Like everyone else, I've been reading the accounts of the fires in California, and have been amazed at the totality of the destruction. This observation was quite striking:
Plastic is made from petroleum, and petroleum burns fast and hot. A retired Maryland state fire marshal told Newsweek that, from a fire perspective, a typical couch is akin to a block of gasoline...
In 2020, the Fire Safety Research Institute set two living rooms on fire, on purpose. Both were identical in size and full of furnishings in an identical arrangement. But in one room, almost everything was synthetic: a polyurethane-foam sofa covered in polyester fabric sat behind an engineered-wood coffee table, both set on a polyolefin carpet. The curtains were polyester, and a polyester throw blanket was draped on the couch. In the other room, a wood sofa with cotton cushions sat on a hardwood floor, along with a solid-wood coffee table. The curtains and throw blanket were cotton. In the natural-material room, the cotton couch appeared to light easily, and then maintained a steady flame where it was lit, releasing little smoke. After 26 minutes, the flames had spread to the other side of the couch, but the rest of the room was still intact, if smoky. Meanwhile, in the synthetic room, a thick dark smoke rose out of the flame on the polyester couch. At just under five minutes, a flash of orange flame consumed the whole room all at once. “Flashover,” firefighters call it—when escape becomes impossible. In the natural-material room, flashover took longer than 30 minutes. Perhaps that difference helps explain why, although the rate of home fires in the U.S. has more than halved since 1980, more people are dying in their homes when they do catch fire.
The Newsweek link strongly urges readers to have automated sprinklers installed in their homes.
Embedded photo of Palisades fire residua, credit Noah Berger / AP, via The Atlantic.
There is so much that can be done but isn't because people are short-sighted.
ReplyDeletehttps://heatmap.news/climate/los-angeles-fires-zone-zero
(watch the video)
99% invisible did a podcast on this same subject years ago. It featured two adjacent neighborhoods. One that had implemented all this knowledge, another that didn't (because it was older). The latter burnt down to the ground, while the former survived mostly - be is smokey and charred.
tdlr: We know how to reduce the damage from fires. However, we refuse to implement that knowledge.
Also, fire turns solids into gas. So a lot of matter seems to disappear.
Thanks for the link. Heatmap looks like an interesting source.
DeleteI hadn't even looked at the rest of the site, tbh.
DeleteI was just happy to find a single article in all this fire coverage stating what is true for so many climate "crises": we know what the solutions are, but we don't implement them because "money" or "freedom" or "bullshit". It is incredibly tragic that a lot of the press does not dig deeper than "this is an act of god we could not have prevented" when that is often not the case.
We can do so much more than we are doing without getting to the heavy lifting. And yes, we need the heavy lifting too and sooner rather than later (Hi Crowboy), but let's start by doing anything at all.