Opinion: Straw houses in fire country

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The ongoing brush fire in Griffith Park has one thing in common with another fire last month in Franklin Canyon: In both cases, the only homes damaged had wood-shake roofs. That isn’t a coincidence.

Owning a house with a wood-shake roof is like piling kindling around your property and soaking it with gasoline. It seems incredible that anybody in fire-prone Los Angeles would be this foolish, let alone anybody with a house in the hills -- chaparral country that in summer (and this year, even in winter) is a natural fire trap. In the April 12 fire in Beverly Hills, three houses with wooden roofs were damaged, and firefighters say the only private property harmed in the Griffith Park blaze was a single wood-roofed home.

A wooden roof makes a house look ‘rustic,’ which explains why they’re popular in L.A.’s woodsy hillside neighborhoods. But hillside dwellers’ aesthetic sensibilities are endangering themselves and others, which is one definition of insanity. A wooden roof doesn’t just make one house a fire magnet, it risks spreading the blaze to nearby houses as well. And yet, for some reason, it’s still not illegal in Los Angeles.

In 1989, L.A. prohibited construction of new homes with wooden roofs; the city also has a law on the books forbidding residents from repairing more than 10% of a wood-shake roof. But there is nothing to force owners of homes built before 1989 to replace their wood roofs with fire-resistant asphalt or other fire-retardant materials. That’s in contrast to Beverly Hills, which requires residents to replace their wooden roofs by 2013.

L.A. is studying such a requirement, at the behest of City Councilman Jack Weiss. It needs to do more than study.