Embers are Everything in Fire Prevention: How Loans for Vents Could Slow Climate Change
Every time a home or any fire fuel burns, CO2 is released into the atmosphere. The culture is slowly catching onto the counter-intuitive fact that tiny fire embers coupled with small twigs start more fires than do large old-growth trees. This was illustrated for the slacker general public in 2003 via the infamous tie-breaking challenge from "Survivor: Cook Islands":
A later, more serious 60 Minutes segment from 2017 called "In the Path of Fire" reported the specific small measures that made an enormous difference determining which homes withstood fires unscathed. It took well over a year to distribute the information through the confusion silo that is Facebook before "embers" were reported on more widely in mainstream media. We Californians and other fire-prone state residents need to repeatedly spread this information. The L.A. Times this week reported the state legislature just stripped a program that funded loans to fire-proof homes:
Meanwhile, the Legislature this year stripped the funding from a proposal to establish a $1 billion low-interest loan and rebate program that would help homeowners pay for fire-resistant retrofits.The article is titled "California is spending $32 million on a fire prevention strategy that doesn’t work in high winds" and it's very well illustrated with animations of past fires jumping over fire breaks. Breaks that officials had specifically carved ahead of time for the very purpose of halting a fire's spread.
Porter, the Cal Fire director, said state agencies are committed to finding programs that would help disadvantaged communities make residences more fire resistant — but most homeowners can undertake the work on their own.
A quick search on "fire proof vents" yields a few companies which sell them. The animation atop this post is from the site of brandguardvents.com, and they posted a demonstrated to youtube here. The state hasn't yet listed approved manufacturers of vents that repel fire. But the fire experts interviewed by 60 Minutes swore by the idea of clearing gutters of leaves and pine needles, and installing a specific kind of vent in homes to fire-harden them. And fire-hardened homes help free up firefighters from evacuating humans long enough for them to turn their attention to actually dousing flames.
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Further Reading:
"As of this year, the state’s code for new construction in areas susceptible to wildfires must include ember-blocking vents, but Berkompas said it’s a long education process of the building industry and homeowners who could retrofit their vents more easily and cheaper than replacing their roofs." ocregister.com
Opinion: California needs to restore an effective firefighting tool: Towers staffed with lookouts: latimes.com
Reporter John Muir Embeds For Days in Forest Fire, 1875: offlinereport.net
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
