> But Michael Wara, the director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Wood Institute for the Environment, said it was likely the Millikins’ decision to dig out the existing landscaping directly surrounding the house and replace it with river stones that made the biggest difference.
> “What folks in the wildfire business call the zone zero or the ember ignition zone, is kind of a key factor in whether homes do or do not burn down,” Wara said.
> Having nothing combustible in the 5 feet directly around a house is enormously important.
This has become increasingly important for fire insurance here in Southern California over the last decade. My neighbor has five acres and when he bought it after a fire destroyed his previous house, he went around and killed everything on his property except for a few distant trees using Round Up (creating a neighborhood standoff over the runoff in the process).
We also had to completely clear cut all plant life that borders the small roads leading up to the neighborhood and all the properties because firefighters will refuse to send their trucks into any area that might be quickly cut off by flying embers lighting shrubs on fire.
They’re basically not a fire hazard at all unless they get really dried out. In fact, large patches of succulents such as ice plant are often used as a firebreak.
Anyone can build houses out of more expensive materials, if they're ready to pay for it. America has an abundance of wood so wood framing houses seems sensible.
You can't make statements like that about America in general. Every piece of it has completely different and extremely opinionated housing regulations. Partly as protectionism for the wood homebuilders, so that nobody tries making them in factories.
There is a wood construction lobby. It's not a conspiracy theory, just the ordinary kind of political self-interest advocacy by lumber sellers. There are also steel and cement lobbies.
Is the wood lobby so much stronger that somehow ordinary American families are punished in some obscure way for daring to have a house made out of steel or concrete?
There's some endogeneity though (sorry for the big word).
Wood houses are cheaper because the lobbying got the other cheap ways to build housing made illegal.
For instance, if you can't build anything more than one story, can't make an apartment, or can't run a corner store out of your house, then it's not productive enough to pay for the construction costs of anything else.
Fire codes are also a lot of it. That's the kind of thing that seems reasonable, then you go back and look at old speeches and they're just saying stuff like "we must make up expensive safety laws for apartments or else black people will move in".
Houses are made in factories in America, and they are generally regarded as a supremely inferior product, at the very least because of width constraints for shipping them via trucks on highways.
In what countries can you get high quality factory-built housing?
Currently you can't get them in other countries, if by houses you mean buildings shaped like American houses. That's because we made it illegal to build any other type.
(Also recommend reading everything else he wrote. This is an inaccurate summary of it.)
Also, here's a building in Seattle that's a new type of wood called "mass timber" that can be built very quickly and cheaply. It wasn't legal until recently, and I'm not sure if it is in other cities yet.
Concrete will be better for both long term and safety, especially when major cities in US are in direct contact with hurricanes/tornadoes.
P.S. no clue why my previous comment was deleted.. is HN run by house developer/contractors that the use of anything than wood will threaten their profit!? It’s no brainer to use something stronger, better, safer, and definitely environmentally friendly cutting trees for wood, it’s hypocritical to say “save a tree” when printing an email but you don’t mind to destroy a whole forest to build houses or even to make toilet papers.. it would make sense to have these houses built primarily using wood in the 50s where everything was simpler and definitely not as costly, but paying ~$800k for a paper house that will literally fly away in the next tornado, is a state-sponsored scam.
Your previous comment is not deleted, it's only marked as [dead] and hidden. Anyone can see it if they go to their profile[1] and enable "showdead". I think your comment got too many flags and downvotes, and it got automatically killed by the system. You can email the mods to get an official explanation.
I guess people flagged/downvoted it for the tone A similar comment is still alive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37195133 . The replies say that apparently wood is better than concrete for earthquakes (but I'm not sure[2]).
TL;DR it was owned by the people who maintained their house.
This is something that worries me about my fire-prone California city, where virtually all of the houses are dilapidated junk that would burst into flames immediately if any embers came by. Wood shingle siding is very common and a lot of people think it is "vernacular" even though such siding was added in a second wave of renovations after all these buildings were made. Letting your house fall to bits, complaining to the city whenever anyone tries to improve or replace a home, and calling the weeds growing right up your walls "a garden" are all local hobbies.
Coriolis effect is common in large (~10s of km) systems but I'm not sure the effect is strong enough to affect something as turbulent as air rising from a fire. At small sizes, like water in a toilet, it's not large enough to determine which direction the water swirls.
I hear you but some of the big fire driven storms really do get up to the mid-range of mesoscale, where Coriolis force starts to play a role. It obviously won’t have the same role as synoptic phenomena, but I suspect most fire whirls have cyclonic motion, unless local orography really favors anticyclonic flow.
Fwiw this is standard stuff here in Montana: the fire people will come out and survey your place (without being asked, they just show up) and tell you what you need to do for better fire protection.
My local FD in California certified my house annually during the decade I owned it despite the fact that it was surrounded by pines, mostly dead, some touching the house.
People in the cities with "normal" yards are not thinking about wildfires, not being contacted about it.
I think they were referring to people in the middle of nowhere, where yard work is more like forestry work. Every year I get some mail from the state about taking a class to learn how to manage my land/trees. It touches on healthy forests and fires. Areas more like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/zPqNbX4142vobyMP7
Expert feedback is a gift and unannounced inspections are the only useful kind. Also, there is lack of regular consistency in America when it comes to regulation of occupied properties.
This is clickbait and not HN worthy. The intro ends with
> Experts say it was likely a little bit of all the above, but that one element of the home’s recent renovation is actually the most affordable and important thing people can do to try and protect their homes.
then proceeds without explaining what it is. Such a trashy technique to drive engagement.
In Australia, once you get outside urban zones, I think the default building guidelines are no flammable materials on the outside of your house. That includes wood verandahs, posts, balustrades, through to aluminium rather than plastic-based fly screens on windows & doors.
Ember attack is a big concern - as noted in TFA you want a clear area around your house, but also sealing off ingress pathways under gutters / eaves and so on. This is all doable, but it's as expensive as you'd expect 'the last 5%' to be.
Where I am (250km north west of Sydney AU) in the months before the pandemic, we had a bush fire heading towards us at about 1km a day through national park. It was ~ 10km away when (atypically) heavy rains arrived. We've had 3 years of above-average rainfall, but it's now agreed that el niño / la niña has flipped, so while it's been great for the inland areas of the southern half of the east coast of Australia these last few years, we're left with a lot of organic matter that's rapidly dying off and drying out.
It's hardly a novel prediction, but this summer will be spectacular in all the wrong ways in Australia.
