Three Little Pigs in the Modern Era

Jun 03, 2024

The classic story of the Three Little Pigs is quickly coming true today, but with a scary modern twist, as powerful and destructive winds take center stage as the dominant feature of America’s new ‘superstorm’ category. From Texas to Colorado to Florida, high winds have been blamed for shutting down power grids, as state regulators try to avoid wildfires from downed power lines, and for destroying buildings and other infrastructure. The scary modern twist is that today’s pigs are not only facing strong winds but also a fire breathing dragon - not a wolf.

Marshall Fire devastation - public domain.

In 2021 Colorado’s Marshall Fire burned over 1,100 suburban homes to the ground in just under eight hours. A few of these structures may have been built from straw, but let’s be honest, 90 percent of them were made of wood and paper. Very few, if any, were made from brick. The frightening reality is that most homes in America are built from wood and paper, plus a few chemical accelerants. Even though the point of the Three Little Pigs is to show us the value of going off into the world to become an adult, the perils of ignorance and laziness, plus the value of education, we continue to fail to heed its lessons.

Just as American society collectively fails to learn the lesson of the little boy who cried wolf, we fail to learn the lessons of the Three Little Pigs when it comes to one of our most important investments - shelter - in terms of protecting our families. I’m going to make a wild guess and suggest that 99 percent of American homeowners likely don’t know yet that they can build/rebuild their homes with something like Nova Terra’s EcoBlox. The bricks that protected the Three Little Pigs were nothing like the EcoBlox pictured below. In fact, I don’t think the Three Little Pigs thought about embodied carbon or energy efficiency.

Published in 1890, The Three Little Pigs was something almost everyone in my generation (X) was overexposed to. We didn’t really care about the plight of the pigs at the time because we knew a wolf wasn’t coming to blow down the front door and eat them. We assumed stuff like that happened in some scary forest in Germany, but not in the US. Not in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where I grew up. Not in the 1980s, when I grew up. My generation was more concerned about invasions being launched from Russia (and Cuba?) and total nuclear annihilation from AI systems named WOPR. Our views as Gen X were skewed by movies and TV. We ignored the news then to our peril.

As it stands now though, wind has been powering some scary storms for the last few years. Just a couple of weeks ago in Houston powerful winds associated with a thunderstorm knocked out power to over 750,000 residents and destroyed a ton of the city’s building infrastructure. People on the ground compared the winds to a tornado. The distinction was clear, however, these were winds and not a tornado. Last week in Dallas something similar took place.

Where I live in Colorado, we are experiencing a large number of ‘wind storms’, which are literally just wind. We call them ‘storms’ now because they have the potential to turn into suburban wildfires and create considerable damage. Those labels mean little to the people who survived the Marshall Fire, such as my client, who is moving into the Colorado Earth home, which was built with EcoBlox, in a few weeks. This family literally ran from a burning home carrying their kids and anything else they could manage. This family suffered serious, real trauma - I think the image below, which their neighbor took on the day of their burning home, says everything that needs to be said.

This wasn’t a neighborhood in a forest - this was a suburb outside of Boulder, CO

So, minus a real solution and because of the potential for lawsuits, the power companies in these areas are simply turning off the power to keep us safe from fire. But then have no power, because of wind? That is not a solution.

Beware of the wind little pigs. It could be a firestorm.