People die in car crashes. A lot of people. In 2022 in the US, about 46,000. But if we had not made the safety improvements in cars that we have over the past half century - and had the same death rate as a result, 153,000 people would have died.
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This is the way to think about wildfire catastrophe and community resilience. Seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, collision avoidance don’t eliminate losses, but they reduce them massively. We can do the same for wildfire. We need to. We need to
The equivalent for wildfire are community features like fuel breaks and prescribed fire and structure/backyard level investments like limiting fuels directly adjacent to structures.
The US is among the worst in the developed world when it comes to people killed by cars. And it's getting worse for people not inside cars as cars get higher hoods all the time...
Many more lives would be saved if the focus was on enabling people to use safer transportation. Rail and bus service at least 30 times safer than driving. Only around 1,500 lives, (probably much fewer), would be lost per year if everyone used trains and buses instead of driving.
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WTF.