Fire Insurance for your home…….

[Fun CH]

I know for a fact building material and construction techniques can make a house more fire resistant. Defensible spaces are also important not only for fire spread but to give firefighters a chance to save a home.

"Home ignition zone zero is defined as the actual structure of your home and the space that extends five feet from the exterior walls of your house. This is the most important area to focus on when preparing your home for wildfire as this is often the space where embers are able to land and ignite. The good news is that there are clear steps you can take to help fireproof your home from wildfire."

https://www.frontlinewildfire.com/fire- ... nst%20fire.

[just-jim]

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I think I’m understanding what you are after….but don’t over-think it. Whether it is a crew boss on a 3 acre with 10- or 15 firefighters and a couple of engines…OR …a mild-level supervisor (like a Division Supervisor) - with a couple hundred folks and a bunch of equipment - there is only so much ‘input’ they can handle. These folks have a LOT going on! Minute by minute small changes in fire behavior are probably not helpful. Nor is anyone going to pay attention to it…these supervisors have a lot of other things to worry about and manage. One of the best indicators is a calculated value, the Energy Release Component (ERC)…I referred to it earlier. That combines seasonal fuel dryness and some weather inputs and gives firefighters a ‘number’. This is the useful thing - one that an experienced firefighter can use to adjust tactics as the day progresses, terrain and vegetation change, etc.
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[mister_coffee]

I'm imagining something where we can get the detection time from on the order of fifteen minutes to under five minutes. That could and would make a difference, in particular for human-caused fires in the WUI. If you detect a fire start early enough amateurs could engage it with a garden hose and be effective.

There are a lot of fire behavior tools, but they aren't really geared for very short-term models (on the order of fifteen minutes or thirty minutes). With existing tech it takes longer to set up and run the models then the prediction horizon would be. I'm assuming if you had a relatively dense sensor network over the area in question you'd have real time data on where the fire currently was and could use that as inputs to a model that you could plausibly run on a smartphone. So rather than fire modeling and prediction being something used at the IC level on a 24-hour time scale it could be something a crew boss does on a fifteen-minute time horizon.

The other observation I'd make is that it is possible to make very accurate predictions about fire behavior at those very short term time horizons.

[just-jim]

I am clearly biased, but to me the core challenges are:

(1) early fire detection: to me the difference between a fire that costs $20_000 to fight and a fire that costs $20_000_000 to fight is 99 percent about how quickly that fire can be detected.
(2) situational awareness during periods of active fire spread. The number one question everyone asks is, "Where is the fire?"
(3) very short-term modeling and prediction of wildfires during active fire spread. it would be extremely powerful if a crew boss in the field could have a short-term (15 minutes to 1 hour) prediction. Note as a necessary precondition you need to solve #2.

I’m not sure that ‘quicker’ detection is the answer….its already pretty good given the variety of detection tools that are available. What could make a difference is quicker response time. But short of positioning more people in more places – I don’t know the answer.

Fire bosses already have access to some pretty sophisticated fire behavior tools. There are daily calculations of a variety of components of fire behavior (actual weather, predicted weather, fuel dryness, etc) that end up in a couple headline figures that wildland firefighters pay attention to; energy release component (ERC) and Haines Index. These are limited, however, in that they are calculated only for the places where daily fuel measurement and weather histories exist. Locally, the fuel calculations are done for places like NCSB, First Butte, Lookout Mtn, Goat Peak, Leecher and a few others ‘representative’ spots.. Obviously, if you are at a fire close to those areas you are in good shape. Elsewhere….nah….you have to make some ‘seat of the pants’ mental adjustments – the kind that only comes with experience. It’s hard to imagine, to me, how an instantaneous and location specific fire behavior analysis/forecast could happen. The weather calculations are even more generalized….and things like atmospheric instability and local terrain-influenced winds are always a variable.

By far the biggest change in my fire career was/is the shift in the number of human caused vs ‘natural ignition. 50 years ago, when I started, the ratio of natural and human ignitions was 80% natural, 20% human caused. Those numbers didn’t vary much for quite a few years. Those numbers have now flipped – in fact it is now closer to 90% human caused, 10% natural. If you assume the number of natural fire starts probably hasn’t changed a great deal from year to year (OK, maybe some increase due to more storms from climate change?)….then the number of human caused fires is up 40 or 50 fold in those 50 years.

Thinking about this today, I went looking for numbers. The Annual 2022 fire report from the National Fire Center (https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics) lists 7467 naturally caused wildfires in the US last year. And 61429 human caused ones. Which type burned more? In acres - natural fire starts – 4.2 million acres. However, a very large part of that was in Alaska - 3.1 MM acres; taking that out = 1.1 MM acres. The 60,000+ human caused fires burned 3.4+ million acres.

There are not only just MORE of us…we are building homes in more and more wildland-urban interface areas. Not just here or Oregon or California….but in places like you don’t typically think about…North Carolina, Florida, and on the outskirts of major cities like Denver and Salt Lake City. Depending on the sources you want to choose….somewhere in the range of 30-40 million new homes have been built in this interface in the last ½ century.