Mom's house in Butte county was built around 1985 up to whatever California building standards existed at the time. The first owners weren't mechanically included but appeared to have a mix of professional repairs where it mattered and confused DIY otherwise. What helped saved the structure were American city habits of high-water lawns and pushing back the wildland-urban interface.
Coober Pedy is a completely subterranean town around the opal mines. These days (not in AU), I'm looking at semi-underground housing structures to cut heating and cooling costs and avert some classes of risks associated with conventional housing. 40-45 C summers for 4 months & -10 C winters will increasingly become too expensive for conventional structures. Plus, there's wind, hail, lightning, tornadic, and wildfire risks to consider. Flooding isn't a problem if building on high ground.
Yup, over winter (just at the end of that here, now) we've been continuing to clear a larger break around the abodes, a few very large bonfires over the past couple of months, but ultimately if a fire is heading towards us we're mostly at the mercy of climate & localised weather events.
Underground is appealing, but radon and costs (water diversion, load-bearing roof strength, etc) have put me off that idea. I should revisit. We're starting to plant out more deciduous trees as our break zone extends - local Australian natives (eucalypts, cypress) burn like tar barrels. Similarly contending with -6 through 45 celsius. You paint a cheery picture. ; |
I read an article about this house immediately after the fires ripped through.
Not mentioned in TFA is that the owner saturated everything with water prior to evacuating. Note his large yard full of vegetation didn't catch fire, that alone put a huge buffer zone on that side of his house.
Also I'll never understand why asphalt shingles are so popular, metal is better in every way.
Where I currently live, tin roofs are the norm. And yes, it can be extremely loud in the rainy reason. My wife & I quite like it actually, like a white noise generator. Also, I can easily get out of phone/video calls I don’t want to be on.
> that the owner saturated everything with water prior to evacuating.
Used to live in rural Colorado and have had our house threatened by wildfires multiple times. We did the same thing and set up large volume pivot sprinklers that formed both a perimeter and kept the roof+deck wet when the fires got within a mile of us. Glad to hear it worked for this person. Wildfires are scary.
Slate is nice, but you've got to make sure your roof can support the weight. In the USA, most homes can't handle it unless they were built with that in mind. I wish I had a slate roof!
My house has asphalt, my garage has metal. I prefer the metal overall, but it’s very difficult to walk on to sweep the chimney, and it’s a hazard during winter when sheets of ice and snow slide off of it.
In Colorado metal roofs are relatively common, typically there's little dams near the gutter to keep large amounts of snow/ice from sliding down and hurting people/property. Even just something that's 2"x2" per panel seems to really help.
> Not mentioned in TFA is that the owner saturated everything with water prior to evacuating. Note his large yard full of vegetation didn't catch fire, that alone put a huge buffer zone on that side of his house.
The article says the owner was was in Massachusetts during the fire. So not sure how the owner saturated everything??
See my other comment, it probably wasn't the owner. A guy rents a workshop in the bottom level and had evacuated to the Millikins' house. It was probably him who was interviewed at the time and did the watering.
This article claims "Millikin, who was on a trip to Massachusetts during the Lahaina fire", not that he evacuated. Perhaps a different fire? (Edit: thanks for the other article link; misunderstanding that someone who evacuated from the home wasn't the owner makes sense)
From the wider angle shot[1], there's some other nearby land with small greenery and no structures that also appears mostly unburnt. (On the left hand side, on the other side of what looks like a major road). Perhaps the other land was also saturated with water, or perhaps the absence of large trees made it hard to catch or some other reason.
> Also I'll never understand why asphalt shingles are so popular, metal is better in every way.
Metal roofs cost more, can be more dangerous to work on (making anything else that happens on the roof more expensive), significantly louder in rain and hail. They certainly have the potential of lasting longer and they're more difficult to ignite.
It might not have been Millikin who was interviewed and did the watering, my mistake:
> They first heard about the fire from a man who lives in
> Lahainaluna, a neighborhood about three and a half miles away, and
> uses two rooms beneath the house as a workshop. His home burned
> first, so he evacuated to the Millikins'. Then he had to evacuate
> from there, too, she said. [0]
The article used the phrase "blessed house"... failing to find it though. Was definitely about this fire.
Sort of, it's common to mount metal roofs on wood. Leaves, pine cones, pine needles, and even just tree dandruf/pollen/cottonwood strands tend to collect in corners, in gutters, and any other ledges. Even an ounce can be enough to start a fire and embers from major fires can easily go a mile. So even a metal roof isn't good protection unless you remove anything that can ignite from anywhere near wood. Embers don't typically light asphalt shingles ... unless the fire gets under it on a gutter or similar.
Asphalt shingles are/were popular because they they are super cheap, pretty hard to fuck up the installation since they soften and half meld together in the sun, and isn't usually that big of a deal if they are damaged by hail or tornadoes again because they are cheap to replace or shingle over. Also easy enough for any random joe blow to install.
Steel is becoming more popular these days though because it has gotten way cheaper while asphalt shingles have gotten a bit more expensive. But like 30+ years a steel versus asphalt roof was a huge step up in cost, and 50 years ago the paint on steel wasn't as good as it is today and could fail and start rusting within the time frame that a quality shingle roof would. You don't see rusted steel roofing very often any more though because most of that failed and was replaced 20 years ago or so.
If you can afford it though steel is definitely the way better deal today, provided you aren't doing your own roof and are tearing it down to the wood instead of just shingling over the old stuff.
Most homes go up in flames not from the flames that we often seen in footage (which can generate quite a lot of radiant heat), but rather start from embers that fall onto flammable bits (decks, wood furniture, dry vegetation, large-hole attic vents):
Maybe those aging homeowners in San Jose, CA with Prop 13 or recent transplants with lots of cash who buy them out, but is that the majority of homeowners in America? I think not.
Most probably care more about their families and irreplaceable heirlooms than their houses. Houses can be rebuilt. Insurance exists now (but maybe not for much longer).
Most (but not all) Americans are intensely ignorant, and some are proud of it for tribal reasons. I know because I visited Paradise in 2018 and lived there 2019-2020. Not a single person I met amongst thousands took even partial personal responsibility for losing their structure: it was all somebody else's fault or an act of divine intervention.
The more real climate change becomes, the more fanciful and fantastic the deniers conspiracies get. There's a classic 70 year old book on this as a nice introduction
In climate change's case, they say "it doesn't exist" and then it happens. It's the same social mechanisms regardless.
They used to just call scientists alarmists, then fraudsters, and now that it's happening there's witchcraft, shadowy cabals, secret weapons, global conspiracies ... this isn't a self-correcting epistemology, it just goes further off the rails.
