Built to Burn
The lessons of the Great Fire of London still apply. Yet discussion moved on to this idea that &#x27;natural fires&#x27; should not be suppressed as this causes too much dead wood to build up on the forest floor meaning that the &#x27;natural fire&#x27; burns too intensely.<p>That massive fire in Yellowstone way back in 1988 was when this new thinking set in. From then on the Forest Service could be blamed for poor management and allowing this kindling to build up, resulting in truly catastrophic fires. It was a seductive way of thinking and whilst everyone was thinking it the basic lessons of The Great Fire of London were ignored.<p>In The Great Fire of London the problem was the wind and embers being blown across town to start new fires. This overwhelmed the authorities of the time. The solution was to build houses with non-flammable materials. In that way an ember landing on a house would not cause another fire to start up.<p>The other detail of note was the use of parapets. In London roofs are always behind a parapet, so, if a house or property does go up in flames then the roof will not fall off the house but be contained within the four walls. In this way adjacent properties, e.g. across the street, don&#x27;t go up in flames too.<p>Nowadays building codes in London expect a property to not go up in flames even if the adjacent house is fully ablaze. This is buying time, clearly there is expectation that the adjoining fire gets put under control within a few hours. It doesn&#x27;t seem that in California there is this thinking, which is understandable if you do have lots of garden and some distance to the adjacent house. But I bet that the first people to populate London thought that way too, they never imagined the pasture land next to their house would become a housing estate some centuries later.<p>Another small matter is that of sprinkler systems. Architects do not like sprinklers even though they do a fantastic job of suppressing fire. They also design atriums with no vents in the roof specifically there to let hot air out if there is a fire. This is considered old fashioned thinking by the entire architecture business, they check the checkboxes on building codes at minimal cost and don&#x27;t think from first principles about how to make a building work within its environment.