Two fire experts interviewed about L.A. wildfires
latimes.com58 points by hodgesrm 10 hours ago
58 points by hodgesrm 10 hours ago
I found a much better article (5 page PDF) from the fire prevention expert quoted in this article, which details his method of prioritizing building fire-safe homes and dispels misconceptions of how wildfire spreads to homes:
Thanks for the article. So it looks like quarter sized embers are the most likely cause of many fires.
Thank you, the original article had very little actual practical information, or substance at all.
The 2020 Australia Royal Commission on bushfire prevention is a good resource, too.
There are tons of things that could be done. Virtually none are being done nowadays, much less retrofitted to existing structures.
Bushfire prevention via design is essentially in its infancy, much like earthquake safe designs took decades to become widespread in California after the 1933 quake. It wasn't like structures built in the 40s had "learned the lessons" and were earthquake proof. It has taken the better part of a century to get there.
A professor of atmospheric science from the university of Washington has a couple posts he wrote about how the fires started and it seems like it was probably electrical, and could have been avoided (by turning off the grid in the area) given the very clear forecasts for extreme wind.
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2025/01/did-la-fire-disaster-...
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2025/01/where-and-how-did-pal...
The other inconvenient truth is that the lack of good water management, prescribed burns, and forest management has been problematic across the country. Climate change isn’t the cause, even though attribution teams desperately try to make it that - it just makes things worse. But forests have dry fuel that will light up at some point and that’s regardless of climate change. There’s inadequate proactive planning for this.
A number of bushfires in the 2009 Black Saturday event in Victoria, Australia were started by downed power lines due to wind.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28305127
Class action, power company handed biggest payout ever at the time of $480 million.
Killed 119 people and destroyed more than 1,000 homes.
As for water? The bushfires were just too big and engulfed entire townships.
> Climate change isn’t the cause, even though attribution teams desperately try to make it that - it just makes things worse. But forests have dry fuel that will light up at some point and that’s regardless of climate change. There’s inadequate proactive planning for this.
I think it is worth pushing back on this, because while yes, in the absolute sense, no single incident can be traced back to the broader pattern; the inconvenient truth remains.
Our addition of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is the long lever that can move the world. Between 1970 and 2020, 381±61 Zetta Joules (10^21 joules) of additional energy was absorbed into the system (i.e. the Earth).
This estimate was prepared using satellite data, which is public source, https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1675/2023/
How much energy is this? It's roughly 80% of the estimated energy of the Chicxulub impactor. Albeit spread over a significantly longer period of time.
The strongest explosion humanity has ever created is in the order of 10^17 joules, or a hundred Quadrillion Joules.
We've managed to add 1.5 million times that number in this 50 years. We've been essentially adding one tsar bomba's worth of energy every fifteen to twenty minutes for the past five decades.
Based on my reading so far, we don't actually know what all of this additional energy is doing to the system. One theory based on satellite data has been that 'wet-gets-wetter, dry-gets-drier' — and some satellite data and simulations bear this out. See, this intensity analysis of NASA/German GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite data, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsbgZ9om0t8.
Now others disagree, because it's a complicated system and we don't know what this energy is doing... And so the debate rages back and forth.
But here's the inconvenient truth. While we may not know exactly what all of this additional energy is doing to the system, we do know that it isn't going to do nothing.
It is the inescapable truth that we're in the middle of a statistically anomalous period of extreme weather events. Was each and every one of these directly caused due to global warming? No, of course not. But that doesn't mean that the additional energy we've added to the system didn't change the dynamics of the system in such a way that made this outcome more likely.
Or, more simply, we've biased the dice and - as they keep getting rolled - we keep getting these "surprises."
I am young enough that in my lifetime, the Earth will look dramatically different than the one I was born into.
So yes, you're strictly right. But no, I think it's worth examining the statement further and pointing out that yes, this is just the sign of what's to come.
Focus more on "human-caused" rather than climate change. Humans both caused pollution, and suppressed fires. Each amplifies the other.
It really means nothing to talk about how much additional energy was added in terms of Tsar Bombas unless you're also going to tell me the sun's steady-state energy in the same units. Just sounds like you're trying to make it sound dramatic and scary.
“Climate change isn’t the cause.”
The region experienced back to back years of high rainfall, spurring brush growth.
This year the region experienced severe drought, converting all of that growth into fuel.
