When new wildfire maps are updated this summer, I guess we’ll see. I’ll make sure to provide an update to this site.
For those looking into buying property areas of high wildfire risk, please take insurance costs and overall higher risk under consideration.
Overall, I’m not willing to go thru the aggravation, cost, uncertainty of living in an area of high wildfire risk. There are other areas of San Diego county that have much lower wildfire risk.
When I was out in 4S last year, there were vast swaths of burned areas right next to the community. Nearly 1000 homes were destroyed in Rancho Bernardo and only a few have been rebuilt. Rebuilding a home is not something I ever want to go thru.
SHELTER-IN-PLACE IS NOT A SOLUTION TO ELIMINATE WILDFIRE RISK IN HIGH WILDFIRE RISK AREAS.
“San Diego County Department of Planning and Land Use calls SIP a “last resort” measure if adequate evacuation routes cannot be built. This is the antithesis of a planned Go Early policy, and imposes SIP on an at-risk population. SIP is apparently gaining traction in the U.S. wildland firefighting community. Stay and Defend or Go Early is a workable policy. However, the San Diego version of SIP as defined by the planning and land use department is incomplete and unsatisfactory.
There are established techniques for planning community evacuation strategies considering population size and distribution, roadway layout, trigger zones, etc. The fire protection codes in San Diego County ignore all of this, requiring only a perfunctory number of roads in and out, regardless the size of the community. The fallacy of this is obvious from a simple example. If 5,000 vehicles are to be evacuated from a community of 2,500 homes at 800 vehicles per hour for each lane of traffic, and there are four outbound lanes, then it would take 5,000/3,200, or a minimum of 1.5 hours to evacuate. A more realistic minimum evacuation time would be under 30 minutes, requiring increasing the number of outbound lanes to at least 12, or reducing the number of homes to at most 800, or something in between. Thus, evacuation planning may influence the very design of a community, and should be an integral part of the Department of Planning and Land Use process.”
