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submitted 1 week ago by RNAi@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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[-] theturtlemoves@hexbear.net 106 points 1 week ago

Living trees contain a good amount of water, and so don't burn all that easily. Wood used in construction has most of their water removed, and so is easier to burn.

And yes, they build houses with wood in a fire-prone area. Quite the bold strategy.

[-] btfod@hexbear.net 56 points 1 week ago

And yes, they build houses with wood in a fire-prone area. Quite the bold strategy.

Genuine question, isn't that bc of earthquake risk?

[-] luddybuddy@hexbear.net 68 points 1 week ago

It is largely due to seismic requirements, yes. Platform framed wood construction is very good in an earthquake. Brick sucks for seismic, and concrete or concrete block can be good for seismic loading, but is expensive. Concrete might pencil out if you were building apartments, but that’s usually illegal in most parts of a west coast city.

[-] btfod@hexbear.net 19 points 1 week ago

Thanks for the reply. The older I get the more I wanna live in a dope concrete apartment building, and I don't even live in an earthquake or fire risk area... (yet, who knows what's in store)

[-] RNAi@hexbear.net 36 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The virgin flammable suburbian mcmansion vs the chad favela

[-] btfod@hexbear.net 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Minus the power lines, give it all a fresh coat of paint/stucco and that would look pretty dope I think.

Spread some public art and plant life around and I'm nearly there

[-] RNAi@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Brightly-coloured bad urbanism is still bad urbanism

[-] btfod@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago

Where can I read more about this topic

[-] RNAi@hexbear.net 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Poor neighborhoods that are ignored/allowed to grow with zero planning by the city government, eventually become a big enough group of problems that the useless dickheads in charge say "alright, lets fix this". The quickest thing to do is to paint soulless murals and bright colors on the small poor houses to give the impresion of doing something.

It's not intrinsically a bad thing nor necesarily counterproductive to attack the aesthetics first, but since the bigger solutions usually never come, it's infuriating. It's the kind of shit ~~CIA larvae rearing centres~~ failsons-lead NGOs do.

Something something "poverty romantization", etc

https://www.vice.com/es/article/el-problema-de-querer-combatir-la-pobreza-con-pintura-en-bogota/

[-] btfod@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago

Thank you. Please forgive, I didn't intend to imply aesthetics fix everything despite my comment appearing so.

[-] RNAi@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago

Pff, relax, no problem

[-] TheDrink@hexbear.net 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I lived in Okinawa when I was a kid, pretty much every residential (in the built up southern half of the island at least) is an apartment building between 4 and 8 floors made of concrete. They withstood yearly typhoons and earthquakes so easily that the locals barely even sweated when they happened anymore, and I've always wondered why not one capitalist corporation has ever been able to make the calculation that building in a similar way (especially on the hurricane-prone East Coast) wouldn't make financial sense in the long run.

"Whats the difference? The speed of technological advancement isn't nearly as important as short term quarterly gains." - Quark, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine [S4E7].

[-] btfod@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yes... severe storms and tornadoes are unfortunately a factor where I live. I've seen neighborhoods here that look just as ruined as the one in the photo, sans ashes... and of course most of the new construction is lumber frame. I even saw a 4 story apartment building go up last year, all lumber. Seemed wild to me. One of the many ill effects of housing being considered a commodity instead of essential to human life, I guess.

[-] Flyswat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 1 week ago

Yes, and also they statistically contain less incriminating materials in the Diddy case.

[-] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 49 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Live trees have lots of water.

American modern, single family home building standards are a total joke compared to much of Europe and Japan / SK.

Almost all new homes are made of (dehydrated) wood, dry wall and fiberglass insulation, not brick, not concrete, not masonry.

Any brick, or masonry you see is very likely to just be a superficial thin veneer, concrete is basically only used in foundations, and that's becoming less substantial and more rare as well.

Its also become very common for just plastic (polyurethane, vinyl) to be used in flooring, external siding, and roofing.

The only exceptions to this, for single family homes, are basically from before the 1960s, and most of these are basically falling apart as the cost of maintenance is unaffordable to most people living in them, with the exception of some basically wealthy 'old money' neighborhoods in certain areas.

[-] Belly_Beanis@hexbear.net 31 points 1 week ago

When I was working construction, we had to put so many doodads onto buildings made of plastic or shitty plaster to look like brick/stone/whatever. And it was all cheap garbage, but the bourgeois owners wanted it on their buildings.