Last week the region experienced 100 mph winds, which converted spot fires into fast-spreading conflagrations that could not be fought.
This pattern of instability is an outcome of climate change.
So yeah, it was caused by climate change.
The revealed preferences of political leaders is that they don't believe Climate Change is the "cause", either. If they did, they would've planned for this instability and increased funding for all of the preventative actions mentioned in this thread and the various links therein.
Or do people still think that banning plastic bags and carbon taxes stop wild fires.
Which of those named weather events was outside of historical experience in the area?
From the outside, wet years and dry years and desert winds seem very much like the expected climate for SoCal.
> Which of those named weather events was outside of historical experience in the area?
Over the last few decades averages for events have changed, and not for the better:
> It was found that nearly all the observed increase in burned areas over the past half-century is due to human-caused climate change. It is estimated that from 1971 to 2021, human-caused climate change contributed to a +172% increase in burned areas, with a +320% increase from 1996 to 2021. In the coming decades, a further increase in annual forest burned areas is expected, ranging from 3% to 52%.
* https://www.drought.gov/news/study-finds-climate-change-blam...
Source paper is https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2213815120.
The paper, which looks quite good, amounts to (stationary baseline + climate drift) explaining burning more than (stationary baseline) alone.
From the paper...
> Their respective uncertainty bands overlap for most of the time periods considered; however, starting in 2018, there is a complete separation between CMIP6-ALL and CMIP6-NAT scaling factor distributions suggesting a complete dominance of anthropogenic over natural forcing.
...or incorrect models or uncertainty bands. The paper looks good but like it presumed to find the desired results from the research outset.
Beware anything done with simulations that provides 3 significant digits (172% increase!). I don't doubt the influence of climate but I do doubt the certainty of these authors.
Going back to the GP, I still want to know how wet years, dry years, and winds are outside of reasonable expectations in SoCal. These are part of the (stationary baseline) the paper should include. From a quick pass on the paper, it's not clear to me that the paper captures hysteresis due to intermittent wet/dry periods. Or that they considered any additive non-stationarity, in (stationary baseline + climate drift), they wouldn't deem anthropogenic.
Not denying here. Just enjoying throwing rocks at a paper adjacent to a past life. I have published on uncertainty quantification for computational fluid dynamics that employed explicit slow/fast timescale decompositions.
bad forest management is a much more proximate cause than climate change, absolutely - not sure why it has become verboten to say.
climate change makes a difference at the margin but the sheer number of recent events has a lot more to do with how we manage our forests/urban upscaling.
> not sure why it has become verboten to say
It's not. In California, we've been discussing forest management for at least 25 years since a series of wildfires broke out. There have been plenty of discussions about how we should be managing forests, trying to build consensus around best practices, and building the political will to implement them. It's been a maddeningly slow process.
If anyone is coming into the conversation out here saying, "California has bad forest management, they need to rake the forest floors" or whatever, it shows that they're entering the conversation with at best a 1990s mindset of what modern forest management is like. Yeah, we know, that alarm has been clanging for 25+ years. Come at us with solutions, not problems, we know the problems.
Bad forest management or ... bad electrical equipment ?
This excerpt of the last week tonight show 90 year old electric line equipment responsible for fires : https://youtu.be/qBpiXcyB7wU?feature=shared&t=515
I don't pretend to know anything and I don't know how common this is but it is pretty concerning and I wonder if anything has been done about that.
pg&e at least is investing very heavily in undergrounding i believe but it is still slow going and expensive like many megaprojects in cali
once again, completely backwards understanding.. PG&E has been avoiding many upgrades to their millions of miles in cables, for decades, and has repeatedly outsourced the maintenance that they were required to do.. they falsified records to avoid doing maintenance, the pipes blew up, and PG&E became the first public utility to be convicted of murder AFAIK
The utility repeatedly plants stories about how much they are doing, and how expensive upgrades are, in the public media as a reflexive PR device and that is what is being repeated, apparently
It's not verboten in a single place. I've seen it mentioned literally hundreds of times the last few days.
sure it's not verboten in the RW media landscape, but in blue circles you're basically called a trumpista for saying that forest & underbrush management is a larger proximate cause [0][1][2]
[0]: https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fast-moving-wildfires-... [1]: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/12/2296400/-Critics-... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/09/los-angel...
