Mike Alcocer
Tremoraholic
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2020
- Messages
- 541
- Reaction Points
- 1,452
- Location
- Santa Rosa, California
- Military
- Air Force Reserve, Spouse
- Current Ride
- 2020 F-250 XLT Tremor 6.7
- First Responder
- Fire Captain
Funny thing is we (firefighters) would rarely rely on those storage tanks for fighting a fire. I have seen maybe 1 in 100 that I would use. Most people don't keep them full because the water goes bad. Hell the city doesn't even keep their water storage tanks full unless the fire department forces them to (found that out the hard way).Well your exactly right. I'm a building inspector and see it first hand every day. Politicians make claims about their affordable housing projects... There's no such thing as affordable housing here anymore, period. You couldn't build a legal affordable house here if your life depended on it. Nobody is permitted to build basic shelter anymore. You have to have an engineer prove that the dirt will hold your house up. Another engineer proves that the house won't fall down. Yet another engineer shows where the stormwater will go, and by the way it better be clean. An energy consultant has to determine how to insulate the home, and a third party tells you if you put it in correctly (because local inspectors can't?) The house has to have fire sprinklers, so another consultant has to design those. The building dept is trained to review the design and inspect those, but the fire dept needs more money so they've decided to take control of that and charge additional for it. And if there isn't a fire hydrant nearby, you'll need to put in at least 5k gallons of water storage and a drafting hydrant. Don't forget to sign the release allowing them to come take the water to fight a fire somewhere else. You'll need solar panels too, mandatory. We'll need a landscape design by a licensed professional too, assuring that you won't plant too thirsty of plants. If you thought you were going to get started on that this year, forget about it. It will take at least 6 months of reviews and plan corrections to get a permit, at which time DOT will also collect a fee for infrastructure in your neighborhood. And even if you don't have kids, the school district will have a fee too. Somehow the Sheriff's Dept gets left out, because crime is not criminal anymore, so no need to support them. ?
And you thought you had a rant, I could go on and on...
I should go on the record for all that I have the utmost respect for firefighters and the important work that they do. But building inspectors are actually quite good at enforcing fire and life safety codes.
As I've posted before, I actually very much enjoy my life in CA. I'm lucky to be able to live a simple life on a nice piece of property thanks to the hard work of my parents and grandparents, as well as my wife's parents and grandparents. We're lucky. Fingers crossed that we won't get burned out.
Also when we had our fire in 2017 all 7000 homes lost needed to be rebuilt with sprinklers. A good portion of the water system wasn't large enough to support the sprinkler systems. So the city had to replace it all too.
To make matters worse we lost so many homes because the hydrants all went dry. Hydrants went dry because every house that burned down was the equivalent of free flowing every faucet in their house times 7000. Include another 200 commercial properties burning and some of them the size of Kmart with 8 inch risers, all free flowing water. Now that each property can flow more water, the loss of each home is more taxing on the water system if the situation was to happen again. This making it harder to put out.
The sprinkler is great to keep your stove fire in check. It's useless to prevent the massive lost of homes in a wildland fire. In fact they can be counter productive to saving homes in that situation.
Last edited: