CONTEXT: I wrote/drew this in 2020. Lol. Happy New Year!
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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I’ll be honest even as someone who studies the climate pretty extensively I didn’t think it would be this bad yet.
California has wildfires every other year, so that's not that much of a surprise to me.
Not in January and not that destroy entire neighborhoods in urban areas. This is unlike any historical fire in multiple ways.
I understand if you just casually read the news from afar this might seem normal but trust me it isn’t. You might also be suffering from shifting baseline syndrome.
Isn't it all the old grandfathered-in, explicitly not fire safe areas that are burning? The ones that you aren't allowed to build new anymore because they aren't up to fire code? Ones that inspectors have repeatedly stated "hey this is definitely going to burn down"?
To some extent, yes. That’s what I was alluding to elsewhere when I said some areas are safer and we need to update our fire codes as Australia has. That said, some of these more suburban neighborhoods would not have been considered that high risk in the past. They are near the wildland urban interface, but they are not physically in the forest like Paradise and other areas that have historically burned.
Edit: See this fire risk zone map for more details. https://osfm.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/community-wildfire-preparedness-and-mitigation/fire-hazard-severity-zones. While these fires originated in and near areas of high fire risk, their extreme size, speed, and intensity caused them to spread into nearby “low risk” areas. These maps likely need updating with our new climate reality in mind.
But solving this this presents a monumental challenge. California is already in a housing shortage, so we can’t just abandon all the housing that is in risky areas or is substandard. We need to thoughtfully update building regulations so that we can more quickly build up dense housing stock in more fire safe areas while also improving the fire safety of those buildings.
Better forest management can also help but given the extremity of the fire conditions we’ve seen in recent years this won’t be enough on its own.