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Serendipity: Sustainable Living in Fire Areas Revisited

By Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist | Published on 12/27/2008

We have to make decisions with our eyes open, the best available facts before us — and humility.

The effects of living in a high fire area can be devastating. The recent Tea Fire destroyed 210 homes and scorched the earth in its path. (Karen Telleen-Lawton / Noozhawk photo)

Last month I began the Serendipity column, “In the long run, living in a high fire area isn’t sustainable. But I’m living in the short run, which put me in the path of the Tea Fire.” A responder named “Good Point” quickly challenged with, “Living in a high fire area isn’t sustainable. It was (and is) poor city planning to allow all these homes to be located in the high fire area. The odds are that each house will burn to the ground once every 20 years. I just can’t believe that anyone is so stupid as to subject themselves to go through this nightmare. A very poor choice when buying property!”

Karen Telleen-Lawton

In fact, I agree with some of “Good Point’s” points, if not his vitriolic tone. If I were Santa Barbara’s environment czar, I’d be tempted to draw a red line not far above Foothill Road and proclaim that, henceforth, no structures could be built (or rebuilt) above it.

Most mountain homeowners, including my husband and me, pay a high premium in fire costs. It doesn’t approach the actual public costs of fighting a fire; however, fires still have to be contained before they reach the city. Maybe we’re just sacrificial lambs for the lowlanders!

Nevertheless, what’s really unsustainable is the absolutism that “Good Point” espouses. Even something as seemingly straightforward as zoning is squishy in the details. For example, California is overdue for a monster earthquake, something on the order of 8 on the Richter scale. Maybe no one should be allowed to live in California. Even if the Big One hits far offshore, we face the possibility of a deadly tsunami like the one that killed more than 200,000 living beside the Indian Ocean just two years ago. Maybe no one should be allowed to live below an elevation of 50 feet or more — a tsunami zone that might displace 1 billion people or more.

Even if we aren’t victims of an earthquake or a tsunami, climate change surely will inundate much of Santa Barbara’s downtown with seawater. A recent art project that planned to paint a blue line downtown, where the new shoreline will be, was scuttled as an “inconvenient truth.”

Climate change notwithstanding, geographers and food scientists tell us we should all live in the foothills, to save the fertile plains for agriculture. This would be especially true in our county, with some of the most fertile soil on Earth.

We have to make decisions with our eyes open, the best available facts before us and mixing in large doses of humility. It’s imperative to elect officials who will make decisions that are best for the community, not for themselves or their friends.

One fact they surely will not find is one espoused by “Good Point,” that each house will burn every 20 years. Climate records suggest that the natural fire cycle in Santa Barbara is 20 years to 40 years, but the odds are quite low for any one fire-area home to burn in any one fire.

If you’re in the nonenviable position of owning one of the 210 destroyed homes and you plan to rebuild, check out the Community Environmental Council’s Web site at www.communityenvironmentalcouncil. The site features a home on West Mountain, which was surrounded by fire and did not burn. The owners designed with an eye to green building and fire impenetrability. It worked. Given environmental and fire-safe guidelines, living in the foothills can be sustainable.

Karen Telleen-Lawton’s column is a mélange of observations supporting sustainability. Graze her writing and excerpts from Canyon Voices: the Nature of Rattlesnake Canyon at www.canyonvoices.com.

» San Roque wrote on 12/29/08 @ 11:24 AM

Karen is a marvelous essayist. Thanks for letting her share her thoughts with the
larger community. She’s a treasure.

But Tea Fire letter writers should consider what Andy Rosenberger knows, but didn’t
say - that some homes and streets burned down for the THIRD time in 45 years. Don’t you think God, or Nature, is trying to tell us something?

FEMA will no longer underwrite rebuilding in certain hurricane prone Outer Banks
areas in the Carolinas, or certain flood prone areas along the Mississippi. Shouldn’t
we do likewise?

There’s a good reason the City and County of SB both have extensive, public overlay
maps, showing where the Fire, Flood, Earthquake “danger areas” are. Anyone who’s
shopping for a new home, or a lot to build one, would be nuts not to examine those maps carefully, and exclude most of the areas inside them as truly “high risk”.

Andy knows that which houses get burned during a fire-storm has more to do with
sudden wind changes, topography, the luck of aerial water drops, than what wood-
frame houses do to protect themselves. Fire-proofing at-risk homes helps, but does not assure safety in a fire-storm, in which the fire is creating its own weather on a scale most of us can’t imagine.

Because the U.S. Supreme Court officially values “property rights” more than
“public safety”, there are few legal ways to tell a foothill or back-country lot owner
that they can’t build anything.

But that doesn’t mean that the City or County has to let them build at-risk homes, or build homes close together, or build them in any way that makes them less “fire-safe”.

The foothill fire-flood-slide areas should be re-zoned to Ag-Rural/transitional. A Transfer of Development Rights system could offer strong financial incentives for Tea Fire property loss victims to use insurance money to move/rebuild in more urban and defensible areas.

» Bob wrote on 12/28/08 @ 06:17 AM

Karen the 2000 acres burned in the Tea Fire is completely fire safe right now. If somehow the burned homes could magically be returned they would be completely safe....for a few years. The key to living in a fire ecology is to remove and keep removed all things flammable from around the home. And of course homes must be ember proof. The pre fire condition of the Mountain Drive area was absurd. It was a tinder box waiting for a match. Owners, city and county planners, and fire departments should all share the blame for allowing such a flammable condition to exist. It did not need to happen nor to happen again (it will).

» Andy Rosenberger wrote on 12/27/08 @ 02:28 PM

Karen-I think lines are arbitrary. I agree with you in concept, but how about the houses that burned on the other side of the proposed line?

In Malibu I remember one year that a fire burned right to what we in the fire business not so facetiously called the “Great Pacific Fuel Break.” Making houses defensible and sustainable makes infinitely more sense. Besides, neither one of us wants to live far from Rattlesnake Canyon anyway!

Serendipity: Sustainable Living in Fire Areas Revisited

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