The Horizons website at that domain [0] (which was on HN recently) seems to be down for me as well. FWIW, that's not "the" JPL website though, that's just one of many JPL-hosted websites.
It looks down, yes the marketing website is fine, but the scientific tools seem to be down. It would be reasonable that they are locally hosted, like close to the sensors.
Well, most of the actual sensors are in space ;) but yes, telemetry collected via the DSN gets routed through JPL first.
Also, in addition to the SSD website linked upthread, the NAIF site [0] (where the SPICE library and kernels can be downloaded) also seems to be down. It would not surprise me in any way if some of these facilities are hosted on-prem and are in a power-down state due to the fires.
(Speaking of the DSN, their website [1] is also down.)
You’re correct. The lab management sent out a message to this effect mid-day Wednesday. Many public-facing servers were taken down purposely due to the fires. Part of the lab HPC was also powered down, not sure what its status is now. The head nodes were up earlier today.
There are generators for other critical servers, and in particular the DSN operations have been moved temporarily to another location so they could continue.
> There are generators for other critical servers, and in particular the DSN operations have been moved temporarily to another location so they could continue.
That's really good to hear. The DSN is a really, really important asset (not that everything else at JPL isn't, but!), so I'm glad they're not totally coupled to the physical JPL location.
Fair, but NASA facilities would be one of the organizations I would personally expect there to be an exception. They have all sorts of facilities where on-premise servers and capacity will be a lot better than some remote cloud offering.
(As an ex-JPLer,) you would be very surprised how many internal tools this decade have been web-stack. Flight systems are one thing, but you need plenty of ground systems to support the effective use of assets in flight, and there's no reason to avoid one of the biggest UI platforms out there.
I hope these days it's more spread out and backed up, but at one point they did a lot of phyical archiving related to space exploration there, including huge amounts of transparencies.
All the big campuses here like JPL and the Getty are built for this (it’s more or less standard now for insuring anything high value). They have landscaping designed to slow down fires, dedicated water systems, and firebreaks all around the buildings. The civilian evacuation order is because the area south of the fire is densely built up with single family homes without much in the way of defenses and JPL has to comply with that.
Thankfully the wind has died down significantly from last night, so we’re in a better shape, but there are still high wind warnings till 6pm and the fires are 0% contained.
Will look into options for supporting these folks. Thank you for the level-headed and informative response.
I prefer HN over some other news sources, which seem less concerned about presenting information to the degree the news article can vouch for. Media literacy is a two-way street and we need better reporting standards. If reading and writing is a lot like parsing, then anyone who spreads misinformation is just a parsehole.
Yep, 3 separate fires. The first in West LA blew up late yesterday afternoon and blew through a bunch of residential areas by the looks of it. From watching Flight Radar, it seems to be getting most of the air resources, although that could just be because wind conditions are favorable on that fire today. The second fire near Pasadena started yesterday as well, but really blew up overnight. The third fire up North I think started overnight.
There's been a huge amount of wind throughout So Cal today and yesterday that is driving the rapid spread of these fires.
I saw a video of of it burning down down houses and commecial building Altedena, unlike newscasts where the lip flappers are blabbing over everything you could hear the wind howling and see streams of embers blowing down the street and overhead.
The lip flappers, as you call them, are providing valuable information to people who lived and/or worked in the areas where the fires are occurring.
As I type this, ABC7 is providing intersections-specific location information for their reporters-on-the-ground so that people can track the progress of the fire and hopefully determine the status of their houses.
With much of California, Texas and Florida property damage is concentrated where folks built where they shouldn’t have [1]. (At times nudged on by subsidised insurance [2].)
Is that true in this case, too? (Being so close to LA, it doesn’t strike me that it could be.) If not, is my general thesis off?
Deserts are generally uninhabitable by their very nature, but these persistent fires are primarily due to lack of proper underbrush care and other preventative measures.
California fires are a classic case of "We tried nothing and we're out of ideas!", speaking as a former Californian I honestly think the faster solution at this point is for enough of the state to burn down that pretending the problem doesn't exist is no longer good enough.
Lightning strikes and humans are probably the most common causes for fires in the desert.
Most desert areas in the US are a lot more lush than the blank sand dunes many people think of as desert. Usually there are a lot of bushes and grasses, and higher elevations can pine, juniper, oak, and other trees.
But PJ high desert areas don’t have the same level of destructive wildfires as, say, the Ponderosa pines found at higher elevations or cottonwood bosques. My impression is the fire load per acre in PJ is much lower and the fires are just not destructive. Adobe/masonry construction probably helps too, as does lower density urbanization. Probably easier to fight such fires too. (Limited experience)
Deserts absolutely have wildfires, and are even pretty common in California deserts. The second largest fire in the state for 2023 was the York Fire in the Mojave Desert[0]. There have been many other sizable desert fires in recent years as well.
As with many other landscapes, climate change, drought, and aquifer depletion have made deserts increasingly vulnerable to large wildfires.
A lot of the risk in the high desert of the western US is the ubiquitous sagebrush. Old growth sagebrush is basically a short tree and it burns pretty easily and very hot (excellent wood for grilling though). Fortunately, the large plants of the high desert (sagebrush, juniper, etc) grow very slowly.
When lightning or people start a fire in the desert, both relatively rare, they tend to be limited by two things. First, if areas that have been burned out sometime in the last century or two, the plants haven’t grown back enough to really support a proper wildfire, so it is easier to contain. Prior burns are a natural firebreak and they last a really long time. Second, the high desert of the US is an active volcanic province. There are fresh basalt flows everywhere, some less than a thousand years old, in the terrain. It takes tens of thousands of years for these to support enough plant life to carry a burn. These natural barriers place limits on where they can go and how far they can get.
The desert does have fires but they tend to be muted and often self-limiting because large contiguous regions of dense fuel aren’t as common.
I'm speaking of the reality of man. The path of least resistance will be the path that is taken, and so far it (apparently) makes more sense to cry "Climate Change!" than actually do something about preventing these fires.
If it takes enough of the state burning down for another path to gain lesser resistance, then so be it. That is certainly going to happen if California keeps going down the same path. I'm certainly not pleased that a piece of my childhood is burning down in unprecedented terms.
Your thesis is way off, and people didn’t understand climate back when these areas were settled. And really, we still don’t know how to or can’t politically manage wildfires well.
Part of climate change is that this man-induced change is making previously hospitable areas much less so.
> people didn’t understand climate back when these areas were settled
Agree on Palisades. My original thesis is about new construction in Florida and Houston and in e.g. the middle of the California woods. That is settlement done when we did know the risks.
LA is surrounded by high fire risk areas. The wildfire risk is also really unpredictable. The rule of thumb is the closer you are to the beach, the lower the risk.
We were looking to buy a house in Orange or Anaheim Hills because those areas are comparatively affordable. But after the airport fire we steered clear. I took a fire insurance quote on an Orange property, their model says the fire risk is 4 on a scale of 15, but they treat it like 10 because the variance is too high.
My sister lives in Anaheim Hills. A couple years ago a brush fire burned right up to the property line behind her house. Fortunately her house was undamaged. Last year the insurance company declined to renew her policy. I think you made a wise choice to avoid that area.
I guess so. I hope your sister is doing alright. Nobody wanted to insure properties in Orange or Anaheim Hills for me either, only option was to get calfair policy. We ended up buying in Aliso Viejo.
To start with the last first, I would argue your general (and not uncommon) thesis is off in one key respect: it's not primarily (though in some percentage it may be) a matter of people building where they shouldn't have per se, but that they built what they shouldn't have where they did. Ie, it's 100% feasible as a matter of architecture/engineering/construction to build a structure that will shrug off a Cat 5 hurricane including storm surge. And while it adds a real premium, it's also not at some impossible cost either. People have done it, and it works. Same with most other natural disasters. It's "only" a matter of cost and standards. It's worth noting too in many cases societies have indeed done exactly that, like with earthquakes, or in areas of high risk tornadoes. Building standards have been set to match the risk. There is plenty of low hanging fruit that can severely diminish the impact of a lot of the disasters causing massive damage if it's just standard upfront.
