It is tragic—the losses in the Mountain Fire, out in CA. But let’s say out loud that which apparently is supposed to remain unspoken: duh.
People decide to build their dream castles, along with other more modest homes, in the middle of pine forests on the side of a hill, with a view, or just out in the boonies, isolated the way they like it, but also in knowingly risky terrain—given California’s propensity for enduring an expanding wildfire (and mudslide) season that arrives with a predictability similar to that of tidal activity.
A few thousand questions pop up, perhaps none more glaring than why people build where they do, and why such conflagrations border on inevitable. It seems there’s always a spark, or always some idiot either doing something idiotic or intentionally incendiary. The Santa Ana winds do their thing, or climate change-enhanced drought does its thing in conjunction with dry— dry! —thunderstorms that produce lightning only, or there’s a spark from a power line, or something else.
In some ways, this seems like the inland version of building a home three feet from the ocean in Florida. What are people thinking? That it won’t happen to them? That they’ll just rebuild because they have insurance and they’re ridiculously stubborn or feeling entitled and they can’t read the tea leaves?
In all fairness, some of the homes in California may have been built before people started thinking in terms of global warming or accelerated climate change, but the Santa Ana winds arrive like clockwork, so it seems possible that there is just as much of a gambling mindset going on as there has ever been.
People don’t mind playing the odds. They want to build where they want to build, damn the torpedoes.
3 Cents' 