Fire Safety Discussions

This Forum is focused on helping to save life and property during wildland fires. It may be your home and your family. Never-ending wildland fires with ever-accelerating loss of life and property shows that often fire services are “over-resourced” and that mass evacuation alone is not the answer. We also need you, the homeowner, to step up to the plate and become part of the fire safety triangle by proactively working in creating a fire-safe community. If you don’t do it, who will? Government alone has not done it to this date.

To start out, let me throw out a somewhat controversial but factual statistic I observed. There is really no correlation between homes saved and the distance of these homes to fire hydrants and fire stations. Why is that? Both homeowners and insurance companies have expectations that fire hydrants will provide good water pressure during a wildland fire to save your insured home. But there is a high probability that the hydrant will be dry during the height of the “firestorm” because water systems in mountainous areas are designed to provide only enough pressure for individual home conflagrations.