Bill Requiring Subdivisions Be Built With Fire Safety Planning Faces Key Vote Tomorrow--Will Development and Greed Kill Common Sense in California?

By Kathryn Gray
Serene Lakes

In Northern California the skies are a yellow pall, and acrid smoke fills the air. Hundreds of lightning triggered wildfires are raging, burning and threatening homes, and taxing the limits of firefighters, as Cal Fire heroically juggles personnel between the latest hotspots. The risk to residents and firefighters is compounded by the sprawling, higgledy-piggledy way development has been allowed in California; many residences are located in high fire risk areas with substandard fire safety design, lack of adequate fire suppression resources, and, most deadly of all, many homes are located in the "death trap" of an area served by only one exit.

Year, after year this scenario plays out, and, although after a fire with particularly high loss of life, such as the Oakland Hills fire, resolutions are made to fix the problem, those resolutions either fall by the wayside, or, as could happen tomorrow, are killed by big money coalitions of developers, chambers of commerce, and the counties who allow development in high fire hazard zones with apparent disregard to both the dangers to future residents, and the huge bill the entire state of California gets stuck with if those developments burn.

A long overdue, common sense bill, Subdivisions and Fire Hazards Bill AB2447, authored by Assemblyman Dave Jones of Sacramento, which addresses the hazards of allowing subdivisions to be built without adequate fire safety design, without adequate fire suppression services, and compromised by "death alley" one road exits passed successfully out of the Assembly, but now faces the challenge of the California State Senate Committee on Local Government tomorrow morning.

You'd think all the smoke in the air would serve as a reminder that many people in California live only a lighting strike, a tossed cigarette, or a firework away from losing their homes, their belongings, their pets, or their lives. Developers, builders, chambers of commerce, maybe even the county you live in don't share that fear. They've joined a sorry list of groups who are actively opposing AB2447 in the Senate Committee on Wednesday morning.

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