Check out how wildly complicated covid conspiracies have gotten now that their global government never came, people didn't all drop dead from the vaccine, and everything mostly returned to normal. They're spinning rube goldberg towers of fantastic tales to stay in their delusions.
There's no denying in the 4bn+ years of Earth, the climate has changed multiple times. Is it changing drastically, today, due to human influence? That's a bigger claim and with good arguments on both sides.
Have we forgotten the Climate controversy emails from 2009?
Was this a random tragedy, or something we should expect to see more of in areas that aren't historically prone to wildfire? Are we going to have to cut down our trees and gardens in New England to protect against fire?
A similar thing happened in my community (not historically prone to wildfire) on December 30, 2021. 1000 homes destroyed. Fortunately far fewer casualties. Similar proximate causes (100+ mph winds and historically dry vegetation). I remember some outlets making a big deal about the possibility of this becoming a new normal due to climate change. It was (to my knowledge) the first wildfire attributed to climate change.
Kind of? There are lots of trees everywhere, and plenty of nature preserves. Think suburban NY, CT, MA. Plenty of ponds and wetlands too, but in a drought things can get very dry.
This happened because of a confluence of several different factors at once:
1. Wildfires that threaten neighborhoods are not particularly common in Hawaii, so people don't have the same level of awareness around defensible space and fire protection, and the government doesn't educate about it / require it
2. Nonnative grasses have taken over swaths of Maui, and they burn more easily than native grasses
3. Maui is currently having a drought and exceptionally dry
4. A hurricane several hundred miles to the south caused very unusual wind conditions: VERY strong winds blowing from the opposite direction wind usually blows
5. The power company's lines are not capable of withstanding the gusts, and they did not shut down the power as a precaution, as happens in other wildfire-prone areas
So powerlines blew over, sparks ignited the grass, fire raced through the town.
The drought and hurricane are likely climate change related. So if climate change is causing outlier weather that can induce wildfires to become more common near you, you should start preparing before the government makes you. That's the takeaway.
Climate change should be number 1 on this list, and it not being listed is unconscionable. It's absolutely because of climate change. Everything else is secondary.
I trusted that people could piece together that climate change is the upstream factor behind both the hurricane and drought. Sorry you think I don't have a conscience.
#5 bothers me. There is no technical reason that a downed power line should start a fire.
As far as I know, a certain amount of energy will be more or less unavoidably discharged when a power line hits the ground: the power line has some capacitance to ground, and it has a voltage (which varies with time) relative to ground, and the stored energy (1/2 C V^2) isn’t going to just disappear. This isn’t all that much energy.
But there is no real reason that the power station needs to keep delivering more power to an arc after the capacitance discharges. Avoiding it is somewhat complicated, but the technology is available off the shelf:
not necessarily to the ground, a power line going down could short with any number of structures, or other power lines.
i've seen a grass fire start when a bird touched its wingtips to two lines on the same pole, and the smoking carcass hitting the ground was enough to ignite it.
That's the question I'm asking myself too. I live in Seattle, where you can't walk two blocks without seeing a new (wooden) residential building going up. I'm sure that newer buildings like these take more precautions than the historic ones in Lahaina, but it still makes me wonder, since Seattle isn't historically prone to wildfires.
I don't understand why more houses in areas prone to wind/fire aren't built from concrete. There are large parts of the world where that is the default due to lack of wood.
Note that fire can and does compromise concrete structures anyways, and more crucially, concrete structures tend to be significantly more expensive to build. A standard wood frame house is insanely cheap to build the structure of, and unsurprisingly, consumers tend to want to build a lot very cheaply.
Finally, there are only two types of concrete: Concrete that has cracked, and concrete that hasn't cracked yet.
For several decades I cannot wrap my head around the fact that US houses are built literally from sticks, alabaster and paper, and still an order of magnitude more expensive that typical Europe concrete/masonry house.
The prevalence of strong earthquakes across large parts of the US explains almost all of it. It is very difficult and expensive to engineer a building with structural masonry that can survive magnitude 7-8+ earthquakes, and the building code requires it in many places (M 8.5 where I live). They used to build a lot of masonry buildings in the US just like Europe using the same techniques but they stopped doing it after they were repeatedly flattened in earthquakes.
Strong earthquakes mean you can only really build with wood or steel frames, so that is what they build with. Steel framed construction is significantly more expensive to buy, build, and maintain, so it isn’t commonly used in houses since they don’t need the extra strength.
You don’t need masonry to be fire resistant. Large brush fires would drop burning embers all over your house when I lived in the southwestern US, but the ubiquitous stucco-and-tile exteriors were largely unaffected.
Then the next generation apparently forgot about Tracy, and the current crop of buildings have the wispy floor to ceiling plate glass windows etc you'd see in any modern designer building slash greenhouse, which is spectacularly unsuited to a tropical climate and even worse for cyclones.
Replacing windows isn't expensive compared to a house rebuild. Seems like an entirely reasonable tradeoff for more light imo, as long as you have a safe room somewhere.
Your second link actually addresses that and seems to contradict your comment:
> The perception that a single-storey brick house would offer better protection from a future cyclone was largely borne out of fear rather than facts, Troppo Architects director Jo Best said. ... "I think also that there's a bit of misconception to why people think a block house is safer than a framed house. It's not the case, they are both required to meet a certain structural code and you can't get a building permit unless that happens."
I did the same for my house, the other thing is to install mesh screens around all the air vents. Don't know what to do about the deck though. Could put a sprinkler on it but I'm sure they'd cut power if it came down to it.
Here in Hawaii (the big island) the grid is so remarkably unreliable compared to the mainland that many folks are simply off grid. On top of that, electricity is so expensive that we are at the forefront of home solar + storage deployment because the ROI is so high.
> Just as if you install a large capacity farm tank of gasoline or propane you can power a generator approximately forever*.
I used to live in a house that had groundwater seepage issues. As a result, it needed a sump pump to keep the basement dry during heavy rains, which naturally coincide with power outages. So the sump pump had a standby battery pack, just two car batteries in parallel. It could work on them for about 4 days.
I checked, and sprinkler pumps need even less power to run.
> Both the Powerwall and large tanks of flammables have their risks in bushfires.
Not really. A tank of diesel (gasoline is not suitable for long-term storage) has a huge thermal mass. A mere bush fire shouldn't be able to ignite it. It might damage fuel lines and the generator, though. I'm not sure about propane.
> If I recall correctly the current crop of Tesla Powerwalls require cooling to stay safe?
Powerwall is OK until +60C, above that temperature it just shuts down.
Australian bushfires get prety hot - much as Californian bushfires do thanks to similar oil heavy trees.
