StemCell Therapy

"The 4 million mark is unfathomable. It boggles the mind, and it takes your breath away," a spokesperson for Cal Fire said.

Speaker 1: 00:00 California's disastrous wildfire season is now one for the record books. Roughly 4 million acres have burned that is far and away. The largest area destroyed in one season in modern California history. Climate change has been named as the major culprit in the state's bigger, hotter, faster moving wildfires in recent years, but a new report finds another and potentially manageable cause of these tremendous fires. That is where California is building new homes and the fire safety measures required in that construction. Joining me is reporter Elizabeth wile co author of an investigative report on wildfire and California housing policy published by pro Publica and Elizabeth. Welcome to the program. Thank you so much. Attention has been given to climate change as the crucial element in our devastating wildfires and rightly so, but what role does back country development play in sparking those fires?

Speaker 2: 01:02 Well, it plays a very large role. Um, climate change, of course, underlies this, all our heating planet and weather patterns are making it worse, but where humans live in our environment makes a tremendous difference in both where wildfires start, how many homes and lives are lost in those fires, how difficult those fires are to fight once they do start and how possible it is to manage the landscape well in a sort of preventative medicine way before fires started all.

Speaker 1: 01:38 And in your article, there's this figure that 95% of wildfires are caused by humans.

Speaker 2: 01:44 Yes. So the landscape does need to burn. California is a Mediterranean landscape and fire is a natural part of that landscape, but yes, 95% of fires are sparked by human. Someone drives down the road, a spark flies from something, somebody start to barbecue. As we all know, PG and E has started an awful lot of fires in the state. So the ignitions almost always are human caused. So when you have more humans living in an environment, the more likely it is that fires will start.

Speaker 1: 02:21 What's driving the development of homes in the back country or the wild land, urban interface area as it's

Speaker 2: 02:29 Yes, it's a mouthful. The wild land, urban interface. Well, the California has a housing crisis, as we all know. So the state desperately needs housing housing in a lot of coastal urban centers is extremely expensive. So people for financial reasons often move further and further away from those cities, uh, into areas that are now known as the wifi, the wild land, urban interface, and of those areas are often beautiful and people like living there. So there are many reasons people are getting pushed outward, but housing policy is a very large part of it.

Speaker 1: 03:09 When housing developments are planned, is there any state requirement that the wildfire risk needs to be assessed?

Speaker 2: 03:16 No, there are many different requirements and different municipalities, but this week Newsome vetoed a bill that for the first time would have made wildfire risks are part of what's known as the housing allocation process. It's very detailed in arcane and that part is not important. But as of now, wildfire is not whilst our risk is not considered in warehousing needs to be developed in California.

Speaker 1: 03:44 And the experts you spoke with said that it's really necessary to have a requirement at the state level about that. What is their reason?

Speaker 2: 03:53 Well, most, most housing decisions are made on the local level and therefore are very influenced by local politics. So for better or worse, a lot of more affluent suburbs and cities are very resistant to housing. There are a lot of underpinnings to this, but people will say traffic is already bad and their schools are already underfunded and their public transportation already. Isn't good enough. And many other reasons that often housing is resisted. So that becomes part of the issue at the local level, that if you leave it up to the locals and they don't want housing, it won't get built. But if there's state oversight sort of looking at the big picture in California and what needs to happen, we might move in the right direction more quickly now. Okay.

Speaker 1: 04:42 In your report, you say that it would not be possible to stop people from living in these remote areas, 11 million people in the state live in the wild land, urban interface, but are there ways to make the houses safer?

Speaker 2: 04:56 Yes. There are many ways to make the houses safer. And I, and I highly recommend to listeners if they live in a fire prone area to just, you know, look it up. But the first and most important thing to do is make sure you have a good roof, that you have a roof that is flame resistant, most houses burn, because embers blow in the wind and land on somebody's roof. And the house burns down as fire people often like to say, houses don't burn up. They burn down. So that's the first thing. And then people will find that they should clear vegetation out from around their houses. So if an Ember flies, the house is less likely to burn. There are a lot of fairly simple things that homeowners can do to make their own home safer. And a lot of experts believe that the community level of organization is really the most important thing relative to keeping our neighborhood safe. That if one house burns, the next is more likely to burn, but if your neighborhood can get together and everybody make your homes, fire safe together, you'll really put yourself at far less risk.

Speaker 1: 06:06 I have been speaking with pro public, a reporter, Elizabeth Weil and Elizabeth. Thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you.

Visit link:
California Wildfires Have Burned 4 Million Acres And The Season Isn't Over Yet (KPBS Midday Edition Segments) - KPBS

This entry was posted on October 8, 2020 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Preventative Medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |