California forest fires?

Question

The Californian forest fires have caused considerable damage and misery to the people living in its vicinity.

If a house has a large compound that has no trees in it, will it be still protected from the fires? Can fires from the forest still leap towards the house and burn it down if it has a large garden to act as a buffer?

Answer 1

Clearing trees, brush, and other dry plants and vegeation to produce a safety buffer will usually increase your chances greatly of saving your home. However, the fire that hit Southern California was considered very extreme with low humidity, very strong dry winds (some stations recorded wind speeds of over 60 mph with local gust over 75 mph, very dry fuels to burn. There is not much you can do except hope that the wall of fire will pass to the left, right, or jump over your property if it will make it onto your neighborhood.

Even with clearing the fuels around your property, these extreme fire potential conditions will produce several types of conditions that just clearing the brush may not protect you as much as you had hoped for.

Fire Spotting...this is when wind blows hot and sometimes flaming embers into the air. Where it lands, it has a potential of stating another fire. Normally, clearing the potential fuels around your home will provide good protection as most fire spotting occurs relative close to the fire line. However, with winds as strong as what we saw in Southern CA and the fact that some fires were was moving down hill and down cayon, these burning embers that are carried a great distant not only by the strong off-shore winds, but because they were also lifted very high into the air by the convective current of these intense fires.

As mentioned by one of the answerers above, the heat alone from these intense fire can start fires of their own. So you may have cleared the trees, but stuff like tires, boxes, wood shingles, dirty rags, etc left around your home may burst into flames.

And with any fire, especially intense one, fire may spread from along the ground or just below the surface of the ground. This can be especially true if you cut down the trees but did not remove the stump or root which become the below the surface fuel for the fire to slowly spread. And when you put a ground fire out, the flames may be gone, but it mays still remain very hot for a long time just below the surface. A little wind and suddenly flames may redevelop long after you thought it was completely out.

So yes, you can increase your chance of saving your house in any fire, but when it gets as bad as what your just saw in CA, sometimes luck plays a major role too!

For more information on this, check our following links

Fire Danger Levels:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/mlb/ghwo/wildfire_levels.html

Different Ways A Fire Will Spread:
http://www.rmrs.nau.edu/fourcornersforests/wildfiredynamics.htm

Fire Terms and Definitions:
http://www.americanforests.org/global_releaf/wildfirereleaf/terms.php

Fire Protection:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/mlb/ghwo/wildfire_rules.html

Califonia's State Wildland Fire Web Site and Links
http://www.fire.ca.gov/

Answer 2

It definitely helps to have a large cleared area around the house, but it may still be possible for it to burn down. Typical wind speeds during the recent fires were 60 miles per hour, which means that a burning ember may fly more than 250 feet in three seconds. To keep a cleared radius of more than that would require approximately a 5 acre property. Of course, in the back country many people had larger properties than that, but not in city areas like Rancho Bernardo.

Answer 3

It depends on how dry it is, how hot it is, and what's planted in the garden. Best gardens are ROCKS. We watched houses that had sufficient clearance STILL erupt into flames because it was SO DAMN HOT that the **RADIANT HEAT** shone thru the windows of the house and set the CURTAINS on fire!

You want war stories... don't even get me started. LOL

Answer 4

It depends how far the trees are from the house and if there is other "flammable" vegetation nearby.

Answer 5

no, if the fires spread close to it, sooner or later it will be 'burned' as well