I find both takes misleading.
"Windy" doesn't begin to describe winds over 100km/h on a dry and warm(ish) day in an drought. You could probably bulldoze a two hundred metre barrier in front of a bushfire on a day like that and it would still spread from uncontrollable spot fires ahead of the front. I'm not sure any forestry practices could do much against it.
Are strong winds directly caused by climate change? Sure, extreme weather events are more common, but it's impossible to say whether any given event would have happened anyway. Reversing climate change might make really bad days less frequent, but it's no more capable of eradicating them than good forestry.
It’s verboten because it undercuts the (hasty and unrigorous) attribution to climate change or fossil fuels or whatever. I’m not ignoring those causes but I think they are incorrectly attributed aa an sole cause and there is so much that could be done to prevent these fires regardless. It seems like we are reluctant to blame governments and politicians that are not performing their most basic duties.
Forest service people have tried educating the public about how new forests have a different set of issues - high density, uncleared dead wood, pests spreading easily, and all that. But no one amplifies those points because it is politically inconvenient. It’s also incredible how little money is spent on access roads, fire breaks, properly located reservoirs, firefighting aircraft, power line management, and so forth given how large state and federal budgets are.
I wonder what caused the fire to burn more heavily before anyone took action? The first few hours are usually very important. It's very difficult to control once it goes off totally.
Similar fire in Chongqing, China back in 2022. The fire was pretty close to the city. The total acre burnt was less than 1000 acres in total.
> I wonder what caused the fire to burn more heavily before anyone took action?
High winds don't help:
> “I’ll be clear: We could have had much more water. With those wind gusts, we were not stopping that fire,” Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin said.
> When winds are as strong as they were Tuesday and Wednesday — reaching 100 mph on mountaintops and surpassing 60 mph along the coast — firefighters are severely limited in their tactics, experts said. They make it too dangerous and all but impossible to establish any fire perimeter. They blow flames as tall as 200 feet horizontally and send balls of red-hot embers flying at speeds that can carry them a mile or two away, where they start what are known as spot fires.
[…]
> The lack of firefighting by air was a critical deficiency that persisted from Tuesday night through early Wednesday, fire officials said, and one that has allowed other devastating Southern California fires to spread in the past, including the Woolsey Fire, which burned across a footprint just to the west of the Palisades Fire in 2018.
> “Without helicopters, this kind of a brush fire, we cannot stop it on the ground,” said Margaret Stewart, an LAFD spokeswoman.
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20...
The fire quickly grew into a firestorm due to the 50 mph+ winds. Southern California is known for this phenomenon of dry winds that blow from the desert called the Santa Anas. They only affect certain areas, so the perfect combination of the winds + being in a fire prone area + having record rainfall the year before + being in a drought caused the fire to burn crazy fast with access to lots of brush (fuel).
If you don't stop it within the first 5 min, it quickly gets out of control. There's so much stuff to burn.
If true, isn't this setup to fail? In cloud infrastructure, we build redundancy because humans can't really solve such problems in 5 minutes. And here in real world, that's our margin? Not talking about uprooting established habitats, but it appears that such risk should not be allowed.
Redundancy only develops after failures. Only after that 5th PagerDuty alert do we start to add more of it.
The fires in LA were a failure and more redundancy will soon follow like improved building codes, better forest management, etc.
Assuming you could get to the fire in the first place.
The winds prevented the use of aircraft, either for direct attack or to insert handcrews.
That means firefighters need to drive/hike in, which can take hours. By that point, it's grown to the point where the wind is blowing embers over your head and causing spotfires miles away.
With the winds again, your containment options are limited. It's already too large for a direct attack. It'll jump your mineral earth containment lines, and you can't light a backburn.
The only real option then becomes property protection, and with a water shortage and finite resources that becomes a challenge.
There wasn't mention about extreme wind in the link you provided, all it called out is "southerly winds". The very high winds (100mph gusts) in Los Angeles prevented fire mitigation aircraft from flying, and spread the fires far and wide very quickly - and the area where the fires started was inaccessible to firefighters, so the fire had very little push-back for the first night so it grew uncontrollably. The circumstances are very different from what happened in the link you provided.
