Sacramento, California – While angels staggered Mortal forest fires of January That destroyed thousands of houses, the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, signed an order on Thursday that ordered the State to advance delayed Regulations that require housing owners in high -risk areas to eliminate combustible materials around their homes.
Newsom ordered the State to publish a regulation draft next month, with a deadline to adopt those rules by the end of the year. Legislators approved the requirements in 2020 and will originally enter into force on January 1, 2023. Newsom signed the order after he returned from Washington to advocate for disaster help.
The rule requires that owners clear materials such as dead plants and wood furniture at 5 feet (1.5 meters) of their homes in fire -prone areas. As multiple fires roared for Los Angeles neighborhoods in January, the regulations were not yet written, and the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection told Associated Press last month that it did not have a firm timeline to complete them .
State officials said at a November meeting that the Board will probably not consider the draft language until the end of this year, although the State has already encouraged the owners to take the practice of cleaning items around their homes in Your website.
In response to the AP questions last month, the legislators who sponsored the original legislation said they were frustrated by the delay. Experts said that strict requirements could have saved some houses from the fire of Palisades, which became the most destructive fire in the history of the city of Los Angeles.
The majority of neighborhoods devastated by the Palisades fire are found in areas that must follow the state requirements to maintain the immediate environment of their homes of combustible materials and would be subject to the new rules because the California department of the Department of California by the California Department Forestry and Fire Protection.
Fire, driven by Hurricane force winds that Extend embers by airThey destroyed at least 5,000 structures in areas such as Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Topanga Canyon.
According to the last proposal, the existing houses would have three years to comply with the regulations, so it is not clear how many houses they would have saved. But clearing the immediate area around the houses would probably have made some difference, several experts said.
“These steps will stimulate the proactive actions to defend the most vulnerable houses and eliminate the combustible material within the five feet of the homes to reduce the risk that a house is turned on in a fire driven by the bie,” said the Secretary of Resources Natural of California, Wade Crowfoot. Your agency supervises the board responsible for writing the regulations.
The Executive Order will also direct Calfire to add approximately 1.4 million acres, or almost 2,200 square miles (5,700 square kilometers), of land on the map of fire -prone areas, which will submit to the owners of homes in those areas to the rules to the rules Fire mitigation. Some cities and owners are already assuming voluntarily.
“To meet the needs of an increasingly extreme climate, where decades of decades were not planned and designed for current realities, these proposals are part of a larger state strategy to develop forest fires and forest resilience from management Forestry, to large investments in fire and equipment extinction staff, community hardening and adopt avant -garde response technologies, ”said Newsom in a statement.
State officials told the AP last month that Newsom proposed to spend $ 25 million to ensure that the owners follow the rules and other defense space requirements.
Most of the neighborhoods who burned in the Eaton fire, including Altadena and parts of Pasadena, are not on the state -like map of the state, so this requirement does not apply to them.
Roy Wright, CEO of the Institute of Insurance for Business Security and the Home that supported Law 2020, said he has not seen the details of the executive order, but was optimistic about Thursday’s announcement after years of delay.
“What we are seeing here is a very clear priority of the governor that this needs to advance,” said Wright. “The administration leans and says: ‘Let’s do this. People in California need this. ‘”
California already enforces some of the most strict defensible space laws in the West, which require that owners in fires prone to fire maintain the area immediately around their home -free homes and other materials that could fire.
The State began to require housing owners in high -risk areas to eliminate flammable materials within 30 feet (9 meters) of their houses in the 1960s and then expand the rules to include areas within 100 feet (30.5 meters) of structures in 2006.
The last measure creates a new “Emperine Resistant” area, called “Zero Zone”, which cheap things like brush, wooden fences, furniture, shed and mantillo at 5 feet (1.5 meters) of houses. The idea is to clear all the materials that could fire the flying embers transported by winds and extended to the structure. State officials and investigators said the embers are responsible for 90% of the structures destroyed by the forest fire.
The Zone-Zero Law approved with bipartisan support after California experienced record fires in 2017 and 2018, including a fire that annihilated the city of Paradise, destroying more than 17,000 structures and killing 85 people.
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