Also, there's the complete polar opposite approach: build something "disposable". In the "old days" (including with my extended family) there was a style of "summer camp" for example that was ultra simple. Some small single floor deal, uninsulated, maybe some power but often not even that, composting/pit toilet, some simple wood furniture, that's it. People bring their own everything, be there for a few weeks/months a year, and then go home. Such a structure can't survive much of anything but that doesn't matter because it's so cheap, if it burns/blows down/washes away once every 5 years or whatever so be it. It's a problem though when people convert what should be cheap into some full fledged thing, but then don't take environment into account.
I think this distinction is super important, because a lot of these places are beautiful and desirable much of the time, and a blanket "no you shouldn't build there ever" isn't likely to be heeded and does not get to the root actual problem, which is that the true costs of doing so aren't being priced in. The reasons for that distortion are myriad, but that's the actual issue. I think it's much more productive and convincing to the public to say "it's fine to build where you like, but it's not fine to hit other people up for money to cover it or cause unreasonable costs to safety services/environmental damage (homes burning or floating away means massive pollution), you just need be responsible in how you build."
FWIW to specifics:
>With much of California, Texas and Florida it seems pretty clear people built where they shouldn’t have.
In some cases sure but in others I guess it'd be reasonable to say that things built long enough before anthropogenic global warming really kicked off can't be reasonably blamed for that, particularly if they correct gauged the risk for themselves (ie, someone built something 50 years ago as a life thing and it did indeed last the remaining 40 years of their life, well you can't really say they got it wrong and built it wrong or it's still their problem). What is bad though is new stuff getting built or worst of all things getting REbuilt after destruction but not to updated standards each time.
Fireproof to what level? Pretty much anything will burn if you get it hot enough. The cost will depend on what level of fire resistance you want to target.
The problem with fireproofing one building in a fire-prone area is that neighboring buildings that aren't fireproof will build, and they will release toxic substances that make your fireproof building toxic.
Right; and houses release those toxic fumes when they're on fire. If poisoning other structures with your house fire was an actionable tort, insurance would incentivize owners (and builders) to make houses that were less likely to catch on fire and poison others, and/or find less toxic building materials and furnishings.
I never experienced an earthquake, in Tokyo, but those who have, say that the buildings wave around like drunk dancers.
Things fall off of shelves, but the buildings seem to come out OK.
The Japanese are hard core about building standards.
Compared to other nations (deliberately not gonna name them), that have corruption problems, as well as frequent earthquakes, you always have a bunch of buildings fall down, there's a surge of anger, a couple of unpopular scapegoats get jailed, then, it happens again, the next time.
I have a bunch of friends in the LA area. So far, none of them have been in the line of [literal] fire, but everyone is freaking out. These fires are under no control, whatsoever.
>The Japanese are hard core about building standards.
Note that this has been built on their fair share of blood and tears[1].
Japan gloated in the wakes of the 1989 Loma Prieta[2] and 1994 Northridge[3] earthquakes that such structural destruction[3][4] would be impossible for them, but then they got their gloating ass burned off.[6]
Japan has been dead fucking serious about earthquake measures ever since, never taking anything for granted and certainly never ever pretending they are kings of the earthquake world anymore.
David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was quoted as saying “It's hard to bullshit the ocean. It's not listening, you know what I mean.” True for wildfires under windy conditions as well. Probably the reason why the word “wildfire” in American English is used as a simile to refer to any fast, destructive, uncontrolled phenomenon, appearing back when those earlier generations lived though them without modern firefighting tech. Your friends’ go-to attack and defense strategies, perhaps their entire realities, are just words…but wildfires have no online presence and can’t read. Umm, earthquakes don’t read either.
Side note: modern media has used exaggeration and hype to make a myriad of small or remote things sound scary. Wildfires are actually scary…what words do we use to describe the clear and present threat of death within minutes when the media has described minor inconveniences as “horrors” and “catastrophes”? People today should refamiliarize themselves with the story of the “boy who cried wolf”.
Unfortunately there's increasingly few places where natural disasters, of one sort or another, aren't inevitable. The PNW also burns regularly now, never mind the enormous earthquake looming under us that we're terribly unprepared for. Even the northeast is starting to get buried in smoke in the summer and hit by storms like Hurricane Sandy. Tornado Alley knocks out much of the midwest. What's left of the US? Desert and mountains?
South Texas? We lived in San Antonio for last 5 years, and the weather does not really get extreme. Well you get consecutive weeks of 105-110 highs in summer. But it is far enough from the gulf coast so no hurricanes, and apart from the 2021 snowpocalypse, we didn't get any extreme weather. Austin is also okay. If you get too far north up to Dallas you start to get the snowstorms and tornadoes though.
Nobody wants to live here, but Ohio is pretty safe. There are tornadoes but they're very localized and not common. Really not much else to worry about, aside from being in Ohio of course.
Phoenix and Tucson are pretty mild for disasters. There are sometimes violent storms in the late summer but nothing that ever rises to the level of requiring evacuation as far as I know.
On the other hand, you better hope your AC works in the summer.
Yea, the potential disasters in the south west are mostly man-made in the sense of underinvesting in the electrical grid to make sure the months of 100+ degree high temps don't kill you, or a snap freeze in the winter doesn't take down power either.
The lack of a real need for natural disaster planning feels like it's left local governance complacent about issues that would barely be a problem anywhere else. I know folks in Dallas, Houston, and Austin who have been without power and water longer from a few hours of freezing rain than folks in Florida that got direct hit with a Cat 4 hurricane. There's certainly disasters that you can only do so much prep for, but there's rigor that comes with having to prep for something that generally helps you not totally fall apart when more minor stuff happens.
This has been well-studied by disaster recovery and business continuity boffins. There are sites that are known to be (1) effectively disaster-free, whether earthquakes, severe weather, volcanoes, tsunamis, wildfires, flooding, etc, and (2) sufficiently connected to commerce and the economy that you can reasonably build and fully operate a business from there. Climate change has relatively little impact on the suitability of these sites, both in theory and in terms of modeled scenarios.
The two cities I’ve seen most commonly used for these purposes are San Antonio and Salt Lake City. Phoenix and Las Vegas are also sometimes used. Most of the sites are in the western US away from the coasts. I believe parts of the upper midwest are also sometimes used for these purposes, though these areas have to contend with extreme cold (which is more difficult to deal with than extreme heat).
Phoenix and Las Vegas may be a great place for a secondary data center. But for humans, they are very vulnerable to water shortages, and power outages during the summer can be deadly. I have seen them referred to as places people weren't meant to live, more than once.
Many of these houses are decades old and were built in areas that weren't fire risks when the houses were built; Altadena had the opposite problem: it generally received a lot of rain so people were concerned about flooding and mudslides and so a lot of the infrastructure is designed to maximize the channeled flow of water down the hillsides.
Also, a lot of the houses burning in the Eaton fire (especially in Altadena) are surrounded by miles of development, but very-low-humidity hurricane-strength Santa Ana wind gusts can carry (and keep alive) burning embers for miles.
Presumably that property is worth more in the first place. Damage by value is a poor metric to use here. Aside from that is there any indication that the fires occur because people "build where they shouldn't have?" Or is it just the case that more "value" is destroyed when a fire eventually reaches them?
I took a look at a map of the Eaton fire and its evacuation area and warning area, then looked up several houses for sale in those areas on Redfin. Redfin includes a section that lists environmental risks.
In the northern parts of Altadena it says the fire risk is 33% chance of a fire within the next 30 years. Going south toward Pasadena it gets lower. At the southern parts of the evacuation zone I'm seeing it mostly range from "minimal" to numbers under 1%. "Minimal" is the category for the places with the least risk, and is described as "Unlikely to be in a wildfire in the next 30 years".
In the warning zone south of that, which looks like to goes south to the 210, so far all I've found is "Minimal".
I was in Pacific Palisades when the fire started yesterday. I've never seen one spread so fast. It went from there being smoke way in the distance and people going about their lives normally, then 90 minutes later the fire was everywhere and people were panicking and evacuating en masse.
