Pajamas Media

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Rule of thumb for those of you building McMansions in hot, dry climates:

If you want your house to survive the next big fire, and you would like to continue to have fire insurance on it, make sure that you have a 200 yard fire break around your property, with nothing within that zone taller than your closely mowed lawn. It would also be really helpfull not to build using a lot of wood products on the horizontal surfaces (the roof, for example) that tend to catch fire when sparks and cinders are blown onto them by the firestorm driven winds.

In short, the only means of preventing one of these brush fires from burning your house is to ensure that there is no fuel for it to burn close enough to you to do you damage.

Hint 2: Manzanita, pretty as it is, is not a suitable landscaping plant. It tends to do an impression of a gasoline bomb in a fire.

Ever wonder why the Mexicans don’t have such fires? Because they have sheep, and the sheep eat enough long grass to reduce wildfire hazards substantially.

So, fires happen in southern California every few years destroying thousands of homes and causing millions of dollars of damage. The fires pretty much occur in the same places over and over again. On the east coast we have hurricanes that occur on a regular basis that causes lots of damage too. Why is it then that building in hurricane prone areas is so very bad but building in fire prone areas is just fine? Some of the homes destroyed this time were the same homes destroyed by the last big fire. Why the double standard?