I have a story about these horrifying $50,000 plaster columns this trophy wife wanted that didn't actually support anything and didn't match the rest of the house. But hey, it's your money. Don't listen to your architect or the stone masons you hired who all recommended doing it for less money using matching hand-cut stone. They also insisted on ordering this expensive ass fireplace mantle made of shitty material instead of letting the carpenter or mason do a custom, more personal piece.

There was so much shit going on with that house and it had over $1 million budget pre-recession. I imagine there's even more in LA.

[-] 7bicycles@hexbear.net 18 points 1 week ago

I thought Home building standards in Japan are also, just seen on a technical level, fairly bad because it's common to just bulldoze and rebuild? Excluding something like earth quake resistance

[-] BobDole@hexbear.net 13 points 1 week ago

The government passed the Long Life Housing act in 2009 to try to change that.

[-] hypnotoad__@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 week ago

Building codes in Cali are different due to earthquakes, and wood becomes a much more tenable option for many.

[-] BabyTurtles@hexbear.net 38 points 1 week ago

Brick houses? In this economy??

No modern houses in the US are basically made out of kindling, cheap and fast to erect.

[-] hotcouchguy@hexbear.net 18 points 1 week ago

Also plenty of petrochemicals

[-] D61@hexbear.net 30 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

The amount of energy needed to completely burn down a tree is higher than the amount of energy to burn down a house.

The fuel to feed a fire around a tree is likely just going to be the surrounding vegetation, so lawn grass. The grass catches quickly, burns up, dries out the nearby grass, the fire moves to the new dry spot and dies out in the previous spot.

A house is just full of fuel and surface area for a fire to catch.

[-] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 10 points 1 week ago

Another way to express this is that bark is more fireproof than vinyl siding.

[-] Hexboare@hexbear.net 7 points 1 week ago

The density of houses would also contribute significantly here.

[-] Spongebobsquarejuche@hexbear.net 27 points 1 week ago

You can make a house fairly fire resistant even with wood construction. Using cement siding.

[-] btfod@hexbear.net 21 points 1 week ago

I'm sure that would help on the margins but I wonder if a fire of this scale could easily ignite or carbonize the timber frame behind it anyway...

[-] Hexboare@hexbear.net 8 points 1 week ago

If the fire was very hot yes, but I don't think these fires were particularly hot.

I would guess they all went up with a bit of spotting from embers blowing ahead of the fire front.

Just using metal mesh helps a lot.

[-] btfod@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago

Makes sense to me, thanks. That last one though... Not sure if crawlspace foundations are common there but if so I bet their vents were open. That's horrifying to imagine embers blowing in and turning your crawlspace into a bellows

[-] RNAi@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago

Bricks don't have termite problems

Sure but you still use wood in brick construction. There is seismic concerns where flexibility is important. And I don't think you can throw up a brick house in an afternoon.

[-] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 24 points 1 week ago

"And I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll burn your house down!"

[-] Posadas@hexbear.net 24 points 1 week ago

Maybe they should build tree houses.

[-] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago

They should just build the whole plane out of black boxes

wait they did build the houses out of trees. shit I'm out of ideas

[-] IncensedCedar@hexbear.net 20 points 1 week ago

Adding to what folks have said, one of the single largest factors in Wildland fires destroying houses is the widespread use of tarpaper or shingle roofs. Wildfires in high winds launch large quantities of extremely hot embers and even chunks of burning materials, and generally the way these fires spreads to houses is those landing on roofs or vegetation next to houses. Less flammable roof options such as corrugated metal, slate or tile are significantly more expensive, so they are not used generally.

[-] RNAi@hexbear.net 18 points 1 week ago

So you will be SWATed by the HOA if your lawn grass is not the exact approved variety but they let you build the most flamable shit ever in the place that caughts on fire every year?

[-] Saeculum@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago

Surely slate and tile have to balance out in price at some point? The slate on my home's roof is ~120 years old and only needs a little bit of maintenance every 5-10 years.

[-] Hexboare@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago

120 years? Where's the profit in that

[-] TerkErJerbs@lemm.ee 11 points 1 week ago

I saw some footage where the bases of a lot of the palm trees were on fire but they don't burn very well because they're full of water so it just scars the bark and goes out pretty soon. Meanwhile all the shingle roofs are spreading fire from house to house in a flash.

Fire is super random as to what it spares and what it doesn't

this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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