It’s definitely the worst fire I’ve ever seen here. Very surreal to watch houses burning while walking my dogs this morning. The only silver lining are the winds blowing the smoke out to sea rather than blanketing Santa Monica.
I have a good view of the smoke column from Brentwood. I've also never seen a fire spread that fast. Same thing, in about an hour it went from a small fire to the smoke blocking out the sun.
As a testament to the speed of the winds, I've never seen a smoke column visually move so quickly. Usually at that size and distance, they feel more like static objects.
Edit: I'm preparing to evacuate tonight in case the order comes through. Checking the most recent maps, the fire has burned through almost all of the Palisades and is getting into Brentwood. The fire may also reach Santa Monica at this rate. I'm stacking go bags by the door.
> IMPACTS...If fire ignition occurs, conditions are favorable for very rapid fire spread and extreme fire behavior, including long range spotting, which would threaten life and property. There will be a high risk for widespread downed trees and powerlines, as well as widespread power outages. A Red Flag Warning means that critical fire weather conditions are either occurring now, or will shortly. Use extreme caution with anything that can spark a wildfire.
The resolution in the posted image is much better than satellite, however. This implies that it's an airborne platform like FIRIS (https://wifire.ucsd.edu/firis-in-depth). It also uses IR.
Folks say the same thing about the 1991 Oakland firestorm. If there's a fire in your area, pay attention and don't assume it'll be contained, the situation can change very quickly.
I was in a wildfire once. I was in a grocery store and I didn’t see anything burning. 2 minutes into the store, another person came in saying they saw smoke a few blocks away. I immediately left the store and went back to the car. Before I could leave the parking lot, everything around me was on fire, there was smoke so dense I couldn’t see anything beyond 10 feet and I genuinely thought I was going to die, if not in the fire, then in an accident. Wildfires move very fast and every second is precious.
I live south of the evacuation warning zone and the wind and fires have turned the entire San Gabriel Valley into an apocalyptic scene. Detritus littered all over the roads (with tons of dry flammable eucalyptus branches, yay!) and there’s ash falling from the sky in big flakes. Air quality in the tank though it was even worse a few hours ago and everything smells like smoke.
This is the worst fire I’ve seen in SoCal since the Valley fire.
One can imagine an IR monitoring (satellite or high flying drones like Reaper, one drone can see an IR source like a tank from 100km, so it would take just a few drones to monitor the the whole state for fires) with [almost] automated immediate dispatching of the fleet of drones (not small quadcopters, more like WWII size bombers) once the fire is detected. Would be much cheaper than having multi-billion dollar fires every year (these LA fires have already hit $50B as of today).
they use manned planes for monitoring - very costly and not scalable. And there is no "water-bombing" drone fleet. The manned "water-bombers" are extremely expensive, there is only small number of them and they actually carry pretty small amount of water as they are mostly helicopters or retrofitted passenger planes.
The problem is not that the water bombers are retrofitted, the problem is that water is heavy, so you're up against the physics of flight. An aircraft loaded to its max weight with water (or water-like material like retardant) is going to look empty, visually. Even e.g. a cargo 747 has ~750 m3 (=~200k gal h2o) of cargo space, but 112000 kg (=~30k gal h2o) of payload, so one could only fill ~1/6 of the cargo volume with water.
A drone is up against the same physical constraints - water is heavy, and you need a lot of it to have a material impact on a fire, even one you've caught early.
>Even e.g. a cargo 747 has ~750 m3 (=~200k gal h2o) of cargo space, but 112000 kg (=~30k gal h2o) of payload, so one could only fill ~1/6 of the cargo volume with water.
yep. Yet they still have to push through the air and have the mass and the cost of the plane for that unnecessary 6x volume. That is because the plane is retrofitted instead of having been built for the purpose of carrying high density payload. (also that 6x larger than needed volume makes those retrofitted planes much more susceptible to the high wind gusts, etc. which almost always an issue with those fires)
CA has C-130 water tankers with 20 ton payload (16 ton is the water itself). Total capacity of C-130 when used as fuel tanker - ie. when its own fuel and payload combined - is 30 ton. Empty it is 35 ton, max - 70 tons, and cost $60M+.
Taking a real cheap large drone as an example to have real base numbers to work with - German V1 (pulsejet doesn't matter, the piston engine of course would be the way to go here as we don't need jet speed) - 2.2 ton total weight with 0.5 ton fuel and 0.85 ton payload. The ratio of fuel plus payload to weight is already better than C-130's (at that ratio the C-130 would have to carry 35 ton payload instead of its current 20 and 20 ton fuel instead of its current 10), and with piston engine of the same weight as the pulsejet we'd get even larger thrust - i.e can get even higher payload ratio - while using much less fuel (the pulsejet had atrocious efficiency).
So, it would take 15 drones of that size for one C-130. These drones are much simpler and easier to build and thus cheaper than even small Cesna, thus 15 of them would be at least ~10x cheaper than one C-130.
Dropping 15 loads of 1+ ton water instead of one 16 ton load seems to be better in most cases as the fire line isn't a straight line, and the large plane like C-130 has to maneuver, etc. while flying low over the fire and being subjected to the fire draft, wind gusts, etc.
The 15 drones can drop those 15 loads of 1 ton using dive-bomber style - impossible for C-130 or any other air tanker currently in use - thus avoiding that prolonged horizontal low-flying over fire and thus having much less risk/danger form the wind gusts, etc.
I think I (and maybe others) understood 'drone' to mean something closer to quad-copters. Sounds like you're actually proposing something closer to water-filled cruise missiles? Which actually seems like a compelling idea. I'd guess there are some questions around how to make the vehicle recoverable/reusable, or else how to avoid causing more fire than you're putting out when the vehicle splatters against terrain, and even more questions around operating the things (autonomously vs. remotely, launch/recovery, ...).
But I do love the image of a satellite spotting a quarter-acre IR hotspot and firing a dozen USFS Tomahawks filled with with retardant to nip it in the bud.
>I think I (and maybe others) understood 'drone' to mean something closer to quad-copters. Sounds like you're actually proposing something closer to water-filled cruise missiles?
as i said in original post - "not small quadcopters, more like WWII size bombers". I use V1 as a close and real existing example of a drone wrt. size and simplicity/cheapness of construction. Though i think 2x-4x of that size would be more suitable and convenient.
>how to make the vehicle recoverable/reusable
just regular software for a plane type drone. The drone comes, drops the water and returns. Can do it GPS/inertial, AI targeted or remote controlled (like say put a Starlink on it how Ukrainians do it sometimes).
>else how to avoid causing more fire than you're putting out when the vehicle splatters against terrain
while normally the drone would return back, accidental crashes of course unavoidable. You don't have to carry much fuel as the drones can be spread around the state on say a 200km grid. The fuel tank can be made with automatic foam generator or something like this triggered if/when the drone goes down crashing.
it works fine for Ukraine sending drones to the targets 1000 km away (commercial large drones bought from China). And their task is more complex like for example they have to care about flying low to avoid air-defense for example, etc.
there is no issue in detecting. You sweep the area. The IR sources like a tank - pops up like Xmas tree even on relatively cheap IR from 10km (there is a lot of footage from Ukraine war for example). A house fire would easily pop-up even from tens of km. A acre size fire - it would pop-up even on coarse grain IR from space.
I'm pretty sure 20 tons of water would douse a house fire. It would take 10 flights of an F8F Bearcat sized drone. Though the F8F is an overkill built for speed. One can carry 1-2 ton with much simpler plane today for that purpose.
An acre size fire - an acre-inch of water is 100 ton. So 10 drones 10 flights at 1 ton/drone.
For what? I’m familiar with very sensitive IR systems. I’m struggling to see the advantage of having them on drones versus satellites, particularly if the threshold is an entire house is on fire.
>I’m struggling to see the advantage of having them on drones versus satellites
An IR camera on drone can be fine-grain controlled from the ground when needed - say zoom-in from a 100km on something detected in the sweep like even a camp-fire so you can confirm whether it is a starting wildfire or just a camp-fire - that of course requires hardware like on those pricey military drones, yet it is still a pocket change in this context. You can also much easily reroute the drone. Again, if you watch the drone war footage there is a lot of scenarios where satellite wouldn't work.
