Comment by altairprime
1 day ago
Note that brick is much worse than wood for wind-stoked wildfires; think ‘explosive fiery-hot shrapnel’ rather than just catching on fire like wood.
(This is not a contradiction of your point, just a useful related factoid for the modern era.)
You're going to die if you're around to witness either (if you didn't already pass out from smoke/heat/lack of oxygen). It literally doesn't matter.
The advantage of suburbs in which houses are mostly built from non-flammable materials is that while maybe one or two rows of houses closest to forested areas will likely burn out, there won't be enough calorific potential for the fire to propagate further into the suburb.
Also for firefighting efforts the difference between a house burning out and a house burning down is huge. The former means that most of the fire is already contained in a non-flammable structure, reducing the risk of spreading and also making efforts to quench it with water more effective.
"Brick is much worse than wood for wind-stoked wildfires" is a strange take. If a wildfire is approaching, I'll take a town built from brick rather than plywood any day.
Brick does tend to survive. Brick as an insulating layer can save lives. Brick also explodes violently under conditions where wood merely burns. Neither of these save homes in our wildfires, though; it turns out what saves homes is things no one realized at first:
Don’t plant trees within fifty feet of a structure. More, if you didn’t inflate your home like a balloon to fill a property to the brim with home. Cut them down and make a firebreak. Clearings exist for a real and serious reason. Aesthetics have been given precedence far too long in this regard.
Make your home airtight (or positively pressurize it, if you have the power and tech to do that safely) so that embers don’t get pushed in by the winds and pulled in by the temperature differential currents and catch your house on fire from inside its walls. Not much fun in having a brick building burned out from embers that were forced in through a poorly-sealed door.
Saturate your roof with water, so that it doesn’t trap embers and act as a fire repeater to the next house on the block. Not only will your roof not burn, but every ember that lands on it will likely go out. Even if your roof is metal, consider installing sprinklers anyways. Maybe you’ll help save your neighborhood someday.
It’s not the building material that’s the one problem here; it’s the carelessness of building code, safety enforcement and absence of federal and state aid to fireproof homes in known fire zones. It’s the catastrophically incorrect hundred year old policy that would rather burn down a chunk of homes every ten years rather than admit that policy is wrong and that the indigenous people were right all along. Brick or wood or concrete or steel, none of these will stop the hottest fires with any certainty. We know what does, and we’ve allowed it to become unsafe to have wood homes. We know how to stop these wildfires. Build with brick if you like, but:
Only fire can prevent forest fires.
For an excellent alternate viewpoint that focuses on making homes stop burning in (and thus spreading) local wildfires and then letting them burn:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/
This is absolutely an acceptable path forward, and was proposed decades ago. It’s been essentially ignored in building codes and homeowner requirements, but if you own a home or know someone whose home is in a fire zone — which is any home between the Cascades and the coastline where there’s a contiguous (no gaps larger than a mile) line of homes and/or flammable unmanaged land eastward from the house to the nearest forest (i.e. all of Marin county) — then focusing on the home modifications described in this story may save that home, and perhaps all of those west of it, when fire visits them eventually.
Think about what you’ve just written… you’re saying that a stone building is less safe than a wood building in a fire.
Have we seen any stone cities burn down lately? Because I haven’t seen London burn down since they replaced all the wooden houses with brick in 1666.
I am not sure the wood framing matters much in this case. The fires are burning houses because the roofs are flammable, or embers are getting in the house through the eaves or a broken window. So in the end you have a completely burned down wood-framed house or a hollow concrete house that is no longer structurally safe.
WW2 saw urban firestorms in European cities built of brick. The insides are still flammable.
Wind-stoked wildfires are not cat4 or something tornadoes.