Fire crews were ready to fight fires in Los Angeles, and quite a lot of fire crews from outside the area were brought in before the fires even started - they knew how dangerous the situation was, and they were trying to do what they could by staffing up. Once the winds died down, fire-fighting aircraft could fly and started containing the fires on the mountains, but much of the residential areas had already been lost, there was just too much fire and too few resources to keep it under control.
Firefighters can’t work well in very high winds, they probably didn’t try until the winds died down.
I think the Santa Ynez reservoir being empty is probably the issue how the Pallisades fires got out of control
> “The assumption is continually made that it’s the big flames” that cause widespread community destruction, he said, “and yet the wildfire actually only initiates community ignitions largely with lofted burning embers.”
I think this is well-known and not at all some sort of secret inconvenient truth. After any disastrous event, there will always be people coming out of the woodwork saying “you should have listened to me.”
Pretty unimpressed by this article, frankly.
Well known by people who pay attention, yet ignored by people who make policy at the local level.
Look at the before pictures in LA. Homes with flammable exteriors and dense plantings.
Look at Laguna beach to the south. About half the town burned in the 90s. Strict building codes and regular inspections. It’s expensive and annoying to homeowners, but it works.
> Well known by people who pay attention, yet ignored by people who make policy at the local level.
It is not ignored by local policy folks:
> Molly Mowery, an author of a 2020 report for Los Angeles County on how to reduce wildfire risk, said that the county now takes wildfire into account when reviewing new housing development plans. The problem, she said, is that nearly 90 percent of the county’s housing stock was built before 1990, before many subdivision or building code requirements for wildfire hazards took effect. Once fire enters these communities, the homes are the fuel.
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20...
But to a certain extent government can only do what the citizens want to be done:
> Nic Arnzen, a town council member in Altadena, where thousands of homes, businesses, restaurants and parks were lost in the Eaton Fire, said the unincorporated community in Los Angeles County was trying to address fire risks. Less than a month ago, the town council chair wrote a letter to Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, recommending she adopt a controversial land-use plan that would direct development away from the Altadena foothills “and other high fire hazard zones.”
> It had been a subject of debate for months. Residents concerned about the community’s vulnerability to an inferno roaring off the slope of the San Gabriel Mountains favored the plan. But others didn’t want to lose the ability to develop their properties in the hills. […]
* Ibid.
The problem of non-compliant old buildings eventually solves itself, as seen here. All new buildings must comply with current building codes.
Same thing as in all European cities in the middle ages, where building codes eventually enforced itself.
They could, but don’t, enforce vegetation clearance around homes, even 100 year old homes.
But you are correct, politicians can only “lead” a much as voters allow.
What we see is the outcome of a political process, but doesn’t mean policymakers are unaware.
All it really means is that when it comes to a battle between fire prevention people and people who like their gardens, in the absence of a fire, the people worried about fire are going to look like scolds and the people who want the individual freedom to have a garden are going to win the political fight. More of a collective outcome of our society than oversight by policymakers.
Good luck trying to ban gardens in the Oakland hills, people just won’t do it even if policymakers want it. Probably the best way to do it would be to deregulate insurance and give them discretion - “oh you want to have a garden in a fire prone area, sure - that will just be 3x your original bill”
Do you mean garden in the American sense or the British sense? Tomato plants are not a problem.
Trees and dense shrubs near the house are.
i'm referring to the generally dense areas of green and trees that are common on the west coast ie like what you see here
Yeah, that’s just not safe in places that can go 9+ months without rain and get 50+mph dry winds most years.
AFAIK, just the shrubs. Particularly, California native trees are fine for and in fires. And if you look at the pictures, the houses have burned but the trees haven’t.
>[…] the houses have burned but the trees haven’t.
Which of course has fuelled conspiracy theories:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/los-angeles-wildfire-trees-1.7...
TL; DR: dry bushes burn, trees with moisture in them do not.
"What Saved The ‘Miracle House’ In Lahaina?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37192915
Iirc, one of items listed was rocks/gravel surrounding the house on the ground so any embers that landed beside the building had nothing to feed on ignite.
Don't even have to go back in time in another state, but even right now in California, "Owner of ‘miracle’ Malibu mansion reveals why he thinks house survived raging fire":
> “It’s stucco and stone with a fireproof roof,’’ he said, adding that it also includes pilings “like 50 feet into the bedrock’’ to keep it steady when powerful waves crash into the seawall below it.