Detection is not the issue, fires in populated (i.e. costly to burn) areas are dispatched very quickly. All the LA fires were on Watch Duty at 1-5 acres in size. The problem is fighting them at that size, when they're on vertiginous terrain, and winds keep conventional (i.e. manned) aircraft grounded.
Yep firefighting is almost completely useless in remote areas which is where most of these fires start before they grow and threaten residential areas. It’s when they grow out of control away from infrastructure that they become a problem.
A class 1 fire truck (the big red ones used in sub/urban areas) and class 3 wildland off road trucks carry around 500 gallons of water which is a drop in the bucket. Fire hydrants on the other hand can supply 250-750 gallons per minute.
The best they can do is try to create firebreaks using bulldozers and other off road vehicles while preemptively dousing properties with water to defend them, because they’ll usually have road access. Doesn’t do a damn when Santa Ana winds are causing 90mph gusts that throw embers for hundreds of feet.
It's the classic tech cultist mentality, they imagine the world is just like their little code base and it's just a matter of tweaking a few lines to solve the problem.
They're the real world "ignore friction, air resistance, &c." of kids physics exercises books.
I think they’re talking about dousing when it first lights. That isn’t “a dumb person’s idea.” But it is presently beyond our capabilities, to say nothing of the huge privacy problem it would entail.
They're talking about both detecting and dousing. Note they mention two different kinds of drones (a few monitor drones, and then a fleet of drones to deploy and douse). The monitor drones could be practical, we've demonstrated that loitering sensor drones work well in other domains.
Depending on the sensor payload (what it's looking for) and how the data is stored and used, it wouldn't really entail a huge privacy problem unless you show up on IR sensors as well as a fire.
To violate your privacy an IR sensor would have to be able to pick out people (98 degrees Fahrenheit, approx.) and put them on a map. Versus a sensor tuned to an actual fire which is substantially hotter and larger.
> To violate your privacy an IR sensor would have to be able to pick out people (98 degrees Fahrenheit, approx.) and put them on a map.
People aren't the only (or largest hotter-than-background, and maybe not hottest-human-sized) thing on your property that a privacy-violating IR sensor drone might want to detect.
> Versus a sensor tuned to an actual fire which is substantially hotter and larger.
If you want an early-detection sensor for fires, they'll be substantially hotter but not substantially larger than an adult human.
I think the point is to detect fires as early as possible, since putting them out becomes much harder the larger they get. If you can detect a fire when it's human sized, you might be able to put it out with a local drone carrying some co2 fire bombs.
It's also poor fire management practice. California has had 100 years of very aggressive fire suppression that's led to burnable areas being extra-flammable: dry brush, dead material, etc. The wildfires have been much worse the last couple decades because it's catching up to them. These extra-flammable areas burn extra hot, extra fast, and spread much, much more quickly than normal.
Managing wildfire risks mean letting a certain amount burn every year, including deliberately setting fires to create firebreaks and clearing out areas overdue for it. A fleet of drones constantly finding and stopping wildfires in their early stages would do nothing but set the stage for cataclysmic fires down the road.
The reason I said it is a dumb idea is because OP has no idea about the current weather conditions. If the conditions are right, such as tonight when the Santa Ana winds have died down, you don't need fancy drones because firefighters are capable of doing things like this- https://x.com/ArtCandee/status/1877210056493539499
read my other comment to understand why the current retrofitted water-tankers can't be used in high winds while intentionally built drones would still work in much higher winds.
He did not. It would be worth re-reading his comment. He's pointing out that we do have technology that could help with containment: quickly identify fires, communicate their location, and dispatch some local water carriers. He's also surmising that the cost of keeping these active would be less than the cost of damages, which could very well be true.
Something like a Reaper drone, which he specifically mentions, works fine in the wind, as do the water carriers, that fly at hundreds of miles an hour, that have been actively helping this whole time.
I think this is probably all true, but probably not the future since it would require a competent state government who embraces tech.
Putting the cameras on flying platforms actually limits their functionality because the platforms have to be refueled/recharged and rotated out on a constant basis.
Water carriers fly close to the ground and make sharp turns because they need to pick up water and make targeted drops, so they are heavily affected by the wind. The water carriers weren't able to start flying until late this morning/early this afternoon due to the winds being too strong (>75+mph gusts).
You're currently being downvoted, but I'm genuinely curious -- is continuous IR monitoring from the sky an effective way to detect wildfires earlier?
Or are small fires indistinguishable from a million other hot objects, until the point where they get large enough to detect reliably, it's already obvious to everyone on the ground from the smoke?
Yes, it is effective. We have several NASA/NOAA satellites with IR instruments on them that are used for fire detection. These are obviously much more useful for detecting fires that start in very rural areas under moderate conditions. The current crop of fires in LA are all very close to populated areas and spread fast, so satellite mapping wasn't of any use for detection. Also, California in particular has a really great fleet of IR mapping planes that give firefighters and the public much more detailed fire information than the satellite coverage, but when I lived in Oregon where they don't have a similar system, the satellite coverage was often the most up to date information on fire perimeters.
I'm not so sure. In nVidia's keynote, they had an example of small smoke plumes identified as potential fires. If you had a drone hovering over a particular city to monitor fires, it could potentially be an early warning system, no?
And to others that said that the winds are dangerous, do quadcopter drones (which tend to be more stable anyway) have algorithms to account for that?
>And to others that said that the winds are dangerous, do quadcopter drones (which tend to be more stable anyway) have algorithms to account for that?
while they have such algorithms, a quadcopter wouldn't able to achieve needed stability in 100mph wind. A heavy plane would do much better.
The current issue is that all those existing water-carrying planes have to go low over fire - thus wind is a problem - as they can't dive-bomb and can't be retrofitted for that. It is just different types of planes.
A dive-bomber would do much better - would deliver the water precisely from a bit higher altitude and from a much more stable, even in the strong wind, trajectory. An unmannend dive-bomber is even easier, can go for even better trajectories.
The problem is that with these winds and humidity small fires become huge fires before anybody can react. Once they are huge fires, detection isn't the problem.
The problem is not identifying fires. That's the easy part. As I watched the local news last night, I was able to watch (along with the anchors) the real-time growth of the Eaton fire from a tiny fire near the campgrounds into a behemoth. This morning, the local news covered the real-time development of 2 new fires (both were quickly contained).
The problem is fighting fires in steep, mountainous terrain filled with dryed out brush and trees when the winds are so strong (hurricane-strength gusts) that you can't provide any air support. The problem is that the winds were so strong last night and this morning that burning embers in the air could fly to and light structures miles away (which is how most of the current fires in Altadena started).
Los Angeles Fire Department funding was cut by over $23M only a few months ago. The fires are currently being fought by a skeleton crew of remaining fire fighters and volunteers. Can't say if that funding would have prevented it, but cutting it definitely has not helped.
Someone tweeted $23 million .. your linked article (thank you for source) follows that with:
City budget documents show the department’s more than $800 million budget decreased by around $17 million compared to the previous budget cycle.
Which makes the cuts less than %2.12
"Gutted" as a descripter seems extreme and the details that matter are whether these reductions simply trimmed fat, or denied something essential that would have made all the difference here.
I'm not sure why the percentage matters? Whether it's 2% or 20%, it's still millions of dollars that could have been used here. More broadly, why are we cutting fire department budgets when wildfires are becoming more frequent, more intense and a year round phenomenon due to global warming? If you want to trim fat in the government there are much bigger targets to go after than an essential service like firefighting.
It doesn't seem to me that the GP comment is arguing for the cut in funding, but rather that 'gutted' may reasonably imply to many readers that a relatively significant portion of the budget was cut, which would be misleading in this case even if unintentional. The percentage helps put the number into context as at least I would not have an intuitive sense of expected or historical LAFD budget numbers.
(This PDF is great, props to whoever made it for making it so easy and accessible for normal people to read.)
If you look at the pie chart on Page 11, you will see that by far the largest slice of the pie is the police budget. It's 45% of LA County's entire budget, totalling almost $2 billion. The LAPD's budget for one fiscal year is larger than most country's GDPs, yet crime is still rampant in Los Angeles. So that's the first place I would start. You could probably find $23 million sitting between the couch cushions at LAPD's headquarters.
