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Comment by sengork | Hacker News Reader

Interesting photo of the burned down buildings considering the trees/bush plants immediately surrounding the two buildings are completely intact.

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Often, plants will survive wildfires (especially in CA, where wildfires are somewhat normal and plants have evolved to survive them) because they have moisture inside them. Buildings do not usually have moisture inside of them, and when embers land on common cladding materials or rubberized roofs with wood beneath them... well.

Well that's obviously a pretty bad way to build a house for an archive.

Buildings do not usually have moisture inside of them

Do sprinkler systems count?

(I know about water damage, but that's usually not as bad as fire damage... and there would be the highly effective Halon if it weren't for the CFC-scare banning it...)

There are plenty of such systems that don't use Halon, but they're expensive.

There's replacements for Halon that work just as well without making a big hole in the ozone layer.

Sprinkler systems only put out fires that start inside. When the fire starts outside and burns down through the roof, the sprinkler systems are not going to do you a lot of good.

It's confused a lot of people. There's a whole subculture of conspiracy theorists [1] who believe that the trees are evidence of an intentional government operation. It involves laser weapons shot from space, apparently.

[1] https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1942601975998002...

The photos of a lot of the neighborhoods show similar effects though the standing trees were still damaged, also, adjacent houses would have wildly different outcomes for not easily apparent reasons.

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