ORIGINAL: Argos
Actually insurance companies do that if they have a chance (pay is great, better than $3500 a day for an engine and crew of 3 and no other responsibility - plus homeowners tend to cook when the get nervous so you eat well...) trouble is they need a day or two to make arrangements to get trucks in, equipment and personnel have to be available (nothing else burning in the Western US), and it still has to be safe to put a truck there. Some of those houses you could build into a 1,000,000 gallon water tank and that's the only way you could keep them from burning.
The fires in that fuel type (SoCal , Australia, Greece) aren't fight-able when they get running, you end up just trying to manage them until conditions change. Fire back in 2003 in SoCal and the IC tried to use an 8 lane Interstate and better than 1000 pieces of apparatus as a holding line. Didn't even slow it down, ended up 1/2 mile past into the housing developments. Some of the film we see from SoCal in training is unbelievable but does a great job of emphasizing that sometimes you have to just try to get everybody out of the way.
Lived in SoCal for 9 years, not too far from our fearless author. The back fence was about 20 ft behind the deck, with a tree in between. The small slope behind the fence was ours, probably 30 to 40 ft before a drop off. I had that slope planted with some native fire resistant stuff in an effort to hold the slope (landslides!) while not providing fuel.
We moved less than 48 hours before that fire started in November 2008. Basically a car broke down and caught fire a few miles to the east on the 91 Freeway. The Santa Ana winds had started coming up the day we left and were very strong plus gusting above 70 mph by then - it's the Santa Ana Canyon and winds from that direction are funneled down, which speeds them up and heats them up. Some grass or brush near the burning car caught fire, and the whole thing sort of ran down the canyon like a blowtorch. Several hundred homes and a couple of apartment complexes were lost, including a home a few doors down from where we had lived. I was later told that the fire burned right up to the back deck of our old house and they stopped it there.