LPG tanks (propane in the US) get hot, increase pressure, and outgas through the pressure relief valve - causing a flamethrower effect and why valves etc should face away from buildings
You're correct that diesal tank are more common thanks to longer storage life etc. but large farms will often have unleaded petrol tanks if there's enough activity to warrent not having to drive a 50km (or more) to a service station to refuel.
The real question I have about Powerwalls (lithium and other future designs) is at what tempreture do they ignite and become part of the problem in a big way (although obviously the question of when they shutdown and no longer provie power is also relevant).
I'm in Western Australia, in rural parts that are largely self sufficient - emergency questions are always coming up wrt what does and doesn't work.
I'm not sure about Powerwall, but in general LiIon batteries can survive being heated to 100C. You can boil them, and they will work fine afterward (provided they stay sealed).
And I'm pretty sure that your house will be long gone if battery cells reach 100C.
100C is boiling water - you don't think a house can survive boiling water thrown on it?
The standard here isn't a simple temp. - it's how long a house can sustain external heat for.
One excerpt from the Australian Bushfire Houing standard talks about:
The assumed effective flame temperature sustained for a 2 minute period over a fire front width of 100 m.
Instantaneous flame temperature may peak above 1090 K.
That's, uhhh, Kelvin - greater than 700C
Who's going to put a Powerwall inside their house in any case? It'd go outside, well away from the house, out by the outbuildings and fuel tanks.
If you poke about you can find the house mockup testing videos on youtube - sustained high temp flame thrower work to determine when windows shatter and lintels catch fire, etc.
Australian Standard AS 3959:2018 - Construction of buildings in bushfire prone areas
For the battery to reach this temperature, the sustained air temperature has to be over 100C for several hours. At this temperature, most of the plastics will start losing structural integrity. Windows will crack from thermal expansion. And water boiling in the pipes will probably be the least of your worries.
> Instantaneous flame temperature may peak above 1090 K.
A gas stove flame is at that temperature, but it's also very thin. Think about how long it takes to boil a pot of water.
Now move that pot away from the direct flames, just a few centimeters. It's likely that the water won't ever get to the boiling temperature.
> Who's going to put a Powerwall inside their house in any case? It'd go outside, well away from the house, out by the outbuildings and fuel tanks.
FWIW, my whole-house backup battery (Enphase, not Powerwall) is in the garage. Because it gets very cold where I live, and the battery needs to be warm enough to work.
Worth pointing out, though, that I literally linked you to design standards for Australian houses intended to survive:
A house in a bushfire may be faced with three ‘waves’ of assault. The first is the radiant heat that arrives just ahead of the fire front itself, which can start to build as much as thirty minutes before the arrival of the flames.
Once the flames themselves hit, a house in a flame zone environment could be subjected to temperatures as high as 1000°C for a couple of minutes.
But even after this initial front passes, the danger is not over; there is still a threat from residual radiant heat that takes a while to ease and embers that continue to bombard the house for many hours.
and suggested you look for the extreme test videos that subject various steel frame mockups to a battery of flamethrowers to simulate Australian bushfires.
Again, 100C is the tempreture of boiling water; what's the ignition point of hardwoods? what's the sagging point of steel?
A few 50 gallon drums, a battery, and a pump seems like cheap insurance if you are in a fire prone area. I wouldn't count on electricity or water pressure during a major fire.
A battery that can drive a decent water pump for any length of time is going to be big, not so much cheap. And you also need metal pipes and sprinklers unless they're buried, or they'll melt in the heat. And those "few 50 gallon drums" won't last for long - 200 gallons will be gone in less than one hour, and that's with just one sprinkler. You'll likely want multiple.
Source: live in the bush and speccing out exactly this.
I'm shopping houses in areas surrounded by trees. Sharing any notes/conclusions you have would be appreciated. My current investigation is along the lines of 8-12 50 gallon drums, a couple sprinklers, and shared use of a power wall or similar battery, and some solar panels to keep the batteries topped off. Was hoping that either physical presence or sensors would help use the water when it's most helpful by watching temps, wind speed, and humidity. Certainly I'm planning on other steps like removing any leaves/pine needles from roof and gutters, metal roof, screens over all intakes, and keeping anything flammable from near the house (and especially within 1-2 meters).
Good luck, I am just starting on the research, though we live on rainwater already so have quite a bit of infrastructure to support that. In our case we have 3 x 25kl tanks (so about 20k gallons), with the tanks all concrete and buried which is good for this application. We also already have our own water pump which is inside a building being protected.
In our case the 3 tanks all come in to the pump more or less separately, so one required action is to install check valves in each line so if one of the lines is compromised, the others won't leak out through it.
As you say, maybe physical presence or maybe sensors. We need to assume we might be forced to evacuate and still want the system to operate, but also consider we might not be able to and might be trapped on site.
In our case the water supply should last for at least 24 hours, so I am hoping it will be feasible to just turn it on as we are fleeing, hard to say though. If you have a lot less water you will need to be much more judicious about when to activate it - as late as possible but not too late.
We have a Honda EU20i generator which with an extended fuel tank should run for at least a day.
Our biggest problem is that one of the buildings is built from cedar. I am not sure how practical it is to prevent such material from catching fire under extreme conditions,m even if it is well hosted down. At least the roof is metal!
It's all too common for narratives like these, i.e., "It's god's will" or "a miracle", because it allows people to dismiss their part of being unprepared since external locus-of-control frees them of the responsibilities of blame and agency. There are no "miracle homes", only preparedness and probability.
In the 2018 Camp Fire, my mom's home was the only one left standing on the block because due to multiple factors:
- Lack of fuel (including trees and debris) adjacent to the structure(s)
- Proper building codes ensuring use of less flammable products
- Distance of setbacks around the structure(s)
- Almost an acre / 4k [m^2] of irrigated lawn on all sides
Firefighters may have helped, but it's difficult to say because there was zero information for months. * When residents were allowed to return, 3 360L plastic wheelie bins were reduced to 1m diameter / 4mm high "puddles" by radiant heating alone. An outdoor shed built like a residential structure was reduced to a toxic crater, including melting steel tools into nothing. 2/3 of a cord of firewood burned near the back leaving a 2" / 5 cm discolored divot in aggregate concrete. Half of an aluminum ladder was left like it had hit lava. Embers left charring here and there but they didn't ignite. The rain gutters were packed full of pine needles that I asked my mom's now ex to solve who kept promising but never delivering.