The question is whether quality of life can be improved in the city with a better allocation of the $2 billion dollars.
Some should go to policing, yes, community policing should increase, working the stats should decrease, dedicated mental health professionals should be funded and replace a good number of police interactions, etc.
This is a large and complex topic that deserves better than ankle deep engagement.
My idea is to have [optional] speed limiters. The generalized speed limits are very crude. Setting different speed for [small] parts of roads using signs has its limits. We attempt to fix dangerous spots by design, it is a wonderful art but not perfect. You can probably solve a lot of congestion by raising the maximum speed where it makes sense. It also allows for limited control over how many cars try to uses the same road. Traffic jams become bugs. It can log your speed on different roads, if there is a violation it can be treated like a bug too rather than a violation. If you don't have a limiter you can still move along with traffic. If there is a mark on the license plate it is not going to fast.
Judging by the history of the Los Angeles Police Department and their own gangs, run by members of the department, policemen, getting rid of cops might actually help reduce crime!
"...why are we cutting fire department budgets when wildfires are becoming more frequent..."
If you're going to say we need more money budgeted to the Fire Dept. because fires are becoming frequent and then say in your next breath we need to cut the budget of the Police because crime is becoming more frequent....
For $2B you could save a lot of lives even through the overpriced medical system. With a number this big, whatever you do with $2B has to be way better than saving those lives.
Drastically cutting the police budget is almost certainly a good idea. The problem is that you can't just count everything you take from the police budget as extra money because even though the police aren't able to competently do a lot of the work they are currently being utilized for somebody still needs to do that work and they also have to be paid. At least initially it would require an investment to get a better agency to start handling that stuff.
That said, I'm sure there is plenty of opportunity to cut waste too and in addition to slashing the police budget a great way to recover some tax money being burned by the police would be to clean up the department so that taxpayers aren't on the hook for the millions spent in lawsuits generated by their repeated abuses, screw ups, workplace injustices, etc. Much of that actually would be free money.
no. not really. The spread of the viewline fire was contained, the getty villa was saved, the hurst fire is being contained and they were on the sunset one pretty quickly. There was one in culver city and woodley that they quashed quickly as well. They got the divide fire from igniting angeles national forest and the lidia. The royal fire is about where the 2018 fire was and that was taken down as well today as was the sunswept, freddy, and emma fire.
that's the past 24 hours.
If you've been following this, they've done a fairly amazing job at knocking out maybe a dozen fires in the past day. Many of these had the potential to be giant infernos and you can actively see very clear evidence of them being contained and suppressed as the fire crews responded.
The evacuation orders and rescue operations were also effective and remarkably little life has been lost.
On the contrary, with crime, there's things like the 1992 Watts truce, which is credited with a rapid decline in LA street violence, which happened without law enforcement at all.
So unlike with say fire-fighting, there's empirically more effective strategies for dealing with crime. They do, however, require us to not be ideologically committed to punitive incarceration.
The fire budget is ~800M. Pretty significant by itself.
You keep throwing around this 23M number like a 3% change would make a material impact on 3 fast-spreading huge fires in worst-case-scenario conditions.
What do you think the budget would need to be to handle this? In a scenario that goes deep, such as how water pressure is low because of how much demand is coming from so many hydrants? 100M more? 200M? 500M? 1B?
Is committing to that much more annually the best solution here?
"You keep throwing around this 23M number like a 3% change would make a material impact on 3 fast-spreading huge fires in worst-case-scenario conditions."
Take 23M and tell me how many firefighters that'd hire, plus equipment to support them. then tell me if that equipment would've been sufficient to at least contain the fires instead of having the damage we have now.
Protip as a former Memphis FD Volunteer: Every damn dollar counts.
It was a 17M cut from a greater than $800 million Fire allocation, not 23M. Of that:
> The budget reduction, approved last year by Mayor Karen Bass, was mostly absorbed by leaving many administrative jobs unfilled, but that left about $7 million that was cut from its overtime budget that was used for training, fire prevention, and other key functions
(see up thread peer comment for source)
Further, with a constrained revenue and something like 63% of the entiire state budget going to Police and Fire it appears that the California Fire budget lost out a little to the California Police budget.
There's the arena for fighting this out, a good old badge on badge bar fight over $$$'s.
> totalling almost $2 billion. The LAPD's budget for one fiscal year is larger than most country's GDPs
In case anyone was curious, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... suggests that ~17 countries have a GDP of less than $2 billion per year. Seeing as how there are 193+ countries, this means that the LAPD budget exceeds the GDP of fewer than 10% of countries. (The median country GDP is ~$50 billion per year.)
For some extra context: while these 17 countries include some very poor countries, the primary reason that they have such small GDPs is their small population. Their combined population is approximately the same as the city of Los Angeles.
> It's 45% of LA County's entire budget, totalling almost $2 billion. The LAPD's budget for one fiscal year is larger than most country's GDPs, yet crime is still rampant in Los Angeles. So that's the first place I would start.
That's like arguing that since Los Angeles public school's budget is $18.8 billion[1], yet scores are still poor[2], we should cut the public school budget.
How much of the city budget does the LAPD need for crime to finally go down then? 60%? 80%? Maybe all of it, replace the mayor with the police commissioner and run the city like a quasi-military dictatorship?
Unlike policing, where clear alternatives to it like mental healthcare, drug rehabilitation and social welfare programs exist, there isn't really an alternative to the firefighting service for stopping fires.
A smartass could say that national, state, and local legislatures could eliminate crime with a stroke of the pen - no money required. Just eliminate laws.
Meanwhile, people aren't necessarily concerned with the crime rate, per se. There are crimes we care about more than others, namely, violent personal crimes: muggings, felonious assault, rape, and murder. Close on its heels are property crimes: breaking and entering, vandalism, and robbery.
Given the crimes the majority of the people actually care about, can we say that the LA crime rate has not gone down?
Meanwhile, 20% of the hydrants ran dry in the Palisades. Increased LAFD funding isn't going to change anything about that. This isn't even getting into whether it's reasonable for a municipal government to be prepared to battle a wildfire enveloping an entire region. I don't think there's a city in the United States that could take that on.
Agreed. I don't see anything from a google search that suggests that they cut the number of firefighters, either.
Hyperbolic statements like "gutted" are just meant to get the knee jerk, frothing at the mouth "retweet" kind of reaction, and it seems to be being successful at that.
The problem with that though is that the overall budget includes big ticket items like pensions and overtime. And cuts often directly are from live services. So even though it’s 2% of the overall budget, the cut could still be significant to the availability of firefighters and crucial things like response times.
> The budget reduction, approved last year by Mayor Karen Bass, was mostly absorbed by leaving many administrative jobs unfilled, but that left about $7 million that was cut from its overtime budget that was used for training, fire prevention, and other key functions.
> The variable overtime hours, called "V-Hours" within the LAFD, were used to pay for FAA-mandated pilot training and helicopter coordination staffing for wildfire suppression, the memo said.
"Without this funding, pilot compliance and readiness are jeopardized, and aerial firefighting capabilities are diminished," it said. "Changes to the Air Operations Section impact the Department's ability to adhere to current automatic and mutual aid agreements, provide air ambulance service, and quickly respond to woodland fires with water dropping helicopters."
> The memo also highlighted other programs that would suffer under the cuts, including the Disaster Response Section, which funds the bulldozer teams that cut breaks and control lines around wildfires, and the Critical Incident Planning and Training Section, which develops plans for major emergencies.
I have a serious interest in emergency service budgets (in Western Australia, although personnel from here do travel to California to assist in our off season).
So.. cheers for the update and context, that does highlight a 'loss' of $7 million in training alocation from an over 800 million budget.
Do 'we' hold the state of California responsible here for allocating less overall, or the LA Fire Chief for perhaps not making the best use of what was allocated to them.
I'm an outsider and I'm avoiding throwing shade, just highlighting the complexity of budget issues.
If the blame goes to the state then attention should be paid to the page 6 water flow from revenue to expenditures - if Fire needs more then Police(?) must get less .. etc.
