Lamp Post and Tree...Fountaingrove Style

Apparently the globes atop the rather ornate lamp posts were made of plastic and melted along with the water mains.  Some trees are making a comeback; others aren't, but even the ones that are look rather odd.  An object as ordinary as a street light can become quite surreal when photographed from the viewpoint of the aftermath of a firestorm.

There is now quite a bit of rebuilding going on in Fountaingrove. In place of the rather unimaginative, pseudo Tuscan houses that abounded, there is now  some more interesting architecture arising. The house in the extras has a metal roof, doors and windows and I expect it is clad with some cement based material.

The process of rebuilding is hard enough because of the scale of houses needing rebuilt, lack of labor and materials, but the number of building code changes, especially in this very fire prone area, is a cause of yet more frustration. Some of these codes replace ones on new houses already rebuilt. Mary and Jerry had to replace the windows in their unfinished house with new tempered glass ones. 

There are certainly reasonable precautions to be taken, but I am a firm believer in a combination of chaos theory and sod's law. No amount of elaborate preparation and expensive retrofitting could have prevented what happened here. Apparently the fire was so hot that some relatively fireproof houses spontaneously combusted from the inside. I don't think fire sprinklers, which are now required in all new construction, would have had any more chance of preventing what happened than spitting into a campfire. They have a better chance of malfunctioning and flooding the house....

It is possible to see in the second extra why some people still want to live up there, but there are far more empty lots than built ones....third extra.