Bad regulations caused Los Angeles to burn, not climate change.
Climate change is not the cause of the disaster in Los Angeles,
but it does make our old problems worse.
Two types of laws create our fire and flood merry go round.
• The ones that regulate, or not, our land management.
• And the ones that allow for cheap buildings in harm’s way that burn easily.
This land and building codes malfeasance is older than anyone alive.
It is older than any perception of climate change.
The fires and floods are both caused by the same bad practices.
The cost of this wildland mismanagement and bad building codes is high in human lives and is also measured in economic hardship, personal loss and the deaths of livestock, pets and wild animals.
This might sound harsh. How harsh was the Paradise fire? (85 dead) The Santa Rosa fire? (22 dead)
In just the last few decades our state has had a long list of places where deadly fire disasters took place in Northern and Southern California and that list includes 25 people killed in my home town of Oakland.
There are places where we never should have built because of the fire, flood and landslide risks.
Parts of San Anselmo and the Russian River area flood again and again. Places like Ft. Bragg have their history written in downtown fires. The Eel River area had a 1964 flood that we have still not recovered from. There are places in the Sierras where fires have left the land damaged for decades.
Two major practices are wrong with the land management.
First, is that we do not set the controlled burns that the natives used for centuries.
Don’t allow small fires, you get big fires.
Second, we do not nurture and protect the watersheds.
The rains run off the land so fast we get flash floods.
The building code issues can also be grouped it two major types.
One is that our expensive housing is made of cheap materials.
Flammable cheap materials.
And two, is that we have to stop building in harm’s way.
Building in flood plains and unmanaged forests are not a receipt for success.
How did we get laws that allow turning our state into a tinderbox with landslides and building our homes out of kindling in areas that burn and flood? Economic interests and racism played a big role.
Of course, both the land management issues and building zoning and code deficiencies are much more complex than I am expressing it here. There are more issues, not just these four, and there are a lot of political and economic problems. Let’s look at it in parts, but not forget that we are always talking about the same peoples and same lands.
Why controlled burns? Because the land needs it. In California we live in a series of fire ecology environments.
The ones in Los Angeles are different than the ones in Sonoma or Humbolt. But they all burn and need to burn gently.
The controlled burns clear out the underbrush and reduce the amount of forest material that is available to a fire. They are also a step that cannot be skipped in the life cycle of a lot of the shrubs and undergrowth that is part of any healthy woodlands plant community. Some plants cannot even release their seeds without some fire.
Be very clear, the Spanish, Russians, Mexicans and Americans did not find wild forests here.
Our forests had been managed by native bands who were already here for a very long time.
Right now, we are hearing a lot of talk about controlled burns. After a couple of centuries of forbidding this we are finally getting back to this critically important traditional practice. Great that we restart, but we are not starting from zero. We will have to do a lot of work to get back up to zero.
This article is fairly good about the native people and the controlled burn situation.
I question how much of the fire suppression motive was to protect watersheds but don’t doubt for a moment that the current regulations favor logging.
https://www.nature.org/en-us/magazine/magazine-articles/indigenous-controlled-burns-california/
This article looks at the ugly history of how natives were treated and how they were not heeded.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-affirms-indigenous-right-to-controlled-burns
Forest management should be good watershed management.
We want our rains to run off slowly. Those cool, tree lined streams one visits in our state parks? That is what we need more of. How do we know a healthy watershed? The flow after a rain takes some time and the waters are clear. Unhealthy? Flash floods right after a rain full of muddy water. Where we conserve forest is as important as the how we maintain them.
Streambed care is the key to watershed health and healthy streambeds are nature’s fire breaks.
Some controlled burns are also needed to keep the creek sides healthy.
So, should we just be setting those controlled burns and leaving those streambeds alone?
No.
The state of our lands is too damaged to go back to native practice in one step.
Because we have done it so wrong for so long, we need a long, and expensive, replanting effort that involves a lot of manual thinning, cutting and chipping before carful controlled burns. Those burns, some of the first in our lifetimes, need to be followed by some very intelligent replanting of trees and natural undergrowth. Here climate change makes our work harder. The rain and heat patterns were never that regular in our state and now have shifted to extremes.
In many places we need to recover from the wrong kind of fire. The hot fires kill the underbrush and leave a disaster that will not grow back on its own in our lifetimes. A lot of challenging reforestation and soil restoration work has to be done now if we want to turn those areas back into healthy forests and watersheds inside of 50 years. 50 years would be ambitious.
The building issues are now more that zoning and code.