The blame starts with the mayor and top brass of the city government. The literal job description involves running the city based on money they have, including prioritizing what’s important. Fire departments and emergency services are the last departments that need budget cuts. Obviously some blame does also fall on the fire chief, but fire departments are usually well run and from the looks of it, there seems to have been an effort to absorb most of the cost cutting in vacant admin positions. Whether there was an opportunity to make cuts elsewhere from the FD’s pov, we’d need to look at the data more closely.
> The literal job description involves running the city based on money they have, including prioritizing what’s important.
Sure, and to that end the Police and Fire together make up in excess of 60% of the entire budget.
Should all income go to the Fire Dept? (Obviously not) .. again, I'm an outsider, but from a helicopter perspective there already a good sized portion of the budget going towards Fire as a priority already. Should some of the Police budget be cut and redirected?
One a portion of total available has been allocated it does rather fall to the Fire Chief to make the most of what has been granted.
The challenge appears to be how to make what's available go the furtherest.
Here, not California, we make considerable use of volunteers .. well equiped and large well trained volunteers with solid liability insurance should they toast themselves and backed by a professional full time core.
I dare say similar things happen in California, I note the use of the prison population in fire fighting.
It's a tough problem domain, not helped by all the outside hot takes on twitter and elsewhere that casually claim budgets are being gutted, etc.
>Should some of the Police budget be cut and redirected?
I'm as far from this situation as you can be, but yes, absolutely, it's ridiculous how much money is set on fire on ineffective budget items, while at the same time AFAIU the police force is not really held responsible to do its job.
> Sure, and to that end the Police and Fire together make up in excess of 60% of the entire budget.
Of the LA City Fiscal Year 2025 (July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025) of $12.90 billion, $1.98 billion (15.36%) is Police and $820 million (6.36%) is Fire. Combined, this is less than 22%, not in excess of 60%.
Agree with everything you have said in this thread, just want to also draw attention to the fact that there are 2400 fewer firefighters in California because California has rightfully reduced the amount of inmate firefighters. I don't know whether they were counted on for these emergency situations.
I seriously hope the rural WA fire season this year doesn't match California or we're going to be for lack of a better word fucked.
We just had a record dry year followed by a warm and wet start to summer which has caused a bunch of new growth, thats going to die and dry come Feb and i'll be keeping a go bag in my car.
I recommend to everyone to get out of cities and counties that have large pension liabilities. You will be less safe, your kids will be educated more poorly, and your quality of public services will be whittled away because the money is going to retirees and debt.
E.g. Retirement benefits and debt service took up 43% of Chicago’s budget in 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/opinion/chicago-illinois-.... A decade ago my wife and I decided to abandon our efforts to move back to the city (where we went to law school) because we saw this coming.
I moved to unincorporated exurban Maryland. The state government is a mess, but it’s mostly preoccupied dealing with Baltimore. Our county is great. Good schools with modest per student spending, the friendliest police I’ve ever interacted with. Even our county landfill is one of the cleanest and most orderly facilities I’ve ever seen. Nicer than most of New York City for sure.
I'd imagine that a lot of the people reading this work in tech, where pretty much every company has instituted return-to-office mandates.
And of course, even if you were willing to spend several hours a day commuting, if you're in California exurban areas aren't exactly safer from wildfires.
That is unfortunate for them. But let me tell you how amazing our landfill is. To me, it exemplifies the best of America. It’s so clean and organized, run by orderly, polite, and helpful people. Every time I have to throw out some bulky items, the experience gives me confidence in our local government. My parents, who grew up in Bangladesh, are also amazed by it. Our local county clerk’s office is amazing too. I needed to get one of my kid’s birth certificates reprinted. I went down the street, to the basement of some sober and cost-effective building that was built in the 1980s, and had a new copy in 20 minutes.
I grew up in northern VA in the 1990s and I thought that the whole of America (besides NYC obviously) was like that. Super clean, orderly, and efficient. Then I lived in Wilmington Delaware, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC, and it reminded me too much of the third world.
> It's not like suburbs aren't sitting on financial bombs either.
Reminds me of a video (part of series), titled "Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme". Previous HN submission and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32495647
TLDR: Suburban and certain commercial development is money-loser because tax-revenue is way under the long-term costs of the infrastructure to support it, and already denser areas (including the housing of poorer people) are subsidizing spread-out/richer zones.
This is just false, and a quick look at any municipal budget is enough to confirm it. Infrastructure costs are small fraction of spend of any municipality. It’s typically under 10%. Making infra spend twice aa efficient will only increase ability to spend by 5%, which is equivalent to two years of revenue growth. The growth Ponzi scheme people say that it’s all deferred maintenance and in long term it will collapse, but it simply has not happened anywhere, even in places where suburban development pattern has existed for three quarters of a century.
My impression has been that Strong Towns' analysis of the growth Ponzi scheme was correct, or at least not obviously incorrect, in its original context, which was watching small towns far away from large cities become hollowed out by people moving outside the city limits into unincorporated land. If you actually look at the examples on the original Strong Towns' site, you will see that they're largely not suburbs or even exurbs of major cities.
But both that site and its readers have tried to apply that conclusion to suburbs of major cities, which is ludicrously wrong to anyone that actually knows anything about the causes of municipal bankruptcy (almost always due to pension obligations , and often in a vicious cycle with high taxes raised to pay for pensions that drive away residents).
Local governance in general is FUBAR. Here in CA, housing supply policies from the legislature have gotten a lot better in recent years, but construction still gets bogged down at the local level.
Most budgeting should be moved to the state level, IMO. It's crazy for Western Springs, Atherton and Beverly Hills to waste money while Chicago and Oakland fall behind. If some magnates decide to move to Texas as a result, good riddance. The dependence on property taxes is particularly perverse, as it incentivizes the housing pyramid scheme.
Why would you want more decisions to be moved up to the state level, where officials will be elected by a low-information statewide electorate, instead of a local level, where there’s at least hope of an informed electorate that’ll hold the government accountable? That’s certainly been my experience living in a well-run county in Maryland.
This guy is my county executive: https://www.aacounty.org/pittmanandfriends. I trust him to make sure our trash gets picked up on time and to keep the community safe. I certainly don’t trust the Maryland government to do that.
It's not so much an informed electorate as a rent-seeking one.[1] The regulatory capture [2] of obscure local boards is much easier than that of state agencies. Voters who are part of a special interest group are much more aware of what and who they're voting for. The prime example are landlords and homeowners. They have managed to strangle the supply of housing to inflate prices, creating the crisis we're in now.
The home ownership rate in my county is 75%, so “landlords and homeowners” is the vast majority of the population, not a “special interest group.”
And your point doesn’t contradict mine. The homeowners in my county are highly informed and conscientious voters, and their decisions are good for most of the people who already live in the county.
I agree in certain circumstances, including land use, you want to make decisions at the state level. But for most government services, like education, policing, local roads, etc., I want Kim who runs our HOA to be voting on who makes those decisions and hassling those officials to keep them accountable.
It's still a special interest group, even if it happens to be a large one. It's orchestrating decisions that effectively siphon money from non-members (e.g. renters and young families), and in proportion to the number of properties each member owns no less.
In any case, we don't seem to disagree all that much. My original point was more legislative than executive in nature. Local executive accountability is desirable, provided that the budgeting and rulemaking were made uniform state-wide. Education already works that way.
The entire state of New Jersey exists to pay pensions. The 2025 general budget is $55 billion, $7 billion went to funding the pension for one year, again.
Unfortunately that 2% was the part going to actual firefighters. The other 98% was administrative overhead. Both remaining firefighters are spread thin.
Regarding what was actually cut, do the cuts include the firefighting equipment sent to Ukraine? Sounds like that was mostly hoses and extra PPE, not major force-multiplier systems needed for this type of fire: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/vital-la-firefighting...
And why is there apparently no water in the fire hydrants? Something about the reservoir not being refilled appropriately?
> why is there apparently no water in the fire hydrants?
They emptied the tanks fighting the fire.
From the article in the GP comment:
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in a Wednesday press conference refuted claims, including those made by Caruso, that water tanks in Pacific Palisades weren’t fully filled ahead of the fire.
