Ash Wednesday fires
The aftermath of the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983, in Victoria, Australia
Why do you sometimes see unburnt trees next to a burnt down house?
fires
Conspiracy theories would say that this is because the houses were actually vapourize with beams of energy from space. But the actual reason, as many people have pointed out, is simply that the wood in the houses is dry, and the wood in the trees is wet.

If you don't use a wood fire in your house this might be a bit hard to understand, so I set out to do an experiment to demonstrate this.

First stop was my attic, which, like most new houses in California has an internal frame of 2 by 4s.
There was a bit of scrap wood left over from construction. The same wood as the frame of my house, so ideal for testing.

Then out back to chop a live branch off a tree, and then I chopped both the attic wood and the live wood into pieces about the same size.

Cutting to size:
cutting wood
I then built a symmetrical fire from kindling and put the live wood on the left and the attic wood on the right. I lit the fire, and fed it more kindling when it went out.

It was very obvious that the live wood never caught on fire, whereas the attic wood started burning almost straight away.
fireplace
The end result was that the live wood just got a bit sooty, and the attic wood was burnt through.
burning wood
burning wood
[Update Dec 14 2017]
A few people have pointed out there are other factors in my test besides simply water content, namely:

Wood Density - The live wood is oak and the attic wood is a conifer, probably Douglas Fir. Oak is denser than pine, and is harder to burn even when dry. However it's also still a typical type of tree in California. Doug fir has a density of 33 lb/ft3, oak is between 37 and 56.

Bark - The tree has bark, which protects a bit from the fire.

Shape - A square cross section will burn better than a round one.

None of this invalidates the point - in fact these are additional factors that show how the wood in a typical California attic is much more flammable than that wood in the trees around the house. The attic wood is about as flammable as you get, it's light, bark free, with sharp corners. And of course it's also really dry.

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