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 on the problem. I started with Opus 5.5, but after it didn't seem to be doing a great job I spent $29.93 to put Fable 5.1 on the problem (prompts). I don't know if Claude would beat an expert here, but after skimming what it did I think it's well above my historical level of modeling. It estimated from historical fires, and thought our monthly risk was ~1% (but could easily be 5x higher or lower), and if our block worked together in a disaster we might reduce risk by 4x. It also thought that my dad's house in Medford (less dense) was ~4x safer, as was my sister's house in Brattleboro VT (even less dense). If you want to play with it for your house, feel free to point an LLM at the code. Claude Output For three New England houses, the modeled chance of burning during 30 days without fire suppression is about 1.2% in dense Somerville, 0.30% in Medford and 0.24% in Brattleboro if nobody defends the house. Preparing one house cuts that by between a fifth and two fifths, and