Ringside: The Fire Next Time

Given our mission to review and recommend water and energy policies and projects, it would be negligent to ignore the horrific firestorms that have torn through Los Angeles County. And before beginning, we must acknowledge that no amount of preparation can entirely prevent tragic outcomes when 100 MPH winds turn the urban canyons of Southern California into a blast furnace. But here are some ideas local elected officials and other individuals in positions of local and regional influence may consider to make their neighborhoods and cities better prepared for the fire next time.

1 – Contact state legislators and urge them to support legislation that streamlines the approval process for projects that deliver more water, and to repeal legislation that deters investment in more water infrastructure. In particular, urge state legislators to either repeal the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) altogether, or at the least, take away the right of 3rd party private attorneys to file lawsuits pursuant to CEQA.

2 – Urge legislators to repeal SB 1157 and related legislation that enforces permanent water rationing on California’s households and businesses. It’s bad enough that this intrusive law will squander an estimated $7 billion to save a scant 440,000 acre feet of water per year. But its ultimate impact will be to slow if not stop efforts by urban water districts to increase their supply capacity. And that is dangerous. Under countless disaster scenarios for which we may have no advance notice, stripping all surplus out of our capacity to store, treat, and distribute water can have devastating consequences.

3 – Work with local fire department officials to identify fire prone neighborhoods and adjacent open space and send crews in once per year to clear out overgrown fuel. The procedures to do this are well established; we just haven’t done enough of it. Fast track the approval process (hours, not months) for applications to perform the work. To secure ample funds to do this, year after year, replace “permanent supportive housing” programs with cost-effective congregate shelters. That should free up millions, if not billions. Then use all available tools and techniques to reduce overgrown vegetation – goats and other grazing animals, prescribed burns, and mechanical thinning.

4 – Bury the power lines. All of them. Everywhere. Secure state and federal funds to help pay for it.

5 – Revise building codes to improve the many standards that already exist to protect homes against wildfires. Eliminate combustible exteriors, install windows with tempered glass, require fire resistive roof underlayment, non-combustible fences and decks, closed attics, or attics with ember-resistant vents that are sprayed with fire retardant interior coating. And so on.

6 – Encourage private residential pool construction with the condition that they include, as one well prepared homeowner recommends, “a 3–inch suction line in the deep end with a standpipe at the street to allow firefighters a guaranteed source of water.”

7 –  Embrace the concept of resilience instead of retreat. California has the highest urban density in the United States at 4,790 per square mile, at the same time as only 5 percent of California’s land is urbanized. Fire risk in the urban-wildland-interface should inspire us to prevent fires and withstand fires in these areas, not impel us to withdraw into increasingly dense urban cores.

8 – Resist the regulatory assault on permeable surfaces that percolate runoff, transpirate valuable moisture into the atmosphere, and reduce urban heat island impact. For example, tear up artificial turf and replant grass on athletic fields. Instead of forcing homeowners to kill their lawns, simply ban use of pesticides and herbicides on lawns. We are not taking advantage of the potential for well-hydrated urban landscapes to increase humidity and resist ignition.

9 – Work with Explorer Scout troops, homeless services, county corrections officials, community colleges, local fire departments and other community organizations to recruit and train a firefighting reserve corps. Drawing on well-established criteria for training volunteer fire brigades, but scaled up, create an army of firefighting reservists that undergo annual refresher training and are on call whenever disaster strikes.

10 – Reimagine firefighting and fire prevention to save money and improve results. Work with private and public fire agencies and private entrepreneurs to procure and test not only systems to remotely detect small fires before they become big fires, but also next generation technologies such as water carrying, firefighting drones, and autonomous robots designed to march into canyons to cut and remove brush. There is no reason why small cities and agencies cannot have someone looking into these opportunities and make small investments. Accelerating the development of these innovations may be the final decisive step necessary to make the experience of cataclysmic wildfires recede into history.

Local elected officials and other influential individuals can do a lot to make sure that next time, the fires have less fuel to burn and the firefighters have more resources to contain them. Working collectively, local authorities can pool sufficient political, financial, and legal resources to defy and dismantle the thicket of laws, regulations, bureaucracy, and vested interests that have undermined our ability to prepare for and respond to fires.

This is a moment to recognize that however well-intentioned they may be, environmentalist-inspired policies in California have created water and energy scarcity, which translates directly into having less capacity in our cities to deliver the resources needed to fight fires. This same unbalanced and often extreme environmentalism has informed policies and regulations that denied us the opportunity to responsibly manage California’s forests and proactively clear the brush out of our urban canyons.

The scale of the ongoing tragedy in Los Angeles County defies description. But it doesn’t have to happen again.