Departmental officials said the three tanks in the area were filled to capacity with around 1 million gallons of water each, but those supplies were tapped out by early Wednesday morning.
“We ran out of water and the first tank about 4:45pm yesterday, we ran out of water on the second tank about 8:30pm and the third tank about 3am this morning,” said Janisse Quiñones, CEO of LADWP.
Three million gallons is a few large swimming pools of water. Is there no way to draw from a larger source? For comparison, the Hollywood reservoir is 2.5 billion gallons.
I'm in Australia, while I cannot personally answer your question wrt these specific tanks I do imagine there was some means by which they were filled to the brim.
Thanks for the info. So is the take-away here that the tanks are under-specified? Should they have maybe 10x the total capacity? Have there been other indications over the years that tank capacity might be a problem with a large enough fire?
Not my country .. but .. I did read that the Fire Chiefs wanted more tanks but NIMBY resistance prevailed.
Fire tanks are generally "slow to fill* and "fast to empty" in relative terms - they form a local cache for rapid drawdown at rates much faster than "normal" water system draw.
There's also strong element in twitter and US news of petty critic for politic points .. "The hydrants are empty and there's no water" might be that kind of complaint, eg: "we emptied the tanks here holding the fire front back, the front has now moved, the tanks are now refilling" might well be the source of what became a damning meme "the hydrants are empty".
Actually we don’t have that information. Often when governments talk about budget cuts they already are pricing it in real terms, or against projected budget increase.
Unfortunately we have a news article reporting a tweet.
Inflation in CA over the past 3 years is likely 50% (my personal estimation for necessities is over 100%) If you cut 2%, you're really cutting it by 52%. There's no way someone will want to work for peanuts. It has been gutted.
"Gutted" sure, but yes it's absolutely possible to go from functional staffing to totally non-functional with a 2% budget reduction depending on the org's structure and where the budget cuts come from.
The city of Los Angeles and the Mayor have been requesting volunteers from the public, due to lack of manpower. According to their website [1] the salary for firefighters in Los Angeles is $85,000 to $125,000 (rounded). Assuming the average ($105,000), that amount of funding could have paid 161 firefighters salaries for the entire year, not including benefits (unsure how that is priced in), and much more than that if they were part-time which most of the force are.
I really don't understand how SoCal and California residents in general find the the state's response to wildfires in the last decade to be acceptable. Not only have fire departments seen cutbacks, but so has the forestry needed for preventative measures.
What really bugs me is what I find to be a disinterest and lack of belief in vastly expanding the fleet of water dropping aircraft. Letting fires burn to the extent that they have been isn't cheap, to put it lightly. Somehow, a state that is one of the largest economies in the world can't or won't expand its aerial response such that fires of the scale we are seeing become a thing of the past. With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress.
I can anticipate being told this is not possible or too expensive, which is what everyone I know seems to believe, but I don't buy it.
If anyone ever runs for governor and makes my proposal their single issue platform, I will vote for them regardless of political party or whether it is truly feasible up to the extent that I am imagining. Fuck wildfires.
Buying more firefighting equipment is like building a dam higher and higher every year as the reservoir fills up, instead of letting it drain out gradually. The natural cycle in California is for there to be periodic fires, but due to the policy of suppression, they haven't happened for 70 years or more, so now when they do, they are these massive infernos.
Better and better fire suppression tech over the years that enables a quicker response, like aircraft, satellite monitoring, remote video cameras, etc, has just served to make the problem worse in the long run.
That's not quite what's going on with these particular fires. They weren't caused by excessive fire suppression. Most of the terrain involved is chaparral rather than forest. The previous two years had relatively high rainfall which caused a lot of fast brush growth. This season has had much less rainfall so everything dried out, creating tinderbox conditions. In those areas we have to rely more on clearing defensible space around structures.
It's not a binary choice between expanding aircraft and doing nothing. I have seen some convincing arguments that firefighting aircraft are mostly for show against large fires. Essentially the amount of water/chemicals they can move is trivial compared to land approaches, and the cost is significant. That doesn't mean that nothing should be done, just that the money should be spent on more effective measures.
Lord knows I'm not going to defend the competence of the CA state govt and I'm sure they could be protecting against wildfires better, but I don't know that railing about the number of aircraft involved will help anything.
Essentially the amount of water/chemicals they can move is trivial compared to land approaches
I'm sure that's correct for many geographies, but most of this fire is burning on steep mountainsides and in canyons without road access, or an occasional dirt road and no water connection. With the amount of wind, probably nothing could be done, land or air, once this started.
Even the populated areas in the Palisades fire have roads that are remarkably poor. A lot of them are windy, with negligible visibility around corners, and are barely a single lane. I doubt that a fire truck can get through many of them easily even under ideal conditions.
California has a problem with overly aggressive fire suppression over the last 100 years creating a buildup of extra-flammable burnable areas. Literally, you need to let a certain amount of burning go on, continuously over time, so that the burnable areas aren't over-fueled tinderboxes that get very hot, very fast.
Part of this is using controlled burns to mitigate the buildup, another thing that's been under-resourced in California.
I had a discussion at a B and B with a guy who flew F-16s in the USAF, then U2s once they were going to promote him out of flying. He'd just left the service and had retrained to fly Grumman water bombers for Calfire. The problem as I've described it is apparently well-known in the wildfire fighting community in Californa.
That's true in general but not really applicable to these fires. It's mostly chaparral that's burning, and most of the dry brush has built up over only a few years — not 100. We had two years of heavy rains that caused a lot of brush growth, and then this season it all dried out.
Controlled burns in that terrain are impractical because there are too many structures nearby and a controlled burn can turn into an uncontrolled burn in minutes. A more realistic approach would be expanding defensible space and culling non-native flora.
Interesting. Wikipedia [1] also says that these biomes are supposed to have canopy fires rather than smaller burns. I'm a bit skeptical (seems awefully convenient), but it looks like the 500 year climate record supports this idea [2].
How much water do you need to dump enough to saturate all the territory that would need to be covered with wind gusts up to 100MPH? (How do you fly and aim the water in those winds?)
Wildfires are obviously not new, if you're saying the fault is of the administration of the last 10 years, how do you explain that the earlier government for the fifty years prior ALSO failed to see and implement your "just dump the water everywhere from planes" approach to the fires in the 90s, say?
We're, what, 13 years from terrible financials for the state and local governments that forced widespread major cuts and furloughs and reduction in hours? Everyone who's been hit by those can point to negative outcomes somewhere or other (crime is up! education achievement stats are down! wait times are up! etc) but there's no free lunch here to just have avoided any cutbacks in any area.
Wildfires, unfortunately, have a way of "not caring in the slightest about what people think of them." Throw in the winds of southern CA, and a wildfire can go from "freshly started" to "a few thousand acres" by the time anyone manages to get their boots on and equipment started. You don't fight wildfires in 60-100mph winds. Firebombers can't fly in those winds (or at night, since it's close to terrain), and even if they did, that sort of wind will scatter your drop before it has a chance to do anything useful.
> With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress.
Great, you've just put out the fire, and kicked the can for next time. Even if it did work that way, it doesn't fix the root problem, which is simply:
Many western forests need to burn. Not in the sort of uncontrolled canopy fires we see with this sort of situation, but a lower, "clean the brush out, candle off some weaker trees, and open up the seeds" sort of fire. The problem is, for most of the past century, we haven't been allowing them to burn. Wildfire fighting in the US really ramped up and became a capable force with the post-WWII surplus - Jeeps, bombers that could be bought for nothing and converted to fire bombers, cheap spotting aircraft. So, for about 80 years, we've been fighting fires - or, explained differently, "We've been letting fire load build up for 80 years." When those areas light, with most of a century worth of buildup, they go off like a bomb, and your option in high winds is to "get out of the way."
You cannot allow endless fuel growth in a forest without consequences - and we're out of runway on that. All the aerial firefighting in the world won't fix that problem, because it's not the problem that needs fixing.