You are right, though…no simple answers! It’s not a situation where ‘more logging’ or ‘less logging’ or more fire resources, or ‘more grazing/less grazing’, or ‘better zoning and building codes’ are going to work.
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[mister_coffee]

These things all have nonlinear and chaotic relationships, and there aren't simple answers.

Higher-density locations tend to have, on the average, higher risk of rapid wildfire spread because the radiant heat from a house burning is much more than the radiant heat from a stand of Ponderosa pines burning, and is high enough to ignite nearby houses. This has been demonstrated in the Real World in places like Oakland, Pateros, Santa Rosa, and Paradise. It is still poorly (or not at all) accounted for in models of wildfire spread. To me this argues that most areas should be zoned at fairly low density with substantial setbacks between homes, and higher density developments should be protected by substantial and well-maintained firebreaks.

Moist valley bottoms have the advantage of higher relative humidity so their fuels, on the average, aren't as combustible. The tradeoff is that there is more fuel. From direct observation in the Cub Creek 2 fire the moist, brushy areas burnt the very hottest.

I am clearly biased, but to me the core challenges are:

(1) early fire detection: to me the difference between a fire that costs $20_000 to fight and a fire that costs $20_000_000 to fight is 99 percent about how quickly that fire can be detected.
(2) situational awareness during periods of active fire spread. The number one question everyone asks is, "Where is the fire?"
(3) very short-term modeling and prediction of wildfires during active fire spread. it would be extremely powerful if a crew boss in the field could have a short-term (15 minutes to 1 hour) prediction. Note as a necessary precondition you need to solve #2.

[woodman]

I would be a bit more concerned in densely populated trailer parks. There would seem to be more risk associated with someone accidentally causing a fire through carelessness from my point of view, or maybe this would be considered "neighborhood profiling". It is good to raise concern early just in case in order to raise awareness. Also, is it better to be by the river where there is the effect of the natural air conditioning and moisture or is it more of a risk because the river tends to create more wind currents?

[Fun CH]

Building codes in fire prone areas need to updated to require the use of fire resistant materials. Land use codes need to be updated so homes are cited correctly within the landscape. The practice of closely stacking homes in fire prone areas maximizes profit for the developer, but obviously not great for fire mitigation.

images (6).jpeg (15.89 KiB) Viewed 1626 times

This photo from the 2018 Calif. "camp fire" that destroyed the town of Paradise is a good example, where it looks like the houses burned like Domino's.

The 2014 Carlton complex fire reached my home in the morning after the mushroom cloud blow up the previous day. With us watching from a distance, I spoke with the changing shift of fire fighters showing them the layout of homes in my neighborhood on a map. They quickly dispatched a group of firefighters to each home.

After the fire I thanked Chief Linden from the Vancouver Washington Fire Department and his group of volunteers for saving my home. He said it was the fact that I had a defensible space in place and had used metal roof and siding that saved my home. He credited me, however the fireman did move a cord of firewood that I had stacked up against the house as I had become a complacent. So really he was being humble in the role his firefighters played in saving my home.

After the Carlton complex fire burned through and around my home, groups of firemen and women visited my home to discuss why my home didn't burn while my neighbors home did.

I was told that because my neighbors home, with stucco siding, was situated in a creek draw, reflective Heat had intensified the heat effect of the fire leading to the complete destruction of the house. It probably didn't help that the home had a cedar deck where as I had used Trex recycled plastic decking and closed off soffits which is often an entry point for fire.

IMO, insurance companies need to evaluate each home for its fire resistance and defensible space capabilities. Only then and after the home owner takes any steps recommended by the insurance company or fire expert to mitigate fire risk should insurance be considered.

[Rideback]

This has been happening under the radar for several years now and of course Florida is also losing their insurers because of the hurricane damage which has increased because of the intensity and duration of the storms related to climate change. Though climate change hasn't necessarily increased the number of storms they are on record now as moving slower and being more intense.

The wildfires in Calif, including the alarming number that have been caused because of PG&E poor maintenance of transmission lines as well as a high number of arson incidents took hold because of the droughts and then were exacerbated by the high end homes built up on hilltops that became vulnerable.

More than a decade ago Farmers' filed suit in Illinois against the governmental agencies with the claim that the infrastructure had not been put into place to prevent/mitigate wildfires and thus putting the onus on govt to do better. Their premise was that climate change was impacting the conditions that led to fire and that govt agencies needed to step up to the plate.

With the cost of materials skyrocketing after covid, as well as a dramatic shortage of manpower within the construction industry the housing industry is struggling. And that translates into exorbitant costs to anyone trying to rebuild after a disaster which underscores why insurance companies are saying this is just not sustainable.

[just-jim]

…...Looks like it might, increasingly, become unavailable. A couple of the largest insurers in California are not taking on new clients- citing not only wildfires and climate change, but inflation in housing costs.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... -wildfires

Taken to a not-so-unforeseeable conclusion - this could have big ramifications for not only construction but real estate sales, commercial real estate, and tourism, etc. All over the western US.