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Twenty-five years from today, Santa Ana’s winds scream Los Angeles on a dry fall morning, turning a small hillside campfire into a deadly, fast moving flame.
At that moment, the city is caught up in action.
Los Angeles knows how to survive the crisis. Angelenos is taking advantage of its resilience and strives to build a city for everyone.
The satellite works with the sexiermeter to combine live aerial footage with wind patterns to tell firefighters exactly where the fire is heading. A fleet of autonomous Black Hawk helicopters and unmanned air tankers fill the sky and drop the fire into the path of fire flames.
Wearable technology guides us in the following cities: “Analer: A wildfire will be discovered 2.4 miles from your location and will reach your location in about 43 minutes.” Angelenos receives a live satellite map in the direction of flame trajectories and safe evacuation.
Threatened neighbours quickly run their to-do lists, including closing vents, checking neighbours, and more. Some tenants and homeowners arm a fire return sprayer on the roof and resistant Adus, who shove valuables into their backyard. Others equip their super smart homes with technology that reduces decision-making for faster departures. The apartment safety team follows Libera’s plans to ensure evacuation.
After that, everyone follows the community evacuation plan by driving an electric vehicle or enduring safety. This is mitigated by a stable flow of green light programmed by the city to keep all traffic away from fire. A fleet of self-driving vans surrounds the neighborhood and picks up stranded residents.
Michael Kobak’s home is located in a burning house in Pallisard, the Pacific Ocean.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
The scenario may seem unlikely, but according to firefighters, architects and futurists, it is a realistic overview of what LA’s fire defense will look like in 2050.
The devastating fires in the past few decades have disrupted Southern California, shifting public conversations from fire control to fire preparation and mitigation as the government forcefully acknowledges disasters as regular events. Many people are wondering after the fatal January fire that burned Altadena and Pacific Palisades.
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Architect Michael Kobak believes we can do it. Kovac, a Palisade resident, including his client, built the house to be fireproof, knowing at one point it would be subject to fire prevention.
Michael Kovack designed his home in Pacific Palisade, where the house is covered in fiber cement. The roof is made of fire-resistant TPO (thermoplastic polyolefin). The deck is made of wood that has been specially treated for fire resistance. The fire system at the back of the house then sprayed fire-combust agent on the vegetation.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
On January 7th, his entire street burned, but his home survived. Now it serves as a fireproof blueprint. “We built it so that we could withstand small fires,” Kobak said. “I never imagined that the entire community would be erased.”
Kovac’s home is wrapped in paneling of fire-resistant fiber cement panels. The green “living” roof is topped with grass and over 4 inches of fire-resistant soil. The windows have three panels of quarter-inch glass, reducing the chance of breaking in the face of burnt temperatures and protecting the interior from sparkling heat. A fire is one of the main ways you can enter the home.
Before escaping the fire, Kobak loaded all his valuables into a concrete-wrapped room, equipped with a fire door that could eliminate smoke and flames for three hours. He used security cameras to monitor the flames from afar. As the flames approached, he activated three sprinklers that spray fire retardant along the property’s boundaries, keeping the fire at bay.
Fire safety guards are generally not cheap. Fire-prevention doors run from hundreds to thousands of dollars, while fire-fighting sprinklers cost tens of thousands of dollars depending on the system. However, Kovac also installed some DIY upgrades to barely anything to block the entrance to Embers, including the mesh screen of the dollar store in all vents.
All improvements will help, but the harsh reality for the next 25 years is that older structures will burn across LA that do not comply with the latest fire codes. The collective hope is that by 2050 they will be replaced by fire-resistant homes and add a defense of herd immunity to the neighborhood.
“Palisade’s 1950s homes – smaller, older homes are vulnerable to fire – are all gone. “Now we have a clean slate, so the next neighborhood we build will be more fire resistant.”
The front yard of Michael Kovack’s house is full of succulents and native plants, covered with volcanic rock instead of mulch.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
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Ken Calligar has the same hope.
“The home replacement cycle is slow. They upgrade every 50 years and 2% of homes are replaced annually,” said Calligar, CEO of Resilient Building Company RSG 3D. “But large-scale incidents such as fires and earthquakes are opportunities for migration to a better system.”
The Calligar company creates insulated concrete panels made of fire return agent foam sandwiched between two wire mesh faces.
The future of fire mitigation is summarized in buildings with non-flammable materials, he said.
“In California, 98% of homes have timber frames. All of these homeowners have future tragedy in their hands,” he added. “We can’t knock down everything in California and start a new start, but by making the new part of our portfolio better, we can reduce the damage to our portfolio.”
Additionally, Kaliger said, “By 2050, Californians need to have a fire protection area to store their assets in the event of a fire. That way, at least some will come back.”
