By Dana M. Nichols
The Record
Copyright 2007 The Record
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
SAN ANDREAS, Calif. — When fires rage through the brush-covered hills above this town decades from now, the wind-carried embers surging ahead of the flames should have a much harder time penetrating homes.
That’s because California on Jan. 1 will begin requiring that homes -- even vacation homes -- built here and in other areas protected by California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection crews must meet stringent standards designed to keep heat and burning embers from penetrating vents, exposed eaves and the wooden decks that often give fire an entrance.
At the same time, Cal Fire is updating 20-year-old maps that show which wildlands protected by the agency have the highest fire hazard. Houses built in “very high” and “high” fire hazard zones will be required to have class A roofs -- usually metal or the very toughest grades of asphalt shingles.
Insurance companies have been remapping over the years and are not expected to base their rates on these maps.
The proposed updated maps place about 71 percent of Calaveras County -- or 467,000 acres -- in the high and very high hazard zones. Property owners have to disclose the fire hazard zone when they sell.
Cal Fire officials are holding a series of meetings in coming weeks during which property owners are invited to give feedback on whether they think the proposed fire hazard ratings are appropriate for their land.
State officials will consider testimony from the meetings before they issue the final fire hazard map Jan. 1.
State fire officials say the new maps and more-stringent building codes should combine to reduce the chances of future disasters like the 2003 fires in San Diego County that destroyed 3,700 homes or the Pattison Complex Fire in September 2004 that destroyed 13 homes in Valley Springs.
“The new building codes are really meant to make sure that embers blown ahead of a fire don’t get into a building and ignite them,” said June Iljana, spokeswoman at Cal Fire headquarters in Sacramento.
New understanding based on the fires that ravaged neighborhoods in the Oakland Hills in 1991 and the firestorm in San Diego in 2003 have changed maps and codes, Iljana said.
In particular, those fires taught fire officials that embers -- tiny pieces of burning material -- often blow far ahead of the advancing flames and can easily penetrate into attics or other vulnerable places in houses.
“A burning ember can move up to a mile away from a fire and ignite a property,” Iljana said.
As a result, the new code also requires designs for rain gutters that prevent the possibility that dry leaves could pile up in the gutter and offer a place for an ember to ignite.
Fire officials are careful to say that their maps show fire hazard -- not risk.
They say a hazard is some natural danger that will happen from time to time. Risk, in contrast, means the chance that a hazard will cause damage such as burning down a house.
Hazards are inevitable. Risk of loss, however, can be controlled by such measures as putting baffled screening in attic vents to keep out embers. And it is things like that the new code will require.
Cal Fire estimates that the new code will add an average of $1,800 to the cost of a new home.
“This is a good thing,” said Steven Hollett, a Cal Fire division chief in the San Andreas office of the Tuolumne-Calaveras Unit that protects Calaveras and Tuolumne counties and the eastern edge of San Joaquin County. “Yeah, building costs will go up. But we are pretty vulnerable out there -- homes nestled in these beautiful forests.”
Hollett said technology ranging from digital photography to computers has vastly improved fire science since the last maps were made in the 1980s.
“In 1983, we were using a ditto machine and typing everything,” Hollett said. “Nowadays, a fire gets mapped (using computer software) so the fire history is pretty accurate now.”
And if property owners heed the warning of those more-accurate maps and make their homes more fire resistant, then those homes may survive fires even if thin-stretched CDF crews can’t get there.
“We can’t put an engine at every house,” Hollett said.