Also, loggers came in from all over and took trees at random from private and public property without the express consent of owners because of disaster resource harvesting since tree trunks were worth thousands each. Mostly Pacific ponderosa pines that stood since before Washington crossed the Potomac, each with 10k's of holes bored by woodpeckers getting at the damn beetles. Instead, the skyline was transformed into a haphazard, sterile moonscape construction site.
* Like Lele, there was also no alarm and the county sheriff defended his inaction and lack of preparedness. The Amber Alert system could've been used by the county sheriff or the local police department, cell phone service was never disrupted. Also, there is a canard being promulgated by the media about not using the tsunami system in Lele, which would've been pointless. I'm sure they had an Amber alert system too, but it wouldn't have made any difference because their cell phone towers and power grid crumbled almost immediately. Hawaiian officials claim they sent out text messages but the cell towers were already down while it was being sent: so too little, too late. Like Paradise, the power company in Hawaii should've known about the weather conditions and turned off the power in dry conditions with high wind.
Experts say it was likely a little bit of all the above, but that one element of the home’s recent renovation is actually the most affordable and important thing people can do to try and protect their homes.
PART 2: A PAINSTAKING RENOVATION
Millikin and his wife, Dora Millikin, fell in love with the Front Street house several years ago...
Wow. This kind of narrative cliffhanger makes sense in a thriller. It does not make sense in an article on how to prevent houses from burning down. I'm not going to blame the author, since this is more of a cultural and institutional problem, but this article reads like a caricature.
This is a type of article called a “human-interest story,” and isn’t intended to teach you how to protect your home from fire. Instead, it’s soft news intended to create an emotional connection to the impact of the fires. This sort of story has been a staple of news writing for decades. It’s not new, and it’s not a sign of any sort of cultural problem. (Except, perhaps, HN’s cultural problem of middlebrow dismissals.)
I’m probably the HN dismissive you are talking about, but I don’t understand the purpose of writing something that establishes a negative emotional reaction to something without engaging with how that something can be fixed.
It’s like saying “I’m happy to put a lot of work into making my readers feel bad for person X, but I can’t be bothered researching how to help person X or others who could become X in the future.”
What am I missing?
On second thoughts maybe it’s useful to separate the emotional articles from the pragmatic ones. Maybe this author is better at empathy and not good at problem solving.
I get that I may think differently, but I still don’t understand why being solution-oriented isn’t superior?
What’s the point of reading and writing if not to learn things about the world to help reduce suffering through solutions? I guess you can just read and write for the enjoyment of it, but it seems weird to do so in a case where there is a huge potential to reduce suffering though sharing knowledge.
You have a massive blind spot here. As one solution-oriented person to another, please make it a goal to understand and fix this blind spot. It will make you more successful in life, and will make you more effective at implementing your solutions, too.
I’m a consultant, and my job is getting people to change their software development processes so they are more effective. In the early days, that included things like “use source control.” Now, my advice is more subtle. Regardless, the job hasn’t changed.
You might think that such a job involves showing people an obviously better way, and then helping while they put the idea into practice. I thought so too, at first.
Narrator voice: It does not.
First and foremost, the job is making an emotional connection with people so they want to change. Convincing them that you’re on their side, that you understand their world, and that you have their best interests at heart. Ultimately, it requires empathy.
If you continue to approach problems without empathy, continue to dismiss people who take a people-centric rather than solution-centric view of the world, and continue to devalue the simple pleasures people take from doing things that don’t solve problems… you will be much less effective in life than you otherwise could be.
As teachers for over thirty years, my wife and I have a saying "nothing changes until motivations and behavior change". Motivations don't respond to logic well. Lots of people wonder why they have limited success in areas they have a lot of knowledge and interest
Behavior changes are even tougher, usually meaning new behaviors can often only piggyback on existing habits. We think that if we think it, we will do it, but lots of factors slow us down, including misunderstanding procrastination and the far-reaching effects of improving sleep and diet.
I think it's just as simple as both article types you identified will exist in the paper. People can read both, just A, just B or neither. Making a superarticle that features both is better for those who read both but far worse for those who read just A or just B.
I lived in Los Alamos during the Cerro Grande fire, and remember friends who lost everything, and their immediate neighbors who lost nothing
Defensible space and choice in building material plays some part, but ultimately there are so many factors that it's basically random. People who had big old piñon trees right up against their house wouldn't see a bit of damage, while the guy next to them, who had a xeriscape yard, had their house burned down to the foundation
I'm very skeptical. I'm sure river stones and steel roofs help in some situations, but there are cars in that picture that look like they were nuked that have steel roofs and are surrounded by pavement.
I’ll save you a click. Nothing combustible within 5 feet of the house. Not done as a fire break, but to protect the home from water runoff from the landscaping.
Journalists who write like this should be kicked in the dick.
> In the morning, a friend called and sent them a picture from a helicopter flyover of Lahaina. Every structure had been destroyed in the area. But there, in the midst of the destruction, was the seemingly untouched red roof of Millikin’s home.
> Millikin said he and his wife were overcome with emotion.
> “We started crying,” he said. “I felt guilty. We still feel guilty.”
154 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] thread> “What folks in the wildfire business call the zone zero or the ember ignition zone, is kind of a key factor in whether homes do or do not burn down,” Wara said.
> Having nothing combustible in the 5 feet directly around a house is enormously important.
This has become increasingly important for fire insurance here in Southern California over the last decade. My neighbor has five acres and when he bought it after a fire destroyed his previous house, he went around and killed everything on his property except for a few distant trees using Round Up (creating a neighborhood standoff over the runoff in the process).
We also had to completely clear cut all plant life that borders the small roads leading up to the neighborhood and all the properties because firefighters will refuse to send their trucks into any area that might be quickly cut off by flying embers lighting shrubs on fire.
> ... if there’s something next to the house that is combustible — a wood fence, a bush, dry grass — that’s often what will ignite the structure ...
In SoCal, succulents are popular -- thick leaves full of a low oil content sap. What is the advice on succulents as a fire hazard?
We used to have factory-built Sears houses though. And now we don't.
Wood houses are cheaper because the lobbying got the other cheap ways to build housing made illegal.
For instance, if you can't build anything more than one story, can't make an apartment, or can't run a corner store out of your house, then it's not productive enough to pay for the construction costs of anything else.
Fire codes are also a lot of it. That's the kind of thing that seems reasonable, then you go back and look at old speeches and they're just saying stuff like "we must make up expensive safety laws for apartments or else black people will move in".
In what countries can you get high quality factory-built housing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes
Currently you can't get them in other countries, if by houses you mean buildings shaped like American houses. That's because we made it illegal to build any other type.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/japans-skyscraper-fac...
