Comment on When people die in wildfires, is it that the fire spread too fast for people to mobilise escape? Or more that people were delayed leaving?

taiyang@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

I know the recent-ish Palisades fire near me was an issue of both fast fires and limited exits, but even then most of it was property damage. What worked was early warnings of evacuation that people took seriously.

The part that struck me was they started calling it a conflagration because the structure fires were so much hotter than the bush fires that things were straight up melting, causing cars to stop working and so on. If you were still there when the houses were full burning, you were likely toast.

The best way to avoid deaths, therefore, is early evacuation and careful neighborhood design. There were some houses that survived the blaze because of factors like walls and gaps that helped reduce the spread, although I’m not sure if they cracked the code on that yet.

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