A sobering video about climate change and wildfires in California

Post date: Aug 28, 2015 1:23:12 AM

This was forwarded to me: Unacceptable Risk – Firefighters on the Front Lines of Climate Change.

A few thoughts of my own after watching the video, in roughly the order of the video:

0) There is an amazing video of a fire whirl in Australia.

1) The Rocky and Jerusalem fires in Lake and Sonoma counties earlier this summer were fuel driven (what they call plume dominated in the video), rather than wind driven as in the Hayman fire.

2) A couple of years ago, I saw an interview with the same Battalion Chief Schanel about the Waldo fire, which included the tidbits that:

     a) there were embers the size of baseballs in that subdivision where he retreated from the radiant heat, and

     b) when asked what he would have done differently, he said, "not send firefighters into the subdivision".

3) That last is part of a growing nationwide consensus, cemented by the Yarnell Fire in AZ and reinforced nationally several times each summer when a fire crew is burned over at a WUI home during a wildfire, that it's not worth risking firefighter's lives to save structures that are doomed in extreme wildfires. 

4) With climate change, the WUI will become like the barrier islands of the Atlantic Coast, and more quickly for that decades long barrier island struggle - acknowledged as a place where people shouldn't build houses, and where it is impossible to afford homeowner's insurance. Eventually this might even force change in planning codes to prohibit new construction. The strengthened building code in the CA WUI was a step in the right direction, but only a step.