We need to fix a problem that we literally built.
We are now at well over 1,400 buildings that have burned in Los Angeles. Since the wildland work is a project for decades, how to we stop turning our homes into bonfires?
Roofing and siding are the big lift. Those big fires spread on blowing cinders. The cinders fall into the tar shingle roofs, the landscaping, the vinyl siding and the wooden fences. When those buildings burn, it burns hotter than forest and throws cinders higher. The high winds push the fire hotter and higher and the cycle accelerates.
Put on fireproof shingles? Yes. Stop using plastic siding? Of course. Clear the area around buildings of fences that touch the sides and landscaping that surrounds the home in kindling? Of course. And there are other details such as wooden fences, vents and gutters…
From the roofing, through the siding to the landscaping and sprinkler systems everything needs to be done to keep our buildings from being so easy to set on fire.
During the Santa Rosa fire a group of employee volunteers were heroes for fighting off the falling embers on the highly flammable flat tar roof of their hospital.
Since when do we code, zone and permit a hospital to have a highly flammable roof in a high fire risk area? Very little of our state is not in a high probability fire zone.
San Diego finally put some serious rules about roofs and we should take a page from what San Diego has done for fire code and take it many steps further.
Half of our state is covered with irrigation sprinklers. How about extending that to a system attached to our fire hydrants that we turn on when a fire breaks out?
Let’s take a look at what happens now compared to what we could practically achieve on the short term.
The bad fires we have now:
Many of our recent fires started either in the farmland or parkland and were sparked by electrical equipment, accident, arson or naturally with lightning strikes.
As it often works now, once started, the fire burns through private and public lands in various jurisdictions, managed by different rules, if at all. Natural fire breaks are usually too small and ineffective. Isolated buildings may not have a good buffer zone around them, but usually the fire has grown too large for cleared brush and trees be enough to keep them from flaming up. Cinders from the large fires follow the wind setting roofs on fire, especially when they get to what is called the wildland / urban interface. That interface is not sharply defined and is often a farmland interface. Fire prevention work has often not been done for a variety of reasons in the locally owned parks, state and federally owned areas and privately owned farmland that boarder urban areas. Roofs catch fire and houses, including the cars and flammable household materials, businesses, including gas stations and infrastructure burn very hot adding to the flammable cinders and how far they will travel. That cycle burns itself out only when it gets somewhere that can’t burn, such as the beach. Our fire departments usually are the ones who have to contain it in the end following heroic efforts. The larger versions of this cost lives.
The not so bad fires we could have:
We start without so much to burn in the country or in town. The fires should be light as they pass over managed and zoned private and public lands. Streambed vegetation should be kept wide enough, lush and moist enough to serve as a natural fire break, at least in part. Cinders will still fly over, of course, and the urban / wildland boarders will still need to be defended. First defense should be roofing and siding materials that will not burn when cinders land on it. Another defense should be some kind of agricultural style sprinkler system that will cause an artificial rain before the fire sparks come close. The fire department will still have their work cut out for them, in a more routine and resourced way.
The land and building zoning and permitting is entirely a political problem.
Right now, our governor is promising people that they can build back right where they were and that he will ease up on permitting and authorizations so that people can quickly build back.
Probably exactly what we should NOT be doing is building back exactly where and how we just failed.
And we do it over and over again. I mentioned Fort Bragg. It was all built out of wood. No firewalls or remediation required. The town has a major history of destructive fires.
If it was all so easy, it would be done by now.
What I am writing here has been written about and proposed by better trained, more influential people than me for many decades. Everything suggested here is being done well by someone in California today. Fire ecology was old news when I started to study the problem in the 1980’s. I have written about it before many times. In the 35 years that I have lived here, there have been many fires every year.
So, what keeps us repeating ourselves here?
The status quo of limited responsibility and getting others to pay the damages doesn’t help.
Land, water and building in California are powerful economic interests used to getting their own way.
We have a system of local jurisdictions and affluent people who play those local governments that makes it easy to stick to their profitable status quo. It is easy for a lumber company, an agribusiness owner, a housing developer, etc., to lobby and get the regulatory fine print modified to help them make money. That almost defines our politics in the United State. It is even easier for big money to push their agenda at the county and city level where there is less scrutiny and the economics makes them a bigger player. In practice, the influence of money on our different levels of government is very complex as the economic interest groups operate on all levels at once and cooperate with one another.
The agribusiness land owners resist all regulation of their land and water use. They totally got away with it before Jerry Brown dealt with the last big drought and are only now falling under some minimal regulations.