* https://nypost.com/2025/01/10/us-news/owner-of-miracle-malib...
And you don't need to have a building made out of concrete either, as long as the shell and the surrounding area is not flammable:
* https://www.builderonline.com/building/safety-healthfulness/...
* https://www.nfpa.org/en/education-and-research/wildfire/prep...
Yeah. About these fires, someone recently told me they should have cut a dozer line around the fire right away and that would have taken care of it.
I replied: sure, but it would have to have been at least 10 miles wide to protect from the 100mph-wind carried embers...
So many tall telephone and power poles with wires everywhere in LA, but rarely mentioned. Can’t survive really high winds.
It’s not clear why they’re not buried other than cost. A few bent poles must now be replaced in our neighborhood at great expense.
Looks like they’d be cheaper buried in the long run.
It is mainly cost – like 6x more. Utilities like LADWP eventually want to underground everything but the time scale of such a project is probably eons.
AFAIK most of the fires in recent years have been started by PG&E power lines.
cost and regulators generally have been unwilling to approve the rate increases necessary for resilience
plus we make our utilities pay prevailing wage
Yeah because those are where the money’s going.
1. a 10% profit margin this year - they are not even profitable over the last 10 years and barely profitable over the last 25.
2. yea, prevailing wage requirements are definitely relevant to the marginal cost of a labor intensive undergrounding project
3. why is pg&e the topic of discussion here?
The last batch of fires were, AFAIK, caused by under-maintained PG&E infrastructure. I would not be surprised if it turns out these were, too.
LADWP (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power) and SCE (Southern California Edison) provide almost all electricity near these fires.
PG&E does not operate in the Los Angeles area: https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_MAPS_...
GP is referring to these fires: https://apnews.com/article/af0ec776efd4b3049f7800ff981bff88
> Pacific Gas & Electric’s outdated equipment ignited wildfires in California that killed more than 100 people, wiped out entire towns and led the company to confess to crimes driven by its greed and neglect.
> The decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Dennis Montali clears the way for PG&E to pay $25.5 billion for losses from devastating fires in 2017 and 2018.
Ah! You’re correct, thank you for the correction. I’ve been LADWP for so long I forgot the rest of the area was SCE.
I have a friend who does power pole inspection, and boy, the stories. Infra is crumbling.
> Building codes failed to address the requirements of specific environments, and infrastructure was laid out without attending to potential hazard.
Well, yeah. Americans tend to laugh at European construction codes, label us with words suggesting we live in a dictatorship... but with every report I see from the newest natural disaster in the US, be it fires, floods or hurricanes, I'm happy that building codes are very very strict here.
> For example, municipal and fire prevention agencies must give property owners advance — and continual — warnings to clear dead vegetation and to wet dry brush within 10 feet of the house with periodic, prolonged sprinklings.
Try that with your average American and the poor sod tasked with doing that will be at best yelled at with "leave my property", and that's assuming they can inspect the property to begin with.
Maybe not average, but in Oakland after the ‘91 fire we now have yearly inspections, including overflying drones and helicopters as well as foot inspections of our properties. They alert us if we have any problematic vegetation, most especially accumulated dead brush or trees that need to be trimmed to keep them out of power lines. We have to address them or we will be fined. I’m not sure beyond that what happens, I haven’t gotten one of the fines, we keep our greenery pretty controlled, as do our neighbors. Maybe it’s because you can still regularly meet people who lived through that fire, but no one is crying “‘Murica!” when the firemen come by here.
The other thing that is subtle and maybe not obvious about American culture — firemen generally are not lumped in with the rest of the government. Police are looked at with extreme suspicion very frequently, but firemen are just generally liked. Yes there are people who don’t want anyone on their property that they didn’t invite, and in some states those people have the law behind them (I grew up in Texas), but firemen coming by to let you know that your property has too many trees near the home are probably the least likely to be shouted off. There is one group, though, that doesn’t want to hear the message - the wealthy. Often they have an image in their head of how they want their house to look and what kind of landscaping they want, never mind what best practice is. They will listen politely and then completely ignore the advice they get because it would keep them from having the picture perfect English cottage look, or maybe they’d have to see their neighbors in their winter ski chalet, or whatever it is that’s in their head. When the Tahoe area has a fire like this, it will be because of these attitudes, 100%.
