500,000 Oregonians are under orders to evacuate their homes.
It is a good idea to take that warning seriously.
If the wind turns and points the fire at your home, there is no hiding or "sheltering in place." Homes burn to the ground. People who evacuated got out.
Yesterday I posted photos of my own. My own situation is good. My home--indeed my entire extended neighborhood--is out of danger. My only distress is heavy smoke, with visibility of about 200 yards, a small problem compared with people who lost everything.
Today's photos and links are taken from Facebook. I am avoiding going to the burned out areas. Curious lookers have been instructed to stay away, and Facebook reports incidents of police questioning people thought to be potential looters.
The mechanism for the fire spread is wind driving flame or embers into dry vegetation that moves to nearby structures, which then moves from structure to structure. Once it gets into a neighborhood--especially closely packed ones like mobile home developments--the fire is unstoppable.
The Bear Lake Mobile Home Park at 300 Lumen Road offers a lesson on regulations, safety, and a lucky escape. It is an old subdivision.
Look at the photo below: 100% loss.
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| Bear Lake Mobile Home Park, looking south |
It is a common occurrence for me to hear people complain about building and fire codes they consider unrealistic and overbearing, as well as subdivision requirements that turn out to be expensive or even impossible to implement, stopping a development. "Oh, those nitpickers," I have heard people say. "The regulations are so unreasonable."
The Bear Lake Mobile Home Park, pictured above, is on a dead end road. Take a moment to look at the Google map.
There is a problem with dead end roads, particularly ones that serve multiple residences. They are dangerous. This development is surrounded on the east by the Freeway, to the west and south by Bear Creek and the riparian area that fed and spread the wildfire. It has one exit, to the north, Lumen Road. It is more than adequate most of the time. The development is an over-55 community, and traffic is not great. After all, everyone doesn't need to come or go at once. Unless they do, because a fire is coming fast. In this instance, the development had warning and the fires were coming from the south. The sole exit is to the north and it wasn't a wall of flames. It could have been.
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| 300 Lumen Road: Bear Lake Mobile Homes |
There were no fatalities. Everyone must have had time and heeded the warnings.
My point is a simple one. There is a reason that fire and building codes exist. 99.9999% of the time, there is no particular need for extra fire exits in buildings or developments. But sometimes there is. Could anyone stuck in their homes have survived that fire?
The following links are to Facebook, where various people in cars or helicopters took videos of the destruction, and posted them. Readers can skip around to get a flavor for the fire damage. A simple takeaway: some areas were utterly untouched, others were utterly destroyed.
1 comment:
You made important points about planning, fire safety, the necessity to design for a bad scenario. The various warning systems functioned adequately and continue to be sensitive to conditions on the ground, so for that all residents/evacuees can be grateful.
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