Land barons are one of the largest lobby groups in Sacramento, if not the largest. They call themselves “farmers”. This part of our billionaire class is used to dictating who will be a county supervision and are not receptive to their streambeds being regulated.
The big and small building lobbies hold big sway at all levels in a way compares to the agribusiness sector. Building and real estate lobbies hold more urban power and often get the city governments that they want. There is overlap. Many of the big rural landowners are behind the sprawl that turns their farmland into track housing and strip malls.
Somehow these builders effectively block stronger building requirements and somehow get the cheapest construction materials and practices approved. These interests build and cash out quickly. It was cheap for them because when the buildings burn, they are long gone and no longer on the hook for how buildings were built, or where. The public hears about it as if those practices were part of some kind of misguided cultural misunderstanding in our past. Then and now those building codes were created and enforced by big money. How much of the permitting and zoning is to maintain safety standards and how much is designed to carve out a captive market for the building lobby’s firms is a serious question.
And let’s not forget the insurance companies who get their money out of harms way. In LA many people found themselves stripped of coverage before the fires. Or when they didn’t, they got their insured properties special treatment. In LA some go as far as having their own fire departments.
We also have a system where we don’t take economic responsibility when we regulate.
If we, as a state, start to say where and how people can build, do we help pay for it? Do we keep the insurance companies from victimizing the small stakeholders? Would we do something as practical as offering people a place to move to and the means to do it?
What will it cost to put tiles on a million roofs?
What will it cost to prepare for and execute those first in a century, controlled burns.
What will the land restoration and reforestation work cost?
The costs are tremendous, and we need to spread them out over the whole economy.
Otherwise we continue to tell people to comply and pay for it, which they will try not to do.
That leads to the inaction being paid for so dearly in Los Angeles today.
We will pay that same price for inaction somewhere else soon.
One of our big problems is that our political class has claimed to be doing all of this already.
You will hear about how they have the most stringent wildlands and building codes.
True, but I would say that we have insufficient and politically compromised regulations, strictly applied.
What is not helpful is going through the motions and pretending to be doing the right thing while really doing the same old thing. This week my local news showed some uniformed people burning piles of cut brush in an open cow pasture of short grass, surrounding a tony housing development and calling that a “controlled burn”.
A controlled burn is not a commodity, but there are people willing to sell you one. Same goes for a protected streambed.
What is only marginally helpful, if at all, is some kind of gadget that will smell out a fire quicker. That made the TV news too. We need to work on the hundred years of neglect before that fire more than the hour before we see flames. We need fires that are not a catastrophe, just part of our natural environment.
Let’s get the politics of this problem out in the open, across California, where the economic interests can’t dominate the discussion and water down the solutions. Fire ecology and how to live with it is a state wide problem that requires a state wide commitment and state wide regulations.
We need state wide standards and enforcement to bridge the difference between the myriad jurisdictions of public and private lands. And we need a state wide building code that is hard core on fire.
We need the state to come up with the resources for the restoration work.
Everything I mention here as a possible solution is being done somewhere in the state right now.
We need to stop asking people to go along, we need to pass some California wide legislation.
Local control sounds good, but in practice it gives us the results we are seeing in Los Angeles today with over 1,400 buildings lost and 25 known dead so far.
The best way to address our land use and construction code problem is to look at ourselves as a single state divided into local environments (called biomes). We have a lot of problems and they all fit into the same California we all live in. We have a lot to learn from our native ancestors and the existing tribes and bands. We also have some of the top environmental sciences resources in the world. California is both ancient and still very natural, and it is as modern of an industrial state as one can get. Unlike other states, we have the money and expertise to make us the world leader of living well with fire.
• When we think about how to build, or rebuild, let’s keep in mind that we are the same state with homeless people living under freeway overpasses and developments built on fertile farmland.
• When we think about how to do rural zoning, remember that we are also where the salmon used to run. Remember that this is where our parks are packed to the brim with tourists.
• When we think about fire and flood, let’s think about water we drink and grow food with. Let’s think about the grey water that we don’t use. Let’s think about sewage as an asset.
It will be easier to pool our vast economic and intellectual resources and deal with our issues comprehensively to work out some integrated plans than to keep working in small bits. We need our political people to focus on the un-exciting world of code, zoning and permitting, both rural and urban.
And climate change? Of course, climate change makes it all worse. Of course we need to get off the carbon energy systems. But driving a Prius would not have kept LA from burning.
To keep it from burning again we are talking about heavy investment in land use and building upgrades.