NA has far more natural disaster exposure than europe does, especially when people just like to subset to the richest western european states as ‘europe’.
i seem to recall quite a few buildings collapsing in Turkey and in Greece in the last quarter century after earthquakes
> NA has far more natural disaster exposure than europe does
Agreed, but that's even more of a sign for "the US should be even more proactive in regulations and enforcement than Europe, not the other way around!
In any case we do have areas that are prone to wildfire, especially the Balkans, Greece and Turkey get hit regularly and hard. But the human toll is always very low even if the fires rage, because our buildings don't consist out of the cheapest sort of wood and cardboard and there is ample distance between homes and forests.
> i seem to recall quite a few buildings collapsing in Turkey and in Greece in the last quarter century after earthquakes
Yup, and in almost all cases it turns out that either the owners intentionally circumvented the code or construction was shoddy because someone diverted money and substituted cheaper but unallowed materials.
Our greatest issue tends to be floods like in the Ahrtal or the beginning of Spain, because our building and zoning codes haven't caught up with climate change. Unfortunately, what I call "Americanism" (or y'all "American Exceptionalism") seems to have seeped into our culture as well - the attitude that humans are superior to nature's forces and can bend them to their will, and so I'm afraid history is doomed to repeat itself.
Taxing people and protecting everyone from fires by imposing regulations is of course socialism. /s
I'm still looking for the incovenient truths because I couldn't find them in that article... A couple thousand words with no real insight or information.
Not directly stated (and maybe not even intended) but for me the inconvenient truth is that human society is absolutely powerless against nature at the extreme ends of the scale. We can do a lot, we can build sea walls, we can reroute rivers, we can cross over or tunnel under almost any obstacle. But ultimately, the planet is capable of bringing more to bear than we can offset, whether it's wind-driven wildfires, floods, large hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, volcanoes. The best and only thing we can do in those situations is hope we have enough warning to get out of the way or find someplace to hide.
Not necessarily. There are similar cases in other countries where the fire was well controlled. Might not be as similar as I thought, but I'm wondering if professionals can give an honest post mortem at least for this time.
> similar cases
Can you provide specific citations?
And.. normally, I might ask that for argumentative reasons, but… sitting here, south of Pasadena, I really want things to look at to understand what this might do to the place I live.
Right now it’s my understanding that this is yet another once-in-a-lifetime disaster. I think our generation is at… five of these, at least?
>There are similar cases in other countries where the fire was well controlled.
Did they also have unprecedented 100mph wind gusts, and strong winds blowing for days? It's impossible to fly fire mitigation aircraft in those conditions, and the terrain where the fire was spreading the most were rugged mountain areas, mostly not accessible to firefighters.
E.g.,
> “Without helicopters, this kind of a brush fire, we cannot stop it on the ground,” said Margaret Stewart, an LAFD spokeswoman.
> Perhaps demonstrating what a difference aircraft can make, a fire that threatened the Hollywood Hills late Wednesday was quickly contained and limited to 43 acres. Calmer winds allowed aircraft to douse flames with water from nearby reservoirs.
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20...
Water scooped from reservoirs is less effective than you might think. When it is dropped, a good amount of it evaporates before it ever hits the ground. Most effective would be air drops of fire retardant, but neither can be done in high wind conditions.
> Water scooped from reservoirs is less effective than you might think.
I'm guessing that water scooped from reservoirs is probably more effective than no water at all.
I believe this assessment is intellectually dishonest.
A couple of days before the fires started, I received a major red alert on my phone (I was in Los Angeles just prior to the fires - Recognizing the danger, I decided to leave).
I expected to see a large-scale response—fire trucks stationed everywhere, extra firefighters on standby, planes ready to deploy, and vegetation being watered—but none of that appeared to happen.
This isn’t about partisanship. One of the core responsibilities of our elected officials is to effectively manage situations like this. Until we address the root causes (like global warming), these events will continue to occur, and we need better preparedness in the meantime.
Fire departments do not have the equipment nor the personnel to handle "the entire city is on fire" events. That would require one or two fire trucks with crew for each house in the city. Even if you could do that, you would quickly deplete the available water supply. It's just not possible.
Could more have been done to make a fire of this size less likely? Perhaps. But once it starts, and reaches a certain size, with winds as they were and combustible material in its path, all you can do is get out.
> Fire departments do not have the equipment > nor the personnel to handle "the entire city is on fire" events.