(Also recommend reading everything else he wrote. This is an inaccurate summary of it.)
Also, here's a building in Seattle that's a new type of wood called "mass timber" that can be built very quickly and cheaply. It wasn't legal until recently, and I'm not sure if it is in other cities yet.
https://x.com/bobbyfijan/status/1639720917042438145
P.S. no clue why my previous comment was deleted.. is HN run by house developer/contractors that the use of anything than wood will threaten their profit!? It’s no brainer to use something stronger, better, safer, and definitely environmentally friendly cutting trees for wood, it’s hypocritical to say “save a tree” when printing an email but you don’t mind to destroy a whole forest to build houses or even to make toilet papers.. it would make sense to have these houses built primarily using wood in the 50s where everything was simpler and definitely not as costly, but paying ~$800k for a paper house that will literally fly away in the next tornado, is a state-sponsored scam.
I guess people flagged/downvoted it for the tone A similar comment is still alive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37195133 . The replies say that apparently wood is better than concrete for earthquakes (but I'm not sure[2]).
[1] Your profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tamimio
[2] Disclaimer: Happy from my concrete house in a non-seismic non-hurricane zone.
I can see some disadvantages, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are bad. The fact that a lot of people do it makes me think there's some benefit.
This is something that worries me about my fire-prone California city, where virtually all of the houses are dilapidated junk that would burst into flames immediately if any embers came by. Wood shingle siding is very common and a lot of people think it is "vernacular" even though such siding was added in a second wave of renovations after all these buildings were made. Letting your house fall to bits, complaining to the city whenever anyone tries to improve or replace a home, and calling the weeds growing right up your walls "a garden" are all local hobbies.
But you can't move there anyway, you can't afford it.
https://www.google.com/maps/@46.5947587,-112.0458768,3a,81.4...
My local FD in California certified my house annually during the decade I owned it despite the fact that it was surrounded by pines, mostly dead, some touching the house.
I think they were referring to people in the middle of nowhere, where yard work is more like forestry work. Every year I get some mail from the state about taking a class to learn how to manage my land/trees. It touches on healthy forests and fires. Areas more like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/zPqNbX4142vobyMP7
I know some parts of Montana where that would be...inadvisable.
But I know what you mean. There are some roads around me you don't go up unless you know someone there.
In Appalachia we call 'em hollers.
> Experts say it was likely a little bit of all the above, but that one element of the home’s recent renovation is actually the most affordable and important thing people can do to try and protect their homes.
then proceeds without explaining what it is. Such a trashy technique to drive engagement.
It mentions steel roof, redwood doors, river stone around the home and removal of bush
It gets right into a number of things
Ember attack is a big concern - as noted in TFA you want a clear area around your house, but also sealing off ingress pathways under gutters / eaves and so on. This is all doable, but it's as expensive as you'd expect 'the last 5%' to be.
Where I am (250km north west of Sydney AU) in the months before the pandemic, we had a bush fire heading towards us at about 1km a day through national park. It was ~ 10km away when (atypically) heavy rains arrived. We've had 3 years of above-average rainfall, but it's now agreed that el niño / la niña has flipped, so while it's been great for the inland areas of the southern half of the east coast of Australia these last few years, we're left with a lot of organic matter that's rapidly dying off and drying out.
It's hardly a novel prediction, but this summer will be spectacular in all the wrong ways in Australia.
EDIT: Add link to some of David Holmgren's (co-originator of permaculture fame) work, responding to large bushfires through Victoria AU over the past few decades: https://holmgren.com.au/writing/bushfire-resilient-land-and-...
Coober Pedy is a completely subterranean town around the opal mines. These days (not in AU), I'm looking at semi-underground housing structures to cut heating and cooling costs and avert some classes of risks associated with conventional housing. 40-45 C summers for 4 months & -10 C winters will increasingly become too expensive for conventional structures. Plus, there's wind, hail, lightning, tornadic, and wildfire risks to consider. Flooding isn't a problem if building on high ground.
Underground is appealing, but radon and costs (water diversion, load-bearing roof strength, etc) have put me off that idea. I should revisit. We're starting to plant out more deciduous trees as our break zone extends - local Australian natives (eucalypts, cypress) burn like tar barrels. Similarly contending with -6 through 45 celsius. You paint a cheery picture. ; |
Not mentioned in TFA is that the owner saturated everything with water prior to evacuating. Note his large yard full of vegetation didn't catch fire, that alone put a huge buffer zone on that side of his house.
Also I'll never understand why asphalt shingles are so popular, metal is better in every way.
It may pay off in the long term but most homeowners don't think in a 50 year time horizon.
Rainy season lasts 4-5 months where our house is and its the kind of rains that make you fear the wrath of God.
Used to live in rural Colorado and have had our house threatened by wildfires multiple times. We did the same thing and set up large volume pivot sprinklers that formed both a perimeter and kept the roof+deck wet when the fires got within a mile of us. Glad to hear it worked for this person. Wildfires are scary.
https://firegel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Barricade-GHS...
I generally agree that metal is better, but want to point out that there are fire rated asphalt shingles, but they are rarely used unless required.
The article says the owner was was in Massachusetts during the fire. So not sure how the owner saturated everything??
From the wider angle shot[1], there's some other nearby land with small greenery and no structures that also appears mostly unburnt. (On the left hand side, on the other side of what looks like a major road). Perhaps the other land was also saturated with water, or perhaps the absence of large trees made it hard to catch or some other reason.
> Also I'll never understand why asphalt shingles are so popular, metal is better in every way.
Metal roofs cost more, can be more dangerous to work on (making anything else that happens on the roof more expensive), significantly louder in rain and hail. They certainly have the potential of lasting longer and they're more difficult to ignite.
[1] https://d1l18ops95qbzp.cloudfront.net/wp-content/2023/08/111...
[0] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-18/how-did-...
I kept waiting for someone else to notice this.
There is clearly more to the story here.
Steel is becoming more popular these days though because it has gotten way cheaper while asphalt shingles have gotten a bit more expensive. But like 30+ years a steel versus asphalt roof was a huge step up in cost, and 50 years ago the paint on steel wasn't as good as it is today and could fail and start rusting within the time frame that a quality shingle roof would. You don't see rusted steel roofing very often any more though because most of that failed and was replaced 20 years ago or so.
If you can afford it though steel is definitely the way better deal today, provided you aren't doing your own roof and are tearing it down to the wood instead of just shingling over the old stuff.
* https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/Fire-causes-and-risks/...
* https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-re...
* https://www.firerescue1.com/fire-products/wildland-fire-prod...
