Posted on 10/26/2007 2:14:13 PM PDT by dirtboy
A disputed land-use strategy designed to protect new developments from devastation in the county's exurban, fire-prone areas appears to have passed its first and most critical test this week.
As the Witch Creek fire raced through some of San Diego County's priciest neighborhoods and crept to the edge of others north and east of Rancho Santa Fe, not a single home in the five subdivisions that have implemented the strategy was lost, fire authorities said.
The communities, which together cover hundreds of acres, are The Bridges, The Crosby, Cielo, Santa Fe Valley and 4S Ranch.
Officials with the Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District credit the lack of property damage to a defensive program called “shelter in place.” It is a wildfire protection plan that imposes construction and landscaping standards intended to be so stringent – including mandatory interior fire sprinklers and broad swaths of protective landscaping – that homeowners can remain sheltered in their houses if they cannot evacuate.
(Excerpt) Read more at signonsandiego.com ...
From the article:
“We lived through Hurricane Andrew,” Samaritoni said, “and I lived in the Bay Area during the Loma Prieta earthquake, so when someone says there’s an impending disaster, we leave.”
Disaster seems to follow him. Hope he doesn’t move to my neighborhood!
Wherever Dennis Samaratoni is moving to next, I don’t want to be near.
In California, in most areas, they have it down to a science, you are NOT allowed to clear your property, some towns ban any tree cutting what so ever, doesn't matter if you own the tree, you can't cut it. This is the height of stupidity when it comes to fire prone areas such as northern and southern CA. I am surprised they have taken an old concept and ran with it in the south. When I was young, all of the property owners kept their places as fire proof(dispose of useless brush, cut down trees that are too close to house, keep a green zone, if possible, around your house, etc.)as possible.
Most ranchers would burn the brush on their property in the spring and after the first rain, keeping that hazard down to a minimum. Now, of course, they aren't allowed to do this so fire danger is much, much higher. Thanks greenies, and thanks to all the CS people who let these fools quietly take over the running of the country.
I should think something as simple as brushhogging and burning brush would fix most of the problem. I suppose that’s probably illegal in California. But which causes more pollution and destruction of wildlife, controlled burning of brush, or brushfires that burn up acres of fields and woods and houses full of plastics and other chemicals?
I cut the brush in our pasture every year, here in Vermont, and I have put in a lot of time limbing trees and removing dead wood. I burn a good sized brush pile once or twice a year. It makes the woods a lot pleasanter to walk in, as well as a lot safer from a fire caused by lightning or some other accident.
Someone on another thread posted this, the other day:
http://www.firedefensetechnology.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=10
Development has advanced to where these houses are now more than a mile from any open country; maybe more.
It’s a non-issue, now.
Now, who do ya think has disputed this?
Could it rhyme with Sierra Club?
Anyone familiar with Rancho Santa Fe and Rancho Bernardo know that these communities are not located in so-called “danger zones,” whatever that is.
Wow...what a place your mind just went. Either your implying he was lying or he set fire to his own home? Are you crazy? Himmel has been on the scene even when I moved to SD in 1990. He’s a TV fixture. Did you actually watch the video?
Why should some private group of people get government funding to purchase these tracts of land? If every inch of Catalina were to be built upon, so fricken what?
Catalina today is mostly sage brush and about 150 bison brought over for a movie shoot in the early 1900s. Once conservancy guru referred to them as buffalo this morning on a cable show. These are North American Bison. They are commonly referred to as Buffalo, but that is an error.
This guy want’s his little conservancy to protect the wilderness he knows next to nothing about.
Perhaps we should get a bunch of chefs to run our military research. It would make just about as much sense.
My old neighborhood association in San Jose, California would only allow shake and tile roofs. You couldn’t use composition roofs. The homes that had shake on them couldn’t be converted to tile because they weren’t built to withstand the weight of the tile.
We moved and have a composition roof. After a fire on hills around our neighborhood, our new neighborhood association got a great deal on composition roofs for the whole neighborhood. People didn’t have to participate, but most did. I like living in a neighborhood that is more worried about fire safety than looks. Plus, I think composition roofs look fine.
That is interesting, but I don’t think it is quite the same product I saw on Fox News. That system was a fire retardent. It required large pressurized gas tanks to aerate and spray the foam. The resulting foam was supposed to protect whatever it hit — shrubs as well as structures for several months.
How far were the Santa Ana winds carrying embers in these fires ? I thought it was “miles”.
Regardless, I doubt if Anaheim Hills would roll back the non-combustible roofing material requirements. There is no real need to. There are concrete tile rooks now that look like shake but without the maintenance shake rooks required. The only issue is the weight on old roofs not built to support that much weight.
Of COURSE they would!
"Environmentalists" have no interest in anything that benefits humans; their only interest is in enacting regulations to punish or endanger humans.
To them, the ideal world would be entirely free of humans.
I'd like to see all these developers head out to Oklahoma are where ever. We've got enough people and sprawl already.
Enough.
I'm a 4th generation Californian ... did it get too crowded before or after you got there.
That's very commendable.
Me and mine have been her a bit longer than you. My clan came on the ship "Confidence" in 1638, and were some of the first to eventually settle California.
did it get too crowded before or after you got there.
Are you suggesting people traveling 3 hours a day in nightmare traffic is just fine? Are you suggesting we add in 20 or 30 million more people? Start shipping water in from Alaska maybe? Perhaps build all the way across the desert to the River, and north into the Sierras? We're on our way to doing just that friend.
Yeah, embers can travel miles, when a fire’s really hot, and the wind is gusting 80mph, but a wet roof — even a wood shake roof — will withstand a rain of glowing embers just fine. Just keep the water on it.
Also, two things:
One: the tract I’m talking about was built in 1967; Nanny State government was still in the flower of its youth, then. I mean, in those days, seat belts were still a fairly new thing. People still ran with scissors, rode bikes without helmets, and laid out in the sun without SPF 500,000,000 sunblock. Ye gods, people still smoked in restaurants, then! They even DIED, from time-to-time (yeah, I know, we hardly hear about THAT anymore), and folks would just nod their heads and say, “Yup. That’s the way it goes: ya live, ya have fun, ya enjoy all that ya can, and then ya kick the bucket.” We’re talking emergent paleonanny statism, here. You lived your life without a safety net, you had your liberty and your responsibility, and if you were really stupid, you took your lumps like a man. If you lived, you learned not to act that stupid; if you didn’t, everyone ELSE learned not to act that stupid. Man, the entitlement and regulatory bureaucracies were barely even rough cave dwellings, at that time.
Two: IIRC, “concrete” tile shingles are less like your driveway, and more like cinder blocks. Porous. Still not featherweights, but not the mass of Spanish tile, either.
A few years back a Dallas neighborhood had deed restrictions that required that only shake shingle roofs could be constructed. One contrarian (who turned out to be a very wise man) rebuilt his roof with composition shingles and immediately was sued by the homeowners’ association trying to force him to replace the composition roof with shake shingles. Before the lawsuit could come to trial a couple of kids shooting bottle rockets on a windy day set fire to a shake roof. By the time the fire department got everything under control, eight or so shake shingle houses had been burned to the ground. The upshot was that the deed restriction got removed and everyone with shake roofs had to replace them with fire-resistant shingles.
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