True, but in fire-prone areas—such as those so high-risk that insurers refuse coverage—we might need to consider a different approach. Whether it’s specialized equipment, additional staffing, or other protective measures, some system should be in place specifically for those regions..
> as those so high-risk that insurers refuse coverage
Maybe in those areas the policy should be "you're on your own."
They did prepare though, 3 days before they got units from north California. If nothing would happen they would be attacked for risking safety of
BTW: which locations in the whole Los Angeles (you know how big it is? actually there's no guarantee the fire works be in LA) you should get fire trucks stationed?
There wasn't any rain registered since April, there were unprecedented (last time we had such big ones was 15 years ago) dry, 100mph winds. This means using air support was also not feasible at the time.
We mostly talk about Palisades, but when watching WatchDuty app, fires were constantly popping up in random places.
It was a nightmare, and it is frustrating to see politicizing the whole thing or criticizing that fire men did something wrong.
Why those people aren't volunteering and helping?
There are some things that is impossible to do with what we have.
Much more effective would be for example having all building up to the latest fire code, but majority are of course old.
> If nothing would happen they would be attacked for risking safety of
You’ve pinpointed the core issue. Politicians have little incentive to invest in preventive measures because, as voters, we rarely reward that sort of long-term planning. And who’s really at fault? We are. We don’t demand enough accountability for prevention when we cast our votes.
If they successfully prevent fires, nobody notices—and no political points are scored.
> This isn’t about partisanship. One of the core responsibilities of our elected officials is to effectively manage situations like this.
Unfortunately, this seems to be fast becoming a partisan position.
We can’t treat fire as an occasional emergency the fire department will take care of. Managing fire risk is something every town and home owner need to spend time on year round.
Even if you don't really live in a wildfire area, there are things you can/should do. I get my fields cut back with a tractor once or twice a year and keep a lawn around the house. I also won't use firepits that have the potential to ignite the surroundings.
This is what everyone needs to be doing, and the fire dept. needs to enforce it.
> […] and the fire dept. needs to enforce it.
And/or insurance companies.
This is actually where the action has been recently. Lots of people complain about aerial inspection by insurance followed by ultimatums to clear vegetation and junk.
Look for people asking for regulations to prevent this any day now.
>Look for people asking for regulations to prevent this any day now.
I actually sort of empathize with a point of view that you pay your insurance every year, aren't doing anything especially unreasonable, and have to adhere to a somewhat arbitrary new standard at possibly very significant cost and time.
To be clear, I get the other side too in wildfire-prone areas.
> […] and have to adhere to a somewhat arbitrary new standard at possibly very significant cost and time.
Either you adhere to standard and make the effort to comply, or you eat the cost of a higher premium because your property has a higher risk.
It's going to cost you either way.
Or you can decide to try to go without insurance and you pay neither the costs of the premium nor adhering to the standard.
These are fairly high cost areas (for the most part) so a lot of people will eat higher costs or get out. But, for many others, the answer is move to Nevada and CA housing prices increase overall, if you can't afford to live there, you should probably find somewhere cheaper.
Fire protection is like vaccination. It protects you, but also people (homes) around you.
LA homeowner here. My backyard is also an undeveloped (re: “natural” hillside).
I’m responsible for clearing brush in that hillside, so that it’s n-hundred feet from structures. It’s checked in May, or thereabouts.
Interesting. City or county enforcement? From the news it seems like it was not well enforced in the burn area, perhaps it’s more public land there?
I think city? Which for me is LA itself. Pacific Palisades and Altadena would be different cities, and yes, from the maps the burn areas are public land.
Unless you live in the southwest, this isn't true at all.
Wildfires in many areas of the West is not a particularly new thing.
B&B Complex Fires in Oregon in 2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%26B_Complex_fires
Yellowstone Fires in 1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_fires_of_1988
And I'm sure I could find many other older examples.
I think this gets at the heart of it. People assume that these fires are fought and prevented in the forest/hills by wildland fire fighters but the reality is that individual homeowners can do a lot by clearing brush, etc. (ahead of time,) from their own yards. It's an inconvenient truth because it shifts the responsibility to individuals.