Most homes go up in flames not from the flames that we often seen in footage (which can generate quite a lot of radiant heat), but rather start from embers that fall onto flammable bits (decks, wood furniture, dry vegetation, large-hole attic vents):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW4ojYJtGbA
* https://www.frontlinewildfire.com/wildfire-news-and-resource...
* https://firesmartbc.ca/why-we-focus-on-embers/
* https://firesafemarin.org/harden-your-home/how-homes-ignite/
But Americans seem to care more about their land than their house, so maybe they confuse these concepts on purpose.
A home is an emotional thing, not just a thing that is worth money.
Most (but not all) Americans are intensely ignorant, and some are proud of it for tribal reasons. I know because I visited Paradise in 2018 and lived there 2019-2020. Not a single person I met amongst thousands took even partial personal responsibility for losing their structure: it was all somebody else's fault or an act of divine intervention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
In climate change's case, they say "it doesn't exist" and then it happens. It's the same social mechanisms regardless.
They used to just call scientists alarmists, then fraudsters, and now that it's happening there's witchcraft, shadowy cabals, secret weapons, global conspiracies ... this isn't a self-correcting epistemology, it just goes further off the rails.
Check out how wildly complicated covid conspiracies have gotten now that their global government never came, people didn't all drop dead from the vaccine, and everything mostly returned to normal. They're spinning rube goldberg towers of fantastic tales to stay in their delusions.
Do you take anything else besides the vaccine against covid? How do you deal with friends who are anti-covid-vaccine/pro-vitamin?
Have we forgotten the Climate controversy emails from 2009?
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/01/25/what-marshall-fire...
1. Wildfires that threaten neighborhoods are not particularly common in Hawaii, so people don't have the same level of awareness around defensible space and fire protection, and the government doesn't educate about it / require it
2. Nonnative grasses have taken over swaths of Maui, and they burn more easily than native grasses
3. Maui is currently having a drought and exceptionally dry
4. A hurricane several hundred miles to the south caused very unusual wind conditions: VERY strong winds blowing from the opposite direction wind usually blows
5. The power company's lines are not capable of withstanding the gusts, and they did not shut down the power as a precaution, as happens in other wildfire-prone areas
So powerlines blew over, sparks ignited the grass, fire raced through the town.
As far as I know, a certain amount of energy will be more or less unavoidably discharged when a power line hits the ground: the power line has some capacitance to ground, and it has a voltage (which varies with time) relative to ground, and the stored energy (1/2 C V^2) isn’t going to just disappear. This isn’t all that much energy.
But there is no real reason that the power station needs to keep delivering more power to an arc after the capacitance discharges. Avoiding it is somewhat complicated, but the technology is available off the shelf:
http://www.swedishneutral.se/main.php?name=gfn
IIRC some Australian customers have tested this system by intentionally dropping a live power line onto dry grass, and nothing catches fire!
i've seen a grass fire start when a bird touched its wingtips to two lines on the same pole, and the smoking carcass hitting the ground was enough to ignite it.
A short to another phase wire can happen, but it’s less common.
https://www.icfmag.com/2019/09/mexico-beach-survivor/
Finally, there are only two types of concrete: Concrete that has cracked, and concrete that hasn't cracked yet.
Strong earthquakes mean you can only really build with wood or steel frames, so that is what they build with. Steel framed construction is significantly more expensive to buy, build, and maintain, so it isn’t commonly used in houses since they don’t need the extra strength.
You don’t need masonry to be fire resistant. Large brush fires would drop burning embers all over your house when I lived in the southwestern US, but the ubiquitous stucco-and-tile exteriors were largely unaffected.
For the next twenty or so years, most new construction was in heavy concrete that looked like it could withstand a nuclear bomb.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-31/curious-darwin-top-en...
Then the next generation apparently forgot about Tracy, and the current crop of buildings have the wispy floor to ceiling plate glass windows etc you'd see in any modern designer building slash greenhouse, which is spectacularly unsuited to a tropical climate and even worse for cyclones.
> The perception that a single-storey brick house would offer better protection from a future cyclone was largely borne out of fear rather than facts, Troppo Architects director Jo Best said. ... "I think also that there's a bit of misconception to why people think a block house is safer than a framed house. It's not the case, they are both required to meet a certain structural code and you can't get a building permit unless that happens."
Purely gravity fed fresh water supplies aren't as common as you might think.
Many US jurisdictions mandate a generator and at the federal level they are “highly encouraged.”
At least in the western US. It sounds like they may do it differently where you live.
Both the Powerwall and large tanks of flammables have their risks in bushfires.
If I recall correctly the current crop of Tesla Powerwalls require cooling to stay safe?
https://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/18720/tesla-s-...
* for some limited value of 'forever'.
I used to live in a house that had groundwater seepage issues. As a result, it needed a sump pump to keep the basement dry during heavy rains, which naturally coincide with power outages. So the sump pump had a standby battery pack, just two car batteries in parallel. It could work on them for about 4 days.
I checked, and sprinkler pumps need even less power to run.
> Both the Powerwall and large tanks of flammables have their risks in bushfires.
Not really. A tank of diesel (gasoline is not suitable for long-term storage) has a huge thermal mass. A mere bush fire shouldn't be able to ignite it. It might damage fuel lines and the generator, though. I'm not sure about propane.
> If I recall correctly the current crop of Tesla Powerwalls require cooling to stay safe?
Powerwall is OK until +60C, above that temperature it just shuts down.
LPG tanks (propane in the US) get hot, increase pressure, and outgas through the pressure relief valve - causing a flamethrower effect and why valves etc should face away from buildings
https://www.kleenheat.com.au/blog/product-safety/bushfire-se...
You're correct that diesal tank are more common thanks to longer storage life etc. but large farms will often have unleaded petrol tanks if there's enough activity to warrent not having to drive a 50km (or more) to a service station to refuel.
The real question I have about Powerwalls (lithium and other future designs) is at what tempreture do they ignite and become part of the problem in a big way (although obviously the question of when they shutdown and no longer provie power is also relevant).
I'm in Western Australia, in rural parts that are largely self sufficient - emergency questions are always coming up wrt what does and doesn't work.
And I'm pretty sure that your house will be long gone if battery cells reach 100C.
The standard here isn't a simple temp. - it's how long a house can sustain external heat for.
One excerpt from the Australian Bushfire Houing standard talks about:
That's, uhhh, Kelvin - greater than 700CWho's going to put a Powerwall inside their house in any case? It'd go outside, well away from the house, out by the outbuildings and fuel tanks.
CSIRO research:
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2015/december/rais...
