This week’s question is What are your plans for fire?
In a hotter world of more extreme temps, we all need to be planning for fire.
Preparedness
SF has burnt to the ground multiple times, most famously in 1906, so preparing for fire is a big deal here.
SF is mostly wood until you get downtown but, as we’ve seen with the CA fires of the last few years, metal burns and melts, too. In SF, there’s no space between us and neighboring buildings; walls touch. A suburb in Santa Rosa burned to the ground in the Tubbs Fire in 2017, and that’s with distance between each house.
We have multiple house fire extinguishers that get checked/refilled every 1-2 years, we have a chain fire ladder if we need to climb out a window to escape, we have various emergency supply kits if we need to get out, and we have the ocean across the street to escape to if the flames are close. SF has been working on getting emergency, high pressure water for fire fighting on the west side of the city (it’s already on the east side), and there are cisterns uphill in various strategic locations. After the 1989 quake, when the Marina was saved by the last fire fighting boat in the city, SF has prioritized boat-based fire fighting equipment.
Insurance
The insurance industry is waking up to the fact that the fossil fuel industry has put them on a hook, and they’re increasingly refusing to sell or renew policies for homeowners in much of CA. This will spread. Reinsurers have been freaking out for a while about big payouts year after year, and the increasing size and frequency of massive fires is making the insurance industry start to freak out, too.
As insurance becomes less available, more and more people are going without insurance. This has already increased homelessness, as people who lose their uninsured homes have no funds for rebuilding and can’t find anyone to buy their uninsurable land. I suspect lack of insurance will also change housing codes and regulations as desperate people rebuild on their own with straw bale, rammed earth, clay plaster, cob, handmade bricks or adobe, bamboo, etc.
Another way to deal with lack of insurance is to form a community insurance pool. SF immigrants from Canton became SF homeowners or TIC owners (tenancy in common — buy an apartment building and live in it like a condo complex) fairly quickly by forming mutual benefit money pools like this. If the community insurance pool formed tries to follow traditional insurance industry lines, though, it won’t survive the first disaster.
Prevention
This is where defensible space, cutting or burning away undergrowth, encouraging marshy areas, making fire breaks, taking out invasives and planting natives, etc. comes in. I’ve done this work on other people’s land before, and it’s back breaking and needs to be done every year.
There’s nothing I know of that I can do re. fire prevention where I currently live that isn’t already being done. There is, however, a lot that can be done regionally that isn’t being done, something I frequently addressed to the SF pols during my 4 years of climate strike. And, of course, the biggest thing to do is to stop heating up the biosphere.
Fighting
I’ve trained with fire extinguishers, limited urban search and rescue, triage, and lots more as a NERT (called CERTs most everywhere else). This stands for Neighborhood (or Community) Emergency Response Teams, and joining one is a great way to get skills, establish mutual aid relationships for when disaster strikes, and to be less scared.
If you have a volunteer fire dept, or if your fire dept takes volunteers, joining in any capacity can be helpful. If you can’t lug a fire hose, you can learn how to work a Ham radio or inventory equipment kits or teach school kids how to use fire extinguishers.
If you live in the countryside or at a suburban- or urban-rural interface, being prepared to deal with massive fires is essential. You can train in forest firefighting, or provide supplies or relief to the firefighters as they come off the lines, or join a relief organization that comes in to help people who’ve been displaced by fire. Anything you can do to reduce burdens on the people actually fighting the fires is incredibly useful.
No matter where you are, you need good masks to have breathable air. I have a ½ mask respirator with replaceable filters, in addition to the KN95s. You likely need air purifiers for indoors (you can make one with a box fan, duct tape, and some replacement HVAC air filters). If your water supply is affected, you will likely want water purifiers as well.
Escaping
Our escape plan is to cross the street, walk over the dunes and stay on the beach or in the water if needed, taking go-bags, masks and respirators, our bikes, a tent, sleeping bags, and umbrellas with us (umbrellas for UV and ash fall protection). Evacuation plans depend on where the fire is coming from and where it seems to be heading, but we can evacuate along the coast for some distance both north and south, and staying near the water is likely to be much safer than heading inland.
The Camp Fire, the one that destroyed Paradise in 2018, killed people because it moved fast, there was a lack of information about current fire movements, and there were few escape routes.
Do you have fire plans?