What saved the ‘miracle house’ in Lahaina?
civilbeat.org
civilbeat.org
Ember attack is a big concern - as noted in TFA you want a clear area around your house, but also sealing off ingress pathways under gutters / eaves and so on. This is all doable, but it's as expensive as you'd expect 'the last 5%' to be.
Where I am (250km north west of Sydney AU) in the months before the pandemic, we had a bush fire heading towards us at about 1km a day through national park. It was ~ 10km away when (atypically) heavy rains arrived. We've had 3 years of above-average rainfall, but it's now agreed that el niño / la niña has flipped, so while it's been great for the inland areas of the southern half of the east coast of Australia these last few years, we're left with a lot of organic matter that's rapidly dying off and drying out.
It's hardly a novel prediction, but this summer will be spectacular in all the wrong ways in Australia.
EDIT: Add link to some of David Holmgren's (co-originator of permaculture fame) work, responding to large bushfires through Victoria AU over the past few decades: https://holmgren.com.au/writing/bushfire-resilient-land-and-...
Coober Pedy is a completely subterranean town around the opal mines. These days (not in AU), I'm looking at semi-underground housing structures to cut heating and cooling costs and avert some classes of risks associated with conventional housing. 40-45 C summers for 4 months & -10 C winters will increasingly become too expensive for conventional structures. Plus, there's wind, hail, lightning, tornadic, and wildfire risks to consider. Flooding isn't a problem if building on high ground.
Underground is appealing, but radon and costs (water diversion, load-bearing roof strength, etc) have put me off that idea. I should revisit. We're starting to plant out more deciduous trees as our break zone extends - local Australian natives (eucalypts, cypress) burn like tar barrels. Similarly contending with -6 through 45 celsius. You paint a cheery picture. ; |
* https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/Fire-causes-and-risks/...
* https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-re...
* https://www.firerescue1.com/fire-products/wildland-fire-prod...
Most homes go up in flames not from the flames that we often seen in footage (which can generate quite a lot of radiant heat), but rather start from embers that fall onto flammable bits (decks, wood furniture, dry vegetation, large-hole attic vents):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW4ojYJtGbA
* https://www.frontlinewildfire.com/wildfire-news-and-resource...
* https://firesmartbc.ca/why-we-focus-on-embers/
* https://firesafemarin.org/harden-your-home/how-homes-ignite/
But Americans seem to care more about their land than their house, so maybe they confuse these concepts on purpose.
A home is an emotional thing, not just a thing that is worth money.
Most (but not all) Americans are intensely ignorant, and some are proud of it for tribal reasons. I know because I visited Paradise in 2018 and lived there 2019-2020. Not a single person I met amongst thousands took even partial personal responsibility for losing their structure: it was all somebody else's fault or an act of divine intervention.
PART 2: A PAINSTAKING RENOVATION
Millikin and his wife, Dora Millikin, fell in love with the Front Street house several years ago...
Wow. This kind of narrative cliffhanger makes sense in a thriller. It does not make sense in an article on how to prevent houses from burning down. I'm not going to blame the author, since this is more of a cultural and institutional problem, but this article reads like a caricature.
It’s like saying “I’m happy to put a lot of work into making my readers feel bad for person X, but I can’t be bothered researching how to help person X or others who could become X in the future.”
What am I missing?
On second thoughts maybe it’s useful to separate the emotional articles from the pragmatic ones. Maybe this author is better at empathy and not good at problem solving.
That not everyone is as solution-oriented as you, and that being solution-oriented isn’t inherently superior.
What’s the point of reading and writing if not to learn things about the world to help reduce suffering through solutions? I guess you can just read and write for the enjoyment of it, but it seems weird to do so in a case where there is a huge potential to reduce suffering though sharing knowledge.
I’m a consultant, and my job is getting people to change their software development processes so they are more effective. In the early days, that included things like “use source control.” Now, my advice is more subtle. Regardless, the job hasn’t changed.