If you poke about you can find the house mockup testing videos on youtube - sustained high temp flame thrower work to determine when windows shatter and lintels catch fire, etc.
Australian Standard AS 3959:2018 - Construction of buildings in bushfire prone areas
https://naturaldisaster.royalcommission.gov.au/system/files/...
For the battery to reach this temperature, the sustained air temperature has to be over 100C for several hours. At this temperature, most of the plastics will start losing structural integrity. Windows will crack from thermal expansion. And water boiling in the pipes will probably be the least of your worries.
> Instantaneous flame temperature may peak above 1090 K.
A gas stove flame is at that temperature, but it's also very thin. Think about how long it takes to boil a pot of water.
Now move that pot away from the direct flames, just a few centimeters. It's likely that the water won't ever get to the boiling temperature.
> Who's going to put a Powerwall inside their house in any case? It'd go outside, well away from the house, out by the outbuildings and fuel tanks.
FWIW, my whole-house backup battery (Enphase, not Powerwall) is in the garage. Because it gets very cold where I live, and the battery needs to be warm enough to work.
Well, you can think that, no one will stop you.
Worth pointing out, though, that I literally linked you to design standards for Australian houses intended to survive:
and suggested you look for the extreme test videos that subject various steel frame mockups to a battery of flamethrowers to simulate Australian bushfires.Again, 100C is the tempreture of boiling water; what's the ignition point of hardwoods? what's the sagging point of steel?
Sorry, I didn't understand what the OP meant and I should have asked for clarifications. My bad.
Source: live in the bush and speccing out exactly this.
In our case the 3 tanks all come in to the pump more or less separately, so one required action is to install check valves in each line so if one of the lines is compromised, the others won't leak out through it.
As you say, maybe physical presence or maybe sensors. We need to assume we might be forced to evacuate and still want the system to operate, but also consider we might not be able to and might be trapped on site.
In our case the water supply should last for at least 24 hours, so I am hoping it will be feasible to just turn it on as we are fleeing, hard to say though. If you have a lot less water you will need to be much more judicious about when to activate it - as late as possible but not too late.
We have a Honda EU20i generator which with an extended fuel tank should run for at least a day.
Our biggest problem is that one of the buildings is built from cedar. I am not sure how practical it is to prevent such material from catching fire under extreme conditions,m even if it is well hosted down. At least the roof is metal!
In the 2018 Camp Fire, my mom's home was the only one left standing on the block because due to multiple factors:
- Lack of fuel (including trees and debris) adjacent to the structure(s)
- Proper building codes ensuring use of less flammable products
- Distance of setbacks around the structure(s)
- Almost an acre / 4k [m^2] of irrigated lawn on all sides
Firefighters may have helped, but it's difficult to say because there was zero information for months. * When residents were allowed to return, 3 360L plastic wheelie bins were reduced to 1m diameter / 4mm high "puddles" by radiant heating alone. An outdoor shed built like a residential structure was reduced to a toxic crater, including melting steel tools into nothing. 2/3 of a cord of firewood burned near the back leaving a 2" / 5 cm discolored divot in aggregate concrete. Half of an aluminum ladder was left like it had hit lava. Embers left charring here and there but they didn't ignite. The rain gutters were packed full of pine needles that I asked my mom's now ex to solve who kept promising but never delivering.
Also, loggers came in from all over and took trees at random from private and public property without the express consent of owners because of disaster resource harvesting since tree trunks were worth thousands each. Mostly Pacific ponderosa pines that stood since before Washington crossed the Potomac, each with 10k's of holes bored by woodpeckers getting at the damn beetles. Instead, the skyline was transformed into a haphazard, sterile moonscape construction site.
* Like Lele, there was also no alarm and the county sheriff defended his inaction and lack of preparedness. The Amber Alert system could've been used by the county sheriff or the local police department, cell phone service was never disrupted. Also, there is a canard being promulgated by the media about not using the tsunami system in Lele, which would've been pointless. I'm sure they had an Amber alert system too, but it wouldn't have made any difference because their cell phone towers and power grid crumbled almost immediately. Hawaiian officials claim they sent out text messages but the cell towers were already down while it was being sent: so too little, too late. Like Paradise, the power company in Hawaii should've known about the weather conditions and turned off the power in dry conditions with high wind.
PART 2: A PAINSTAKING RENOVATION
Millikin and his wife, Dora Millikin, fell in love with the Front Street house several years ago...
Wow. This kind of narrative cliffhanger makes sense in a thriller. It does not make sense in an article on how to prevent houses from burning down. I'm not going to blame the author, since this is more of a cultural and institutional problem, but this article reads like a caricature.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-interest_story
It’s like saying “I’m happy to put a lot of work into making my readers feel bad for person X, but I can’t be bothered researching how to help person X or others who could become X in the future.”
What am I missing?
On second thoughts maybe it’s useful to separate the emotional articles from the pragmatic ones. Maybe this author is better at empathy and not good at problem solving.
That not everyone is as solution-oriented as you, and that being solution-oriented isn’t inherently superior.
What’s the point of reading and writing if not to learn things about the world to help reduce suffering through solutions? I guess you can just read and write for the enjoyment of it, but it seems weird to do so in a case where there is a huge potential to reduce suffering though sharing knowledge.
I’m a consultant, and my job is getting people to change their software development processes so they are more effective. In the early days, that included things like “use source control.” Now, my advice is more subtle. Regardless, the job hasn’t changed.
You might think that such a job involves showing people an obviously better way, and then helping while they put the idea into practice. I thought so too, at first.
Narrator voice: It does not.
First and foremost, the job is making an emotional connection with people so they want to change. Convincing them that you’re on their side, that you understand their world, and that you have their best interests at heart. Ultimately, it requires empathy.
If you continue to approach problems without empathy, continue to dismiss people who take a people-centric rather than solution-centric view of the world, and continue to devalue the simple pleasures people take from doing things that don’t solve problems… you will be much less effective in life than you otherwise could be.
Behavior changes are even tougher, usually meaning new behaviors can often only piggyback on existing habits. We think that if we think it, we will do it, but lots of factors slow us down, including misunderstanding procrastination and the far-reaching effects of improving sleep and diet.
Defensible space and choice in building material plays some part, but ultimately there are so many factors that it's basically random. People who had big old piñon trees right up against their house wouldn't see a bit of damage, while the guy next to them, who had a xeriscape yard, had their house burned down to the foundation
Journalists who write like this should be kicked in the dick.
> Millikin said he and his wife were overcome with emotion.
> “We started crying,” he said. “I felt guilty. We still feel guilty.”
The survivor's guilt has got to be tough.