Making California Fire-Safe Starts by Not Making the Problem Worse

In the crush of bills at the end of its regular session, the Legislature took an important step to make it safer for Californians to live with fire.

Now, it’s up to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to decide whether he will sign a measure that protects firefighters, families and personal property.

When fires approach with homes, they can cause great disruption. People can lose their homes and possessions. In the worst cases, residents and firefighters can be hurt or killed.

Many things can be done to reduce these losses--such as building with more fire resistant building materials and reducing fuels near homes--and California has made good progress on these issues. But it was not until the last few days that we addressed the obvious: Homes should only be built where there is adequate fire protection.

Assembly Bill 2447 by Dave Jones adds a common sense requirement for new development. Under this bill, before a county approves new building sites, they need to make three findings:

1) That homes have adequate structural fire protection
2) That subdivision design meets modern fire-safe standards; and
3) That residents have more than one way in and out of the community in the event of a fire.

Although it seems preposterous, counties currently have the freedom to approve new homes even in places where they know there isn’t adequate fire protection. The local government gets the benefit of new tax revenue, without having to provide that core safety service. They hope for the best, and trust that CalFire and others will save the day in the event of fire.

This is irresponsible, dangerous and financially unfair. Local governments that approve development must be responsible for ensuring basic services like fire protection. When development is approved without consideration of fire protection, the financial burden is unfairly shifted, generally to the state taxpayer. Increased calls for CalFire to step in and provide fire protection is a large part of why firefighting costs to the state’s General Fund have skyrocketed from $408 million in the 1997-98 budget to over $1 billion this year.

Firefighters are, of course, trained to protect homes, and work tirelessly to do so. But tragedy becomes more likely when firefighters must defend poorly planned subdivisions. That’s what happened in the 2006 Esperanza fire in Riverside County, where five firefighters lost their lives while trying to defend a home in a dangerous location on a dead-end road at the top of a brush-filled canyon.

California faces a huge challenge as we try to ensure the safety of millions of existing homes. But a critical part of fire protection strategy must be to stop making the problem worse. The best time to address fire risk is before the homes are built, and if we can’t build safely, then we shouldn’t build there at all. That’s just common sense.

This approach lets local government make land use decisions, while ensuring that those actions don’t put people at undue risk. I hope Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger joins California’s firefighting unions and conservation groups and sees the sense of signing AB 2447.

Source: California Progess Report
By Paul Mason, Deputy Director, Sierra Club California