Official: California must mull home ban in fire-prone areas

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California's increasingly deadly and destructive wildfires have become so unpredictable government officials should consider banning home construction in vulnerable areas, the state's top firefighter said.

Department of Forestry and Fire Protection director Ken Pimlott will leave his job Friday after 30 years with the agency. In an interview with The Associated Press, he said government and citizens must act differently to protect lives and property from fires routinely threatening large populations.

That may mean rethinking subdivisions in thickly forested mountainous areas or homes along Southern California canyons lined with tinder-dry chaparral. Yet Los Angeles County supervisors stung by California's housing shortage approved a massive rural housing development Tuesday despite the fire danger.

Developers said the 19,000-home community in rugged mountains 65 miles north of downtown Los Angeles would be built to minimize fire hazards with anti-ember construction and buffers around homes. It would include four new fire stations and roads wide enough to help people evacuate from an area the state has designated as a "high" and "very high" fire hazard zone.

Faced with such dangers, California residents should train themselves to respond more quickly to warnings and make preparations to shelter in place if they can't outrun the flames, Pimlott said.

Communities in fire zones need to harden key buildings with fireproof construction similar to the way cities prepare for earthquakes, hurricanes or tornadoes and should prepare commercial or public buildings to withstand fires with the expectation hundreds may shelter there as they did in makeshift fashion when flames last month largely destroyed the Sierra Nevada foothills city of Paradise in Northern California.

California already has the nation's most robust building requirement programs for new homes in fire-prone areas, but recent fire seasons underscore more is needed. Officials must consider prohibiting construction in particularly vulnerable areas, said Pimlott, who has led the agency through the last eight years under termed-out Gov. Jerry Brown.

He said it's uncertain whether those decisions should be made by local land managers or at the state level as legislative leaders have suggested. But Pimlott said "we owe it" to homeowners, firefighters and communities "so that they don't have to keep going through what we're going through."

"We've got to continue to raise the bar on what we're doing and local land-use planning decisions have to be part of that discussion," he said.

California's population has doubled since 1970 to nearly 40 million, pushing urban sprawl into mountain subdivisions, areas home to fast-burning grasslands and along scenic canyons and ridgetops susceptible to fires. After a crippling drought, the last two years have seen the worst fires in state history.

November's fire in the northern California town of Paradise was the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century, killing at least 85 people and destroying nearly 14,000 homes.

A year earlier, a fire ripping through the San Francisco Bay Area city of Santa Rosa killed 22 people and destroyed more than 5,000 homes and other structures.

Every year since at least 2013, firefighters did not anticipate California's wildfires could get worse, Pimlott said. But each year the fires have increased in intensity -- driven by dry fuels, an estimated 129 million drought- and bark beetle-killed trees, and climate change.

In response, the state is doing more planned burning to eliminate brush and dead trees serving as fuels for wildfires. The state will also add seven large firefighting aircraft, replace a dozen aging helicopters, provide firefighter counseling and ensure firefighters have enough time off for medical checkups to help them manage the mental and physical stress from a never-ending fire season.