I know, I’m just preaching to the choir ……. but what do you think we should do? Take a look at this picture taken yesterday in Maryland:
[photopress:firewalls_c.jpg,full,centered]
These are fairly new homes and you can see that the firewalls definitely did their job. Now take a look at this picture taken last June:
[photopress:firewalls_b_1.jpg,full,centered]
Fairly new homes here, too. But the supposed firewalls did not extend through to the roof. When we posted coverage on this fire here, we got either a comment or an email, I can’t remember which, from somebody who lived in one of the devastated units insisting that we were wrong and that there were firewalls in his house.
Sure, they began life as a firewall between the homes, but they never grew up. This was a case of the poor citizen not knowing (a) what a firewall really is, and (b) that he didn’t have one. No doubt the sales agent assured him that he had firewalls.
You see where I’m going here? It all gets back to Public Education. It goes so many different ways. And it has to start with the hapless citizen who is continually led astray by the political bodies that are always preaching goodness and rainbows.
The home-builders groups, not satisfied with getting zoning that permits them to pack a dozen homes onto an acre, get the building code relaxed so that they can space firewalls out to encompass four homes instead of one. That way they can save a few hundred $’s per unit on costs. And the ordinary citizen has no clue.
We are regressing, folks. As long as the politicians keep taking the builders’ campaign donations with one hand and sign off on relaxed codes with the other, we’ll continue the march to what FossilMedic called the Suburban Slums. And within a generation our suburbs will be looking just like the cities did in the last century:
[photopress:chicfire_f_1.jpg,full,centered]
We’d better get the equipment checked now. I’ll get the coffee pot going.
