German tanks are indestructible!

[Pilgrim]

This is great! He was definitely in the right place at the right time.

VW vans, though...as an old friend of mine used to say, if yours broke down on the road, you were scared to leave it b/c they were so unprotected and dangerous in case of a front collision.

I've ridden in cars doing some stupid things, but I've never been more nervous than riding 80 miles in an old VW van on a windy day. I thought that damn thing was going to overturn every moment of the drive.

[Alanko]

Congrats on raising an upstanding young man and I'm glad he's okay. I see a red pickup there too. Looks like a Dodge?

A Chevy Blazer, shurely?

[Dave W]

That's awesome that he was able to be so helpful during the fires.

It's been absolutely insane out here. I'm personally closer to the other Eaton fire we had that took out a huge chunk of Altadena/Pasadena and while I don't think I know someone that has been directly impacted, there are a lot of people who know at least one person who lost everything.

I read an article about the history of Altadena. What a shame. so much history lost.

[uwe]

May the smart-alec Kraut ask something? I see the charred remains of Pacific Palisades and wonder. Yes, there had been no rain for a long time and the winds were extreme. But looking at the ruins, you couldn't erect those buildings closer together than you already did, could you? And they are nearly all made out of wood. What do you expect in an environment where bush fires occur all the time? Don't your fire, life & safety (FLS) building regulations take likelihood of fires, flammability of building materials and proximity of buildings into account at all? It sure looks like it.

What happened, happened, thank God there were not more casualties. But I already visualize a re-erection frenzy where enforcement of FLS regulations is given a pass because they are costly, unpopular and hold up speedy redevelopment. Until the next fire strikes again as it no doubt will.

Yes, concrete, bricks & mortar can burn too. But only at temperatures that are almost impossible to attain in a natural open fire. In WW II, the Royal Air Force searched long and hard and got real creative until they found a combination that would burn down German concrete and stone buildings too.(Pacific Palisades wasn't carpet-bombed with phosphor bombs or napalm.) Add to that how in a concrete & bricks buildings zone fire spreads much slower than it did in those affected LA neighborhoods.

I understand that non-wood private homes are not really an American tradition, like 90% of your private buildings are wood structures and your private home construction firms are not really well-versed in using concrete and brick as building materials. Wood is also cheaper, leaves less of a carbon footprint in production, is easier to transport and build with + you have an overabundance of timber. But if people are hell-bent living house to house in regions where wildfires are a fact of life (and the next ice age seems by all accounts still somewhat away) wouldn't more concrete and bricks as well as distancing buildings properly make some sense when rebuilding these neighborhoods?

[Darrol]

I would actually expect any new houses to take into account the fires now. Some of the few that remain standing were indeed ones that were built with concrete. In one case, there was a house in I think Altadena that utilized a newer style that saved it. Most of the homes here were built with vents going into the attics and with the fires, the embers would just go up those vents starting the fires up there. The newer style that saved the house utilized a single vent that led to a inlet system in which an ember wouldn't survive long enough to ignite anything.

Anyways, we'll see what happens with redevelopment. The state government is already trying to make some changes to ensure that houses can be rebuilt quicker than it normally takes to build a single family residence and stop big development companies from scooping up the land. I think the goal is to fast track direct rebuilds of houses as they were prior to the fires.

[Ken]

But Dave, trust my son to not content himself with anything as Old World as a 'VW Bus' (the German term for a Volkswagen van)!

Funny, I always knew it as a VW Bus.  Maybe it has to do with having grown up in NY.

[Pilgrim]

Uwe, given the rate of population growth and the available building materials, it's no wonder that US single family homes are typically made of wood. Close spacing is simply a matter of economics where developers packed as many homes as possible into the available space.

Considering that American humorist Will Rogers' (now burned) home was built in 1928, it clearly has been nearly 100 years since any fire of that magnitude took place there, which is plenty of time for developments to occur while believing they are disaster-proof. Now we know they're not.

I'm seeing news stories - some of them from near me in Colorado, where they had a devastating wildfire last summer - showing houses being built with new venting systems which are good at keeping embers out of the home's interior, and using more fire resistant materials.  They noted that the construction required added about 7% to the cost of building a home, which means an additional $70,000 per million in cost. That's a lot of beer and pizza money, and it's a fair guess that most of the homes which are replaced  in LA will cost in that range.  I don't think Altadena is going to have a low to medium income homeowner component any longer.

Clearly the "right" thing to do is require construction to meet those standards. But getting a state law passed would take at least a year, and considering the pleas of people who can't afford the extra cost, it seems politically questionable to me.

BUT - it's pretty obvious that there are river valleys with towns which are often flooded and should never have been built, ocean-side communities (as well as a chunk of Florida) which are doomed by sea rise, and buildings in fire-prone areas which should not be there. Political will to make those calls doesn't seem to exist.