Official: California must mull home ban in fire-prone areas

SACR A MENTO, CA LIF. » California’s increasingly deadly and destructive wildfires have become so unpredictable that government officials should consider banning home construction in vulnerable areas, the state’s top firefighter says.

Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Director Ken Pimlott will leave his job Friday after 30 years with the agency. In an interview with The Associated Press, he said government and citizens must act differently to protect lives and property from fires that now routinely threaten large populations.

That may mean rethinking subdivisions in thickly forested mountainous areas or homes along Southern California canyons lined with tinder-dry chaparral. Yet Los Angeles County supervisors stung by California’s housing shortage approved a massive rural housing development Tuesday despite the fire danger.

Developers said the 19,000home community in rugged mountains 65 miles north of downtown Los Angeles would be built to minimize fire hazards with anti-ember construction and buffers around homes. It would include four new fire stations and roads wide enough to help people evacuate from an area the state has designated as a “high” and “very high” fire hazard zone.

Faced with such dangers, California residents should train themselves to respond more quickly to warnings and make preparations to shelter in place if they can’t outrun the flames, Pimlott said.

Communities in fire zones need to harden key buildings with fireproof construction similar to the way cities prepare for earthquakes, hurricanes or tornadoes, and should prepare commercial or public buildings to withstand fires with the expectation hundreds may shelter there as they did in makeshift fashion when flames last month largely destroyed the Sierra Nevada foothills city of Paradise in Northern California.

California already has the nation’s most robust building requirement programs for new homes in fire-prone areas, but recent fire seasons underscore more is needed.

Also Tuesday, state and federal authorities estimated that it will cost at least $3 billion to clear debris from 19,000 homes and businesses destroyed by three California wildfires last month.