You might think that such a job involves showing people an obviously better way, and then helping while they put the idea into practice. I thought so too, at first.
Narrator voice: It does not.
First and foremost, the job is making an emotional connection with people so they want to change. Convincing them that you’re on their side, that you understand their world, and that you have their best interests at heart. Ultimately, it requires empathy.
If you continue to approach problems without empathy, continue to dismiss people who take a people-centric rather than solution-centric view of the world, and continue to devalue the simple pleasures people take from doing things that don’t solve problems… you will be much less effective in life than you otherwise could be.
Behavior changes are even tougher, usually meaning new behaviors can often only piggyback on existing habits. We think that if we think it, we will do it, but lots of factors slow us down, including misunderstanding procrastination and the far-reaching effects of improving sleep and diet.
Finally, there are only two types of concrete: Concrete that has cracked, and concrete that hasn't cracked yet.
Strong earthquakes mean you can only really build with wood or steel frames, so that is what they build with. Steel framed construction is significantly more expensive to buy, build, and maintain, so it isn’t commonly used in houses since they don’t need the extra strength.
You don’t need masonry to be fire resistant. Large brush fires would drop burning embers all over your house when I lived in the southwestern US, but the ubiquitous stucco-and-tile exteriors were largely unaffected.
For the next twenty or so years, most new construction was in heavy concrete that looked like it could withstand a nuclear bomb.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-31/curious-darwin-top-en...
Then the next generation apparently forgot about Tracy, and the current crop of buildings have the wispy floor to ceiling plate glass windows etc you'd see in any modern designer building slash greenhouse, which is spectacularly unsuited to a tropical climate and even worse for cyclones.
> The perception that a single-storey brick house would offer better protection from a future cyclone was largely borne out of fear rather than facts, Troppo Architects director Jo Best said. ... "I think also that there's a bit of misconception to why people think a block house is safer than a framed house. It's not the case, they are both required to meet a certain structural code and you can't get a building permit unless that happens."
https://www.google.com/maps/@46.5947587,-112.0458768,3a,81.4...
My local FD in California certified my house annually during the decade I owned it despite the fact that it was surrounded by pines, mostly dead, some touching the house.
I think they were referring to people in the middle of nowhere, where yard work is more like forestry work. Every year I get some mail from the state about taking a class to learn how to manage my land/trees. It touches on healthy forests and fires. Areas more like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/zPqNbX4142vobyMP7
I know some parts of Montana where that would be...inadvisable.
But I know what you mean. There are some roads around me you don't go up unless you know someone there.
In Appalachia we call 'em hollers.
Defensible space and choice in building material plays some part, but ultimately there are so many factors that it's basically random. People who had big old piñon trees right up against their house wouldn't see a bit of damage, while the guy next to them, who had a xeriscape yard, had their house burned down to the foundation
Purely gravity fed fresh water supplies aren't as common as you might think.
Many US jurisdictions mandate a generator and at the federal level they are “highly encouraged.”
At least in the western US. It sounds like they may do it differently where you live.
Both the Powerwall and large tanks of flammables have their risks in bushfires.
If I recall correctly the current crop of Tesla Powerwalls require cooling to stay safe?
https://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/18720/tesla-s-...
* for some limited value of 'forever'.
I used to live in a house that had groundwater seepage issues. As a result, it needed a sump pump to keep the basement dry during heavy rains, which naturally coincide with power outages. So the sump pump had a standby battery pack, just two car batteries in parallel. It could work on them for about 4 days.
I checked, and sprinkler pumps need even less power to run.
> Both the Powerwall and large tanks of flammables have their risks in bushfires.
Not really. A tank of diesel (gasoline is not suitable for long-term storage) has a huge thermal mass. A mere bush fire shouldn't be able to ignite it. It might damage fuel lines and the generator, though. I'm not sure about propane.
> If I recall correctly the current crop of Tesla Powerwalls require cooling to stay safe?