""...Ignitions downwind and across streets are typically from showers of burning embers from burning structures.” This fundamental misunderstanding has likewise led to a misunderstanding of prevention. No longer is it a matter of preventing wildfires but instead preventing points of ignition within communities by employing “home-hardening” strategies — proper landscaping, fire-resistant siding — and enjoining neighbors in collective efforts such as brush clearing."
> A couple thousand words with no real insight or information.
Because it's things we already know about, but refuse to do anything about. For example:
> “The assumption is continually made that it’s the big flames” that cause widespread community destruction, he said, “and yet the wildfire actually only initiates community ignitions largely with lofted burning embers.”
We've known about embers for decades, and why you need to clear the area around your home of ignition sources:
* https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/wildfire/prepari...
Here's a potato-quality video posted thirteen years ago on landscaping best practices:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NVe0gu69FY
A news story from twelve years ago about a home that survivied (with a charred landscape around it):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rgUp245nso
Which is talked about in the article:
> This fundamental misunderstanding has likewise led to a misunderstanding of prevention. No longer is it a matter of preventing wildfires but instead preventing points of ignition within communities by employing “home-hardening” strategies — proper landscaping, fire-resistant siding — and enjoining neighbors in collective efforts such as brush clearing.
We may also have to accept that perhaps Mother Nature can still be more powerful than humans at times:
> The National Fire Prevention Assn., a national nonprofit that provides standards for fire suppression operations, calls for a minimum of three engines or 15 firefighters for a single-residence fire, a number that is impossible to attain when fighting a fire on the scale of the Palisades or Eaton fires.
> “We’re not recognizing, analyzing, questioning how we’re failing,” Cohen said. “We just think we need more airplanes and more helicopters flying 24 hours a day.”
> More CL-415 super-scoopers or Firehawk helicopters will not help when water is being dropped into 60 mph wind gusts.
See also "Why Los Angeles was unprepared for this fire":
> Water runs short: […] “There’s no urban water system engineered and constructed to combat wildfire,” said Michael McNutt, a spokesman for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which serves 75,000 people in northwest Los Angeles County. The system was intended to supply water to homes and businesses, he said, and to help fire crews defend a large structure or several homes, not multiple neighborhoods at once. […]
The inconvenience was ignoring the experts advice.
They might have said something along the lines of make sure you have water, the ability to use it (hello Maui), and people who know how to use it.
Or maybe they thought that was needless to say and had more advanced advice like clearing dead brush, making fire breaks, etc.
Or ... Well yeah. It would be nice to know what advice was ignored. I'm sure there was plenty in that category.
> It may be the fire equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane
When I saw the pictures of the completely burnt out districts, the first thing I thought of was Hiroshima. At least we got most of the people out first this time, though.
Much/most of the damage at Hiroshima was the resulting fires, not the explosion, so it's very similar!
First thing I thought was hopefully they wont rebuild using same cardboard and wood in a highly fire prone area.
As someone who’s spent their entire life in california near these types of fires and someone who recently visited the Hiroshima memorial museum, this take is pretty disingenuous.
As someone who’s not participating in the discussion, can you elaborate? “No it isn’t” is an unhelpful response without any explanation whatsoever.
[dead]
What are the odds of the fire expanding to the rest of the world making a full circle?
It's inconvenient to the policy 'makers' who are more interested in their aspirations than their duty.
It's common sense to everyone else.
Cheap talk and extremely boring overgeneralization.
As everyone else clearly has built their houses in a fireproof manner, activated personal fire prevention tactics like watering their surroundings and, as the article stated, tried to decrease community hotspots succeptible to being ignited by ember, what do we even need these experts for, am I right?
I mean, clearly it's common sense, right?
Yes, it is common sense.
The fact that thousands of homes are burnt to ashes very simply and clearly shows that is not the case.
I'll concede that you're making a strong individual case that common sense is anything but.
Ahh, can't contribute anything meaningful, so you go for an ad hominem attack.
As in the beginning, still pretty boring.
At least you have continuity in that regard.
Ok I get all of these, but, {checking calendar}, it is freaking January! Not Summer.
I thought the appeal of California was that it didn't have intense winters or summers, but was pleasantly warm year-round?
LA is at the same latitude as North Texas, and Texas isn't exactly known for snow. Where I live in the Midwest we're guaranteed at least one good snow every winter, and it's been around freezing temperatures for weeks.
The Santa Ana winds that spread the fire are an all-year thing, concentrated in autumn and winter.