Estimating Our Tail Fire Risk

In many disasters sheltering in place can make a lot of sense, but what about fire? As someone who lives in one of the densest municipalities in the country, with 3-story wooden buildings packed close together, is fire likely enough to rule out any kind of "stay put" approach? After having Claude do some rough calculations I think probably not. Very few houses are lost to fire anymore, but this is mostly downstream from putting a lot of effort into suppression. From when a fire is reported until firefighters are on the scene is typically an impressive three minutes, and they can very quickly be delvering massive amounts of water onto a fire anywhere in the city. If an emergency were bad enough to break or overwhelm this system, a fire anywhere could lead to city-wide distruction. Still, I really didn't have a good sense of scale here. If we had a month-long outage, are we talking 10%, 1%, 0.1% chance of fire? Historically, I would have tried to do a BOTEC, but these days I set Claude…

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