Originally Posted by MandoMan
(Post 2400490)
On December 30, 2021, a wildfire driven by heavy winds near Boulder, Colorado burned to the ground over a thousand suburban homes in two neighborhoods. I’d been visiting my dad in Denver, and no spotted the plume of smoke as my plane took off that morning. One of my nieces is a firefighter and fought that fire.
I spent five years of my childhood in Northern California, in the mountains above St. Helena and its vineyards. Our first home had varnished redwood siding and redwood shakes on the roof. Most homes were stucco (fireproof concrete), but with shake roofs. Surrounding us was miles of big evergreen trees and dry grass.
My in-laws live in Loma Linda, California, a couple hours east of Pacific Palisades. They live high on a hill, with a gorgeous view, and there are miles of hills behind the house a couple hundred miles away. No trees. Just oily dry brush, tumbleweeds, dry grass.
It’s certainly possible to design homes less likely to burn. However, a home that can withstand, say a dry grass fire when the wind is low, buffered by bare dirt or well-watered grass, on a day when the wind isn’t high, still can’t usually survive 80 mph winds and the heat from a fast-moving fire racing through dry forests. Things like burning pine cones and pine needles and burning brush fragments soar as if in hurricane and can start new fires hundreds of years in advance.
Lots of these Southern California homes have roofs made of clay tiles. Those are half an inch thick and essentially fireproof. Drop a basket of burning pine cones on the roof and they will burn themselves out. Lost house walls are stucco, and that is also mostly fireproof. Glass doesn’t easily melt or burn, either. Studies show that the weak spot is the soffits, often called the eaves, the area under where the roof juts out from the walls. These are usually made from either half-inch painted plywood or thin vinyl. Both burn easily. Also, building codes usually require attic ventilation. Vents in the soffits let air be sucked up into the attic, thanks to vents at the top of the roof. When homes in these situations catch fire, the fire tends to start in the soffits let air area because they are more flammable than stucco or roof tiles. It doesn’t take long when the air is 400°. The flames are sucked into the attic and start burning themselves wood roof trusses and the plywood sheathing. Seconds later, the entire roof is ablaze. That’s the end of the house.
Normally, places like New York State and New Jersey get rain and humidity and dew in the summer and don’t easily burn. Last summer, you may recall, there were big fires there due to unusually dry conditions.
In the winter in The Villages, we get very little rain. Grasses and trees dry out. We are surrounded by many miles of fields and forest. Not far away is the Ocala National Forest, 673 square miles of brush and short pines inhabited by thousands of people in old house trailers, many of them drug addicts. If we have a drought here some summer that lasts several months, could we have a fire that burns out of control and burns thousands of homes? Yes. Could it reach The Villages? Yes.
Consider. My home is framed with wood, covered with vinyl siding that melts and burns, the soffits are vinyl. Thousands of homes here are similar. Faced with a fire similar to the Pacific Palisades fire, The Villages could burn, too. Even homes with concrete walls have vinyl soffits vented to let air (and flames) into the attic. Class A shingles won’t do anything to stop a fire that has already entered the attic and is burning from the inside out.
I don’t live in terror of this happening here, but it certainly could. Some homeless person neglects a little campfire in a hidden spot a mile from here, and because of extreme drought, the glade catches fire, and then the surrounding trees and scrub. If it reaches The Villages as a big wildfire, yes, The Villages could burn, house after house. The fire department can put out two or three house fires at once, but not a hundred. We have lots of ponds that can be used for extra water, but with a fire like that, the closest ones would be quickly drained. Yes, it could happen here.
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