses should be built to be 100% fireproof?

You do realise the wildfires reached temperatures between 800°C and 1,200°C, with extremes surpassing 1,300°C? These temperatures exceed the thresholds for both concrete spalling and steel failure, particularly under prolonged exposure.

Intense heat turns moisture within concrete into steam, causing explosive spalling and exposing the steel reinforcement.  Extended high temperatures cause reinforcing steel to soften and fail, undermining the structural integrity of even the most resilient concrete.

Even if the concrete frame survived, the house would still be destroyed at these temperatures.

Should those rebuilding in these areas adopt more fire-resistant materials than wood framing, vinyl siding, or asphalt shingles?

Yes, of course they should.

But is that why the fires were so intense?

No, it is not.

This argument is nothing more than a diversion. Their homes didn’t spontaneously ignite because they had wooden siding or an asphalt roof.

Blaming the choice of materials is akin to the reprehensible “she was asking for it because of what she was wearing” defence of a rapist.

Only this time we're not talking about Trump. It’s an unprecedented wildfire supercharged by climate change. The flames were fuelled by a toxic combination of drought, rising temperatures, and systemic inaction on climate policy.

Shifting the blame to homeowners and their construction choices only serves to deflect attention from the larger, more culpable forces driving this catastrophe, which is your goal.

SadKangaroo wrote on Jan 18^th, 2025 at 7:36am:


What fuels such temperatures. Dense wood in the middle of a dry forest.

Not dry grass and pot plants on a stone patio around a stone building with no wooden frame or roof structure.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-01-17/lessons-from-the-burn-zone-...


Stone, concrete, brick, steel structures do not burn. Wood, plastic do. 

Bobby. wrote on Jan 17^th, 2025 at 9:57pm:


are you offering to pay for it?

SadKangaroo wrote on Jan 18^th, 2025 at 9:37am:



You have been very eager to finally get to your point, haven't you.
Sad. 

Dem Governor, Dem mayor, Dem population - but it's Trump's fault.

You lot have TDS brain scabs and you actually love picking them incessantly!


I have a good one for you, too:

Frank wrote on Jan 18^th, 2025 at 9:43am:


It’s absolutely hilarious how pathetically triggered you get when I hold up a mirror to your nonsense.

Are you truly that oblivious to the garbage you post? Or does self-awareness just terrify you?

The fact that you can’t even detect sarcasm, delivered in the exact same absurd tone you use unironically, is beyond pathetic.

Once again, you’ve managed to showcase just how completely your Trump Derangement Syndrome has rotted whatever scraps of intelligence might have once existed in that tiny excuse for a brain.

greggerypeccary wrote on Jan 18^th, 2025 at 10:09am:


I mean, I was kidding, but it's certainly something we should start doing once he is sworn in.

Not so much about the fires, but all the outcomes from the policy changes he makes, positive or negative, should have his name on it.

Trump Recession 2.0 here we come.

SadKangaroo wrote on Jan 17^th, 2025 at 9:53pm:



That is an assumption. Perhaps you can provide proof of your assertion. Meanwhile -

"A new study led by Stanford’s Rebecca Miller analyzes one option for limiting fires in California: prescribed burns. The researchers interviewed experts in state government, federal agencies, non profits, and academia to find out what barriers are preventing greater use of prescribed burns."
...

"The researchers noted that permit requests have been on the rise, with the area planned to be burned each year doubling since 2013. But only about one-half to one-third of that area actually gets burned—almost entirely due to the US Forest Service falling short of its annual plan.

So what holds the Forest Service back, and why aren’t the planned areas larger? At around 18,000 acres burned in 2018, it would take quite a while to work through the backlog, which now totals 20 million acres.
The three Rs

The researchers found three types of barriers: risks, resources, and regulations. In terms of risk, the fear of liability seems to be preventing many private landowners from considering burns. In 2018, the state created a training certification and a protection from liability for those who complete it and follow safety procedures. The researchers say that more programs like this could help.

The resource-related barriers can largely explain the gap between plans and actual area burned. Responding to uncontrolled wildfires obviously takes precedence over prescribed burns, both in terms of staffing and funding. CAL FIRE, for example, hires seasonal staff focused on the fire season—which isn’t the best time of year to be attempting prescribed burns. And the US Forest Service has had to use much of its fire budget on active wildfires, diverting funding from prevention. Add in a demographic wave of retirements among fire managers, and staff availability has been limiting.

As is true elsewhere, mechanical thinning efforts in California have suffered from the tension between financial incentives for those doing the work and optimal thinning techniques. Private logging operations would like to target the largest trees, ignoring the small stuff that won’t yield lumber. But thinning operations focus on the small stuff, greatly reducing the profit potential.

Finally, there are the regulation-related barriers. Air board approval is one bottleneck. The experts interviewed felt that the working definition of “acceptable weather conditions” has been strict, which can cut short multi-day burn plans. There are also many local air boards around the state, and a lack of consistency can create problems for burn projects that have to involve more than one of them.

There’s some friction, in that the particulate pollution and carbon dioxide emissions of prescribed burns are counted as human-caused, while emissions from wildfires go in a separate category. There’s no offset for prescribed burns reducing potential wildfire emissions.

It’s also true that burns supported by state or federal grants have to undergo additional environmental reviews, which can sometimes hold up projects past windows of opportunity. The researchers say that the experts they talked to felt these reviews are designed for larger projects and don’t work well with prescribed burns. They were also leery of weakening environmental protections, though, so there was no clear recommendation.

The researchers noticed, unsurprisingly, that the California State Legislature tends to introduce more wildfire bills following major disasters—of which there have been plenty in the last few years. Many recent bills have focused on addressing roadblocks like liability concerns. But in order to treat something like a million acres of land each year, the researchers say more strategies (and money) will have to come out.

Hiring dedicated staff during the prescribed burn season would be a good start. And real financial incentives for landowners to carry out burns, or for logging contractors to cut brush, could get some wheels rolling. The researchers also suggest that CAL FIRE’s legal requirement to suppress active fires on state or private land could be eliminated, giving them the ability to allow non-dangerous fires to burn when that makes sense, as the Forest Service does on federal land.

They write: “Generating the political willpower to make these important policy changes will probably require a combination of administration support, successful burns, collaboration among multiple stakeholders and, unfortunately, more deadly and destructive wildfires.”

Nature Sustainability, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s41893-019-0451-7 (About DOIs).

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-using-more-prescribe...

Some people don't like Arstechnica, if so go to the mentioned paper.

Note Air Boards or Air Resources Board.

"CARB is charged with protecting the public from the harmful effects of air pollution and developing programs and actions to fight climate change."

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/about

lee wrote on Jan 18^th, 2025 at 12:58pm:


No worries, Lee. Show us your posts where you said that.

We'll do a little compare and contrast, shall we?