Before and After Photos: Fires Tear Through California?s Wine Country
 

before:
https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphic...ark-before.jpg
after:
https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphic...park-after.jpg

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...ps-photos.html

Wow :(

Thats not good.

like an atomic bomb went off. horrible.

Accident with fire and good firefighters - all that's needed to make this happen

http://info-rm.com/data/photo/031815...xixgrgnxz4.jpg

We have gone through similar .horrible ,I feel for those poor people

Don't consider me an ass for this post, but you Americans are used to build these childish carton houses. If you try to build real houses of bricks and armored concrete like we do, there will be no such sad pictures of devastation after hurricanes and fires...

P.S. A couple months ago I was watching some episode of "myth busters" where they tried to approve a scene from "breaking bad" where Mike shoots some guy right through the wall. They were tried all types of common wall materials in the USA. It was funny to watch because my internal walls as well as the walls in other typical Russian houses are made of 20-30 centimeter armored concrete (yeah, winter has came). Go on cowboy, try to shoot through it...

))
https://tverskaya-oblast.doski.ru/i/48/25/482503.jpg

Funny, but you have to be on heavy drugs to think it's a typical Russian house :) Even a cheapest Russian equivalent of the US redneck trailers called Khrushchyovka can stand a hurricane and a fire storm ;)

That's terrible. I hope they have fire insurance. That's assuming it doesn't fall under the act of god clause.

I'm not an engineer, but I think the homes built on the West Coast of USA/CA use wood framing because of the flexibility needed due to frequent earth quakes in the region. North East Coast family and friends seem to have concrete block structures due to stronger winter conditions and a lack of earth quakes.

A home we have in Europe, has 50cm reinforced concrete in the basement, and 30cm on 1st and 2nd floors.

Exactly this. :2 cents:

I would never buy or have built a wooden house for living. Besides the higher danger of fire it just looks flabby, unstable, too light. It squeaks, you hear every single walk and talk.. it also attracts worms and cockroaches. :Oh crap

What are the benefits?? Price? LOL..

Well, the likelihood of an earthquake is probably a bit smaller than a fire as fires occur all the time in that area .. + you can still build a house that will stand an earthquake while no wooden house can survive a fire

Construction options wise, you are probably correct SpicyM. Regarding the likelihood of fires and earthquakes, check out this site:

https://earthquaketrack.com/p/united...ifornia/recent

Over 8000 in the previous 365 days. The vast majority are likely small, but nonetheless the ground shakes in that area a lot. I've been through plenty of them when I lived in CA full time.

Winter? LOL.

We have brick houses in the United States. Don't really need that in California; It's not like is snows here. At lest not in this area.

Well if they didn't have insurance damn... sad.

wtf were they built with???? toothpicks :Oh crap :helpme:helpme

WTF?? 8,000 earthquakes per year?? wow :Oh crap

You are an ass. This is obviously an off-the-scale level of destruction. I live in one of the most bushfire prone areas in the world, and the advice is that suburbia is generally safe, even when you border a high risk area, so long as you're a couple of blocks away from that border. The pic in the OP looks to be a suburban area, and they're completely fucked.

The firies were probably concentrating on saving lives rather than assets.

What's about earthquakes and firestorms? Your kiddie cartoon barby houses just can't survive 'em. This is the actual reason of all that devastation. Just build normal houses and fire won't spread to the whole bock. Can't you see it?

You would be disappointed, but armored concrete can stay earth quakes much better than a wood. It can stay earth quakes, hurricanes and even a nuclear blast.

This spring/summer we had some serious hurricanes in Moscow. The people have died of lightnings and accidents of flying trees, billboards etc, but nobody has died in the house.



In all those videos you can hear the comments of operators, but you can't hear a sound of hurricane. When windows are closed, you look at flying trees like in a movie. You can see them, but don't even hear anything - you are like in bunker when you live in the house made of an armored concrete.

Course I would be worried about that I'd lived in a paper-like barbie house.

I'm from a country that has thousands of earth quakes a year, New Zealand, and in an earth quake a wooden house is much safer than concrete unless its specifically modified for earth quakes, even small earth quakes totally fuck concrete, you need something that can move with the quake. I have been in a concrete place and watched the wall beside me splinter up the middle.

-------

The LAST place you want to be in a fire is in an concrete place with 2ft brick walls, your basically in a pizza oven, there's really little you can do if a firestorm hits except get away before it comes, the major issue is wind that can blow burning embers for miles, so people think they are safe and well away from the fire, and next thing those leaves in the guttering catch fire and burn the house down.

I advise the Russians to keep giving advise on 500 ways to cook a potato and how to survive a Martian winter, other than that best to shut the fuck up.

Depends on how they built. In fact the armored concrete is much more reliable than wood if we are talking about earth quickies. Telling you this as a professional engineer. A concrete can stand a very serious pressure, but not a stretching. The armored one can stand both just easily.

Please look at the video above. We had a serious storm in Moscow this year. No buildings made of reinforced concrete were damaged.

Tell me more about this miraculous Russian concrete, just understand as a Kiwi I have been through over 100,000+ earth quakes in my life.

What's your experience in them? Where I live anything under a 6 most people don't even blink, the most reaction you will get is.. Ohh did you feel that? Its fun to watch the tourist freak.

https://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake

Google is your friend, dude: https://www.google.com/search?q=rein...st+earthquakes

Just a quote:

The keyword here is "reinforced". But you can still live in wooden barbie-houses...

I said here on GFY a few weeks ago that Cali looked like a fire waiting to happen.. All that dry grass in the valley is just a massive fire waiting to go.

Such a shame

I'm glad I don't live in a country where armored walls are standard.

Okay, that was seriously funny.

That's a lot of homes that will have to be rebuilt.

A lot of work for illegal immigrant construction workers.

Things that make you go hmm...

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh