One of the home’s main advantages over its neighbours was that it was brand new: the owner only moved in last year. “A lot of these houses in the neighbourhood were built from the 1920s through to the 1950s and were quite vulnerable to fire,” Chasen said. “No real protection was added to these homes when they were built.”
A car drives past homes and vehicles destroyed by the Palisades Fire.Credit: AP
Chasen, who grew up in the Palisades and lives in nearby Santa Monica, said Californians would need to have serious discussions about design and construction following these devastating fires, including the use of wood frames and mandating fireproof walls.
The issue has stirred debate on the letters page of the Los Angeles Times. “We are seeing what happens when we build homes with wood framing instead of tilt-up steel reinforced cement walls that would be more fire-resistant,” wrote Douglas Chapman of Santa Ana. Citizens were “too stupid” to insist on proper building codes, he wrote.
Dave Simon, a landscape architect from North Hollywood, said residents of fire-prone semi-urban areas could take all the design precautions possible, but damage would still be entirely predictable.
“Wood burns and steel melts, and if you’re lucky enough to have a concrete home with a tile roof, even that type of structure will last only so long in an inferno,” Simon wrote in his letter to the editor. He also questioned why an insurance company would sell policies in such an area and why governments allowed vulnerable homes to be built.
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Contrary to impressions of the US as a free-for-all country where anything goes, Molly Mowery, the executive director of the non-profit Community Wildfire Planning Centre, told this masthead fire-prone California had made significant efforts to enforce safer building.
“The state of California does have a very robust building code for wildfire,” she said. But it was only adopted in 2007. “One of the factors is that many of the [destroyed] homes likely pre-date current requirements for building codes. When you factor in housing stock, some of it I believe dated back to the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s.”
The measures in the 2007 code include requiring dual pane windows and for one of the panes to be made from tempered, or hardened, glass. It required render to pass a fire penetration test – though combustible siding and decking is still allowed – and generally compelled class-A fire rate roof coverings. There are also guidelines about where to put vegetation around the home and how to maintain it to reduce fire risk.
But even with these regulations, it’s easy for embers to ignite a home, said Stephen Quarles, an expert in the performance of buildings exposed to bushfire and an adviser emeritus to the University of California. Once the blaze jumped from bushland to the semi-urban environment, it could quickly become an urban fire.
Wood is used for the frames of most houses in the United States and Australia.Credit: Paul Rovere
“Once you have some limited number of ignitions within a neighbourhood, then you have this home-to-home scenario. Then the [building] materials make a lot of difference,” Quarles said. “Once you get inside a house, everybody’s going to have combustible things. They have wood floors, they have combustible furniture.”
More so than building materials, it’s ultimately the location of these properties on the foothills of the mountain ranges surrounding LA that make them susceptible to fire. Australia and California have similar debates about whether people should be allowed to build – or rebuild – in fire-prone areas (or flood zones). Climate change has made that discussion more urgent.
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For example, firefighters spent much of the weekend aggressively defending homes in Mandeville Canyon, a leafy, narrow valley on the eastern edge of the Santa Monica Mountains that is popular with celebrities and accessible by just one dead-end road out of Brentwood.
“There has been a lot of development that has occurred over many decades with homes that were not always seen in fire-prone areas,” Mowery said. “Some homes and neighbourhoods just weren’t designed with fire in mind.”
Chasen, the architect, said the location of homes was another difficult and important question to grapple with, but he expected people to keep building in fire-prone areas, just with more resilient materials. “I don’t think there’s a way back, and knowing Americans, they’re gonna forge ahead. There’s no retreat.”
He also said the surviving Palisades home he designed showed wood-frame constructions could perform well against fire if done properly. In an earthquake-prone area, the alternatives of concrete and steel would greatly increase the cost of building.
“People I know who’ve done it in places like Malibu are really only very, very wealthy people who can afford to spend a multiple of what regular people spend on houses,” Chasen said.
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