Powerwall is OK until +60C, above that temperature it just shuts down.
LPG tanks (propane in the US) get hot, increase pressure, and outgas through the pressure relief valve - causing a flamethrower effect and why valves etc should face away from buildings
https://www.kleenheat.com.au/blog/product-safety/bushfire-se...
You're correct that diesal tank are more common thanks to longer storage life etc. but large farms will often have unleaded petrol tanks if there's enough activity to warrent not having to drive a 50km (or more) to a service station to refuel.
The real question I have about Powerwalls (lithium and other future designs) is at what tempreture do they ignite and become part of the problem in a big way (although obviously the question of when they shutdown and no longer provie power is also relevant).
I'm in Western Australia, in rural parts that are largely self sufficient - emergency questions are always coming up wrt what does and doesn't work.
And I'm pretty sure that your house will be long gone if battery cells reach 100C.
The standard here isn't a simple temp. - it's how long a house can sustain external heat for.
One excerpt from the Australian Bushfire Houing standard talks about:
The assumed effective flame temperature sustained for a 2 minute period over a fire front width of 100 m.
Instantaneous flame temperature may peak above 1090 K.
Who's going to put a Powerwall inside their house in any case? It'd go outside, well away from the house, out by the outbuildings and fuel tanks.
CSIRO research:
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2015/december/rais...
If you poke about you can find the house mockup testing videos on youtube - sustained high temp flame thrower work to determine when windows shatter and lintels catch fire, etc.
Australian Standard AS 3959:2018 - Construction of buildings in bushfire prone areas
https://naturaldisaster.royalcommission.gov.au/system/files/...
For the battery to reach this temperature, the sustained air temperature has to be over 100C for several hours. At this temperature, most of the plastics will start losing structural integrity. Windows will crack from thermal expansion. And water boiling in the pipes will probably be the least of your worries.
> Instantaneous flame temperature may peak above 1090 K.
A gas stove flame is at that temperature, but it's also very thin. Think about how long it takes to boil a pot of water.
Now move that pot away from the direct flames, just a few centimeters. It's likely that the water won't ever get to the boiling temperature.
> Who's going to put a Powerwall inside their house in any case? It'd go outside, well away from the house, out by the outbuildings and fuel tanks.
FWIW, my whole-house backup battery (Enphase, not Powerwall) is in the garage. Because it gets very cold where I live, and the battery needs to be warm enough to work.
Well, you can think that, no one will stop you.
Worth pointing out, though, that I literally linked you to design standards for Australian houses intended to survive:
A house in a bushfire may be faced with three ‘waves’ of assault. The first is the radiant heat that arrives just ahead of the fire front itself, which can start to build as much as thirty minutes before the arrival of the flames.
Once the flames themselves hit, a house in a flame zone environment could be subjected to temperatures as high as 1000°C for a couple of minutes.
But even after this initial front passes, the danger is not over; there is still a threat from residual radiant heat that takes a while to ease and embers that continue to bombard the house for many hours.
Again, 100C is the tempreture of boiling water; what's the ignition point of hardwoods? what's the sagging point of steel?
Sorry, I didn't understand what the OP meant and I should have asked for clarifications. My bad.
Source: live in the bush and speccing out exactly this.
In our case the 3 tanks all come in to the pump more or less separately, so one required action is to install check valves in each line so if one of the lines is compromised, the others won't leak out through it.
As you say, maybe physical presence or maybe sensors. We need to assume we might be forced to evacuate and still want the system to operate, but also consider we might not be able to and might be trapped on site.
In our case the water supply should last for at least 24 hours, so I am hoping it will be feasible to just turn it on as we are fleeing, hard to say though. If you have a lot less water you will need to be much more judicious about when to activate it - as late as possible but not too late.
We have a Honda EU20i generator which with an extended fuel tank should run for at least a day.
Our biggest problem is that one of the buildings is built from cedar. I am not sure how practical it is to prevent such material from catching fire under extreme conditions,m even if it is well hosted down. At least the roof is metal!