Some home builders and designers offer fire-sensitive designs as demand continues to increase in the wake of the fire. KB Home recently announced its 64 fire-fighting communities in Escondido with covered trenches, non-flammable siding and defensive space. Santa Monica-based construction company Sweiskloss offers fire ratings glazes and foam delay sprayers for custom-built designs. Experts say by 2050, the majority of home builders will provide fire-resistant homes.
There is a reason why many California homes are built from wood. It’s relatively cheap. There are many future building materials, including graphene, hemp, and self-healing concrete. This can repair your own crack after damage, but it is not cost-effective for most home buyers. According to most experts, even traditional concrete that withstands better elements than wood can increase by about 20% to 50% over wood for a home building, and building a fire-resistant home adds tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a building.
For Daniel Lopez Perez, the solution is a return to wood. Especially the mass of wood.
In addition to being a professor of architecture and futuristic professor at the University of San Diego, Lopez Perez is the founder of Polyhouse, a home building startup that says it can assemble a home in three days. To prove that, he put together a small prototype in his La Jolla backyard over the weekend in February. The 540 square foot ADU is wrapped in 60 mass wood panels made from three 1.5 inch layers of plywood.
Due to the traditional wood construction, the wood, studs and insulation leave plenty of space for oxygen to burn the fire. Using mass wood, the three layers are sealed with no air gaps, making it much more fire resistant. When exposed to fire, massive wood charcoal burns half an inch each hour. So, he said the 4.5-inch panels last for 6-7 hours until they burn completely.
The 540-square-foot polyhouse ADU was assembled over the weekend in Daniel Lopes Perez’s backyard.
(Daniel Lopes Perez)
“It’s like a bushfire where big old growing trees survive charcoal. It looks charcoal, it survives.”
Mass materials are a new trend in fire prevention. This year alone, there will be multiple conferences nationwide dedicated to engineered wood.
Lever Architecture, a company with offices in Portland, Oregon and LA, has the US use of popular material in the Lever project, and multiple use offices/literals at Adidas and Oregon Conservation Center in Portland and 843 N. Spring Street in Chinatown.
Massive timber projects are beginning to emerge across Southland, including Silver Lake’s multi-family development and the Office Retail Complex at Marina del Rey.
His backyard prototype is his only model to date, but the Polyhouse is flooded with inquiries after the January fire. He tells customers that the 540-square-foot unit runs a $300,000 all-in and can put out units in six weeks from start to finish.
For López-Pérez, the future is also about getting more from what they already use, using new technologies such as the robotic arms that assemble the panels.
“By 2050, we will be mixing our ancestor materials with high-tech solutions,” he said. “Think Star Wars: Lightsabers in a cave.”
In the meantime, he suggests that instead of destroying a 1950s Tinderbox home that is scattered across the 1950s fire-prone hills, once it’s set on fire, it’s necessary to carve a large amount of wood panels on the exterior or inside to give firefighters rather than minutes.
Mass material is one of several approaches that makes Brian Fennessy’s job easier. Fennessy, who serves as the Orange County Fire Department fire chief, has been battling wildfires for 47 years. But over the past decades, as flames penetrate deep into cities, he deals with another kind of problem: urban fires.
Wildfires burn forests and brushes, but big city fires are fires burning cities. They are becoming more common, and the toxic smoke released when the house is burning poses new dangers for his team. “These are usually wind-driven fires, which infuse smoke into firefighters’ lungs,” he said. “We do blood samples and early testing shows higher levels of heavy metals.”
A 2024 study found that firefighters are 14% more likely to die from cancer than the general population, causing the disease to cause 66% of career firefighters deaths from 2002 to 2019.
He hopes that 2050 will pay more safety attention to his team, including personal ventilators of all firefighters and truck fleets who share their location in real time for better communication between departments, and he imagines a fleet of drones flying along with fire aircraft.
He also said he was optimistic about fundraising and never saw much legislative interest in putting money into fire services, as was the trigger for the January fire. The Los Angeles Fire Department is one of the few city departments looking to win new hires under Mayor Karen Bass’ $14 billion spending plan released in April, adding 227 fire department jobs while cutting 2,700 jobs in other sectors.
A few weeks after the January fire, a California Legislature bill was introduced to explore the use of autonomous helicopters to combat fires. Choppers, including Black Hawk helicopters used in traditional military operations, can be programmed remotely to take off, find fire and drop water where needed. By 2050, experts hope that fire stations can use their entire fleet at their disposal at their own disposal to limit the risk of pilots during unstable weather conditions.
In March, Muon Space launched a low-orbit satellite designed to detect early wildfires. By 2030, the company expects to have a fleet of 50 satellites circling the Earth.
“The next few years will be a vital moment for both the firefighters and the public,” Fennessy said. “We have to get it right.”
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