Natural disasters

[Farmercharliesblog]

I have been thinking about this a lot and I need to ask, how do you keep your greenhouses safe during natural disasters? I live in Great Barrington mass and we recently had a wildfire. It was called the butternut wildfire. I also know that California has been having a big wildfire. We are also prone to blizzards, drought, flooding, wildfires, small avalanches ,and small earthquakes here. Please share how you keep your greenhouses safe. It would really help.

 

[AMKuska]

I used to live in California. The best thing to do to protect from wildfires is to keep vegetation cut to the ground so there is less to burn in a ring around your greenhouse. 100 feet is considered good. With less vegetation to burn, there's less fuel for the fire to consume, so it's more likely to go around your greenhouse than destroy it.

If a fire is coming for you and water is available, soaking the ground can also be helpful.

This isn't a guarantee, fires can do crazy things, but it will help.

 

[ducks4you]

The thing about greenhouses is that they don't do well anywhere that the "wind can come sweeping down the plains."
If you Look closely, you will notice that many people do very well with a greenhouse in their back yard and a 6 ft fence around the back yard protecting it.
If you look at Eliot Coleman's Greenhouses, they are all on the east side of a forest which protects them from the west wind. In fact he cleared forest to create a ground for agriculture.

I Know that the NE recently had a bad drought, but we in the Midwest and you in the East DON'T KNOW what a drought is like out west.
You have nice soil and usually plenty of rain.
IF you didn't hear already California wasn't even in a problem drought.
The large California population needs a great deal of water and their government spent all of the money that the voters had allocated to build new water resources. The Pacific Palisades reservoir was bone dry before the fire.
THIS was a man made disaster, not an act of God.
Pretty bone headed to not take care of the people's needs, but I wouldn't worry too much about a fire taking your greenhouse out in Massachusetts.