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/01/25/what-marshall-fire...
1. Wildfires that threaten neighborhoods are not particularly common in Hawaii, so people don't have the same level of awareness around defensible space and fire protection, and the government doesn't educate about it / require it
2. Nonnative grasses have taken over swaths of Maui, and they burn more easily than native grasses
3. Maui is currently having a drought and exceptionally dry
4. A hurricane several hundred miles to the south caused very unusual wind conditions: VERY strong winds blowing from the opposite direction wind usually blows
5. The power company's lines are not capable of withstanding the gusts, and they did not shut down the power as a precaution, as happens in other wildfire-prone areas
So powerlines blew over, sparks ignited the grass, fire raced through the town.
As far as I know, a certain amount of energy will be more or less unavoidably discharged when a power line hits the ground: the power line has some capacitance to ground, and it has a voltage (which varies with time) relative to ground, and the stored energy (1/2 C V^2) isn’t going to just disappear. This isn’t all that much energy.
But there is no real reason that the power station needs to keep delivering more power to an arc after the capacitance discharges. Avoiding it is somewhat complicated, but the technology is available off the shelf:
http://www.swedishneutral.se/main.php?name=gfn
IIRC some Australian customers have tested this system by intentionally dropping a live power line onto dry grass, and nothing catches fire!
i've seen a grass fire start when a bird touched its wingtips to two lines on the same pole, and the smoking carcass hitting the ground was enough to ignite it.
A short to another phase wire can happen, but it’s less common.
Not mentioned in TFA is that the owner saturated everything with water prior to evacuating. Note his large yard full of vegetation didn't catch fire, that alone put a huge buffer zone on that side of his house.
Also I'll never understand why asphalt shingles are so popular, metal is better in every way.
It may pay off in the long term but most homeowners don't think in a 50 year time horizon.
Rainy season lasts 4-5 months where our house is and its the kind of rains that make you fear the wrath of God.
Used to live in rural Colorado and have had our house threatened by wildfires multiple times. We did the same thing and set up large volume pivot sprinklers that formed both a perimeter and kept the roof+deck wet when the fires got within a mile of us. Glad to hear it worked for this person. Wildfires are scary.
https://firegel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Barricade-GHS...
I generally agree that metal is better, but want to point out that there are fire rated asphalt shingles, but they are rarely used unless required.
The article says the owner was was in Massachusetts during the fire. So not sure how the owner saturated everything??
From the wider angle shot[1], there's some other nearby land with small greenery and no structures that also appears mostly unburnt. (On the left hand side, on the other side of what looks like a major road). Perhaps the other land was also saturated with water, or perhaps the absence of large trees made it hard to catch or some other reason.
> Also I'll never understand why asphalt shingles are so popular, metal is better in every way.
Metal roofs cost more, can be more dangerous to work on (making anything else that happens on the roof more expensive), significantly louder in rain and hail. They certainly have the potential of lasting longer and they're more difficult to ignite.
[1] https://d1l18ops95qbzp.cloudfront.net/wp-content/2023/08/111...
> They first heard about the fire from a man who lives in
> Lahainaluna, a neighborhood about three and a half miles away, and
> uses two rooms beneath the house as a workshop. His home burned
> first, so he evacuated to the Millikins'. Then he had to evacuate
> from there, too, she said. [0]
[0] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-18/how-did-...
I kept waiting for someone else to notice this.
There is clearly more to the story here.
Steel is becoming more popular these days though because it has gotten way cheaper while asphalt shingles have gotten a bit more expensive. But like 30+ years a steel versus asphalt roof was a huge step up in cost, and 50 years ago the paint on steel wasn't as good as it is today and could fail and start rusting within the time frame that a quality shingle roof would. You don't see rusted steel roofing very often any more though because most of that failed and was replaced 20 years ago or so.
If you can afford it though steel is definitely the way better deal today, provided you aren't doing your own roof and are tearing it down to the wood instead of just shingling over the old stuff.
> “What folks in the wildfire business call the zone zero or the ember ignition zone, is kind of a key factor in whether homes do or do not burn down,” Wara said.
> Having nothing combustible in the 5 feet directly around a house is enormously important.
This has become increasingly important for fire insurance here in Southern California over the last decade. My neighbor has five acres and when he bought it after a fire destroyed his previous house, he went around and killed everything on his property except for a few distant trees using Round Up (creating a neighborhood standoff over the runoff in the process).
We also had to completely clear cut all plant life that borders the small roads leading up to the neighborhood and all the properties because firefighters will refuse to send their trucks into any area that might be quickly cut off by flying embers lighting shrubs on fire.
> ... if there’s something next to the house that is combustible — a wood fence, a bush, dry grass — that’s often what will ignite the structure ...
In SoCal, succulents are popular -- thick leaves full of a low oil content sap. What is the advice on succulents as a fire hazard?
> Millikin said he and his wife were overcome with emotion.
> “We started crying,” he said. “I felt guilty. We still feel guilty.”
The survivor's guilt has got to be tough.
Journalists who write like this should be kicked in the dick.
In the 2018 Camp Fire, my mom's home was the only one left standing on the block because due to multiple factors:
- Lack of fuel (including trees and debris) adjacent to the structure(s)
- Proper building codes ensuring use of less flammable products
- Distance of setbacks around the structure(s)
- Almost an acre / 4k [m^2] of irrigated lawn on all sides
Firefighters may have helped, but it's difficult to say because there was zero information for months. * When residents were allowed to return, 3 360L plastic wheelie bins were reduced to 1m diameter / 4mm high "puddles" by radiant heating alone. An outdoor shed built like a residential structure was reduced to a toxic crater, including melting steel tools into nothing. 2/3 of a cord of firewood burned near the back leaving a 2" / 5 cm discolored divot in aggregate concrete. Half of an aluminum ladder was left like it had hit lava. Embers left charring here and there but they didn't ignite. The rain gutters were packed full of pine needles that I asked my mom's now ex to solve who kept promising but never delivering.
Also, loggers came in from all over and took trees at random from private and public property without the express consent of owners because of disaster resource harvesting since tree trunks were worth thousands each. Mostly Pacific ponderosa pines that stood since before Washington crossed the Potomac, each with 10k's of holes bored by woodpeckers getting at the damn beetles. Instead, the skyline was transformed into a haphazard, sterile moonscape construction site.
* Like Lele, there was also no alarm and the county sheriff defended his inaction and lack of preparedness. The Amber Alert system could've been used by the county sheriff or the local police department, cell phone service was never disrupted. Also, there is a canard being promulgated by the media about not using the tsunami system in Lele, which would've been pointless. I'm sure they had an Amber alert system too, but it wouldn't have made any difference because their cell phone towers and power grid crumbled almost immediately. Hawaiian officials claim they sent out text messages but the cell towers were already down while it was being sent: so too little, too late. Like Paradise, the power company in Hawaii should've known about the weather conditions and turned off the power in dry conditions with high wind.
> Experts say it was likely a little bit of all the above, but that one element of the home’s recent renovation is actually the most affordable and important thing people can do to try and protect their homes.
then proceeds without explaining what it is. Such a trashy technique to drive engagement.
It mentions steel roof, redwood doors, river stone around the home and removal of bush
It gets right into a number of things
This is something that worries me about my fire-prone California city, where virtually all of the houses are dilapidated junk that would burst into flames immediately if any embers came by. Wood shingle siding is very common and a lot of people think it is "vernacular" even though such siding was added in a second wave of renovations after all these buildings were made. Letting your house fall to bits, complaining to the city whenever anyone tries to improve or replace a home, and calling the weeds growing right up your walls "a garden" are all local hobbies.
But you can't move there anyway, you can't afford it.