That’s a political hot potato in California right now. CALFIRE has been advocating for prescribed burns for decades but it doesn’t have jurisdiction over all the lands owned by the federal government and the 35 California Air Districts mired in local politics are responsible for issuing the permits for those burns. Lots of NIMBYs who pressure the district boards to withhold those permits for air quality reasons.
There’s hope that this series of events will cause them to reevaluate but prescribed burns wouldn’t have helped in the Palisades anyway.
The wind is too high for aerial firefighting. You could have every firefighting plane in the world in LA right now and it wouldn't matter. None of them can fly.
Do you have some reason to believe more planes is the best allocation of resources?
California recently acquired several C-130H firefighting aircraft. These are extremely expensive platforms and while they're useful for fast response in some scenarios they're hardly a complete solution. For these particular fires the winds were often too strong for air tankers to fly. Effective fire prevention and suppression requires a variety of different solutions. It would be foolish to focus on a single issue.
Not an expert: I think one of the issues is that there's only a handful[0] of satellites with the appropriate infrared instruments, which means that any given point of Earth is only sampled at a multiple-hour cadence.
It's a generic problem for any sensing problem that's real-time + low-orbit.
I speculate adding instruments to large LEO constellations, en masse, would solve that problem—though I have no clue if that's practical. (Perhaps if the same instrument were doing other kinds of real-time imaging, you could piggyback wildfire alerts on that datastream, and the get the functionality essentially for free?)
edit: More info:
- "Geostationary satellite sensors view the same area of Earth’s surface at all times while polar-orbiting sensors, such as MODIS and VIIRS, typically view the same area of Earth’s surface twice daily. Consequently, geostationary satellite sensors can provide repeated observations on a sub-hourly basis, making it possible to detect fires which may not be detected at longer temporal intervals. Geostationary satellites provide data at 10-15 minute intervals, so they can detect more fire events and capture their growth and change. However, the spatial resolution of geostationary satellite data is coarser and therefore less sensitive to small fires."
> by a skeleton crew of remaining fire fighters and volunteers.
I think you're missing a major contributor which is California's prison population [0]. Prisoners getting paid around $3-$5 a day make up ~1/3 of California's wildfire fighting service. Maybe you consider them to be "volunteers" but that seems to be missing some important context.
As I understand it, no. Most counties require that you have an EMT license to be a firefighter, and many people with conviction histories are barred from getting EMT licenses (Title 22 § 100214.3(c)). There was a bill a few years ago that allowed CalFire specifically to hire people as firefighters with an alternate credential that doesn't have a blanket-ban on people with conviction histories.
There aren't a lot of opportunities to earn money in prison. Having money in prison is important. Although having work time credits are more important as those earn you an early release.
Slave labor (which is permitted under the 13th amendment as punishment for a crime) undercuts the wages that you would pay in the market hurting both the prisoners (as they aren't paid appropriately or given appropriate medical care for injuries, etc) and the would-be non-prison firefighters.
Worse, you generally can't be a firefighter once you get out of prison as they don't hire ex-convicts. Consequently you're not even learning a useful job skill. Note that this hard-ban was relaxed in California specifically in 2020 under AB2147 (allowing prisoners who participated in firefighting programs to apply to have their records expunged in certain cases) -- but applies elsewhere in the US.
I'm not informed on the specifics on these cases, but I generally view that (many/most) prisoners have a debt to society for breaking the social contract and serving the community by making it safer is a generally positive activity. I'm happy to adjust my opinion on this topic if provided evidence that inmate firefighters either are unsafe for the community or have worse outcomes than other inmates.
I find it curious that some people here consider it as slavery ?
It is an optional activity if I understand right.
It seems rewarding to do a training to become a firefighter and join the team, than to idle in prison.
It is a volunteer role. Many people in the world become volunteers in the firefighters, a lot are unpaid. They do it for reasons beyond money (making friends, feeling useful, helping people, etc).
A prisoner may get some carrot as a reward (like less served time) but at the end, they all benefit.
> I'm not informed on the specifics on these cases, but I generally view that (many/most) prisoners have a debt to society for breaking the social contract and serving the community by making it safer is a generally positive activity.
Yes -- but -- by undercutting the wages you would have to pay people outside, it lowers the pay of the non-prison laborers. This hurts that community.
You can achieve the same result by paying them prevailing wage. This has the extra benefit of giving them some saved up money to start a new life when they get out, helping them avoid falling back into a life of crime to make ends meet.
> You can achieve the same result by paying them prevailing wage. This has the extra benefit of giving them some saved up money to start a new life when they get out, helping them avoid falling back into a life of crime to make ends meet.
I don’t see how you can do this, because you turn punishment into privilege. If the way to firefighter pay is through a jail cell you create all kind of problems around perverse incentives.
Because no one is actually seriously proposing to pay prisoners the same rate as real firefighters; we just shouldn't be using prisoners. Would you allow prisoners to volunteer as teachers, nurses, engineers? Why is the market for firefighters the only one that gets free volunteers from this pool?
But it's not just hurting the firefighter market, lots of people just have issues with using prisoners as slaves.
> Would you allow prisoners to volunteer as teachers, nurses, engineers?
If part of their job description was the equivalent of clearing brush/cutting fire lines in emergencies, I might consider it.
> Why is the market for firefighters the only one that gets free volunteers from this pool?
Do you have another source of willing, not-risk-averse, physically fit and competent people that are not doing anything else, know each other already, can be there ready to work together at a moment’s notice, and won’t bail partway through to go fill an instacart order?
My concern only becomes an issue if prisons put them on parity with actual trained firefighters (as was being suggested, but is not the case). Presently they are not, and they are not used that way. They usually do not do the same types or level of work.
I think the first step is people educating themselves even marginally on the topic of discussion before proposing policy changes.
And if the way to cheap labor for risky, highly needed manual labor is through incarcerating people, you create all kind of problems around perverse incentives.
This also has to be balanced against the perverse incentive to construct bullshit laws to justify mass incarceration to get more prison slaves. Not a hypothetical either; this actually happened, because the US Constitution actually says very little about human rights.
Yep, and just to drive home the point the official motto of the California Conservation Corps, which does a lot fire fighting and prevention in the state, is “Hard work, low pay, miserable conditions, and more.”[0]
I get that the motto is somewhat tongue in cheek but still, slave labor does tend to distort markets.
this is disinformation. CalFIRE at the State of California had a 10x budget increase in the 2020 time frame under Gov Newsom. LA County has budgets larger than small countries. Fire suppression is a priority.
These fires have spread quickly and it is true that fire fighters are spread thin.
Exactly. There's only so much they can do. They couldn't fly aircraft. Spread to a huge area rapidly, the area isn't even that easy to get in/out of on a good day. Add in another couple fires that also rapidly spread and it really doesn't matter how much money they had, you can't just bring on firefighters that fast.
I'm glad to see all the aircraft are working the fires and hopefully they'll make some good progress before night.
Never allowing the forest to burn, which is a part of its natural cycle, is a form a drastic climate change for the forest.
Proper management of the forest means selecting a time to do these burns. If we don't select a time, mother nature will select one for us.
Yes, global temperature rise is real, and could potentially have had some effect on the fire. Completely disrupting the natural cycle of the forest is a much bigger deal.
I was curious to learn why we "never allow the forest to burn", given that Cal Fire for example has a whole department of Prescribed Fire. Sounds like the problem is lawyers and property owners:
> One of the primary obstacles to increasing the pace and scale of beneficial fire use in California is the difficulty for practitioners to obtain adequate liability coverage, although the rates and losses from escapes are very low.
> Sounds like the problem is lawyers and property owners:
Some of them might change their mind now that they’re owners of some acres of charcoal.
You cannot not choose a time - it’ll get chosen for you. Schedule should be known, cost included in taxes, risks known when property was acquired, liabilities limited in state or federal regulation. Weather doesn’t care about lawyers.
> Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, slammed Bass in an X post claiming the mayor slashed the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget, despite the high risk of wildfires in the region, and raised questions about reports that some fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades had run dry.
It's kind of rich that a local billionaire would complain about this. I'm going to guess that the $23M was cut due to budget shortfalls. Maybe if the billionaires and multi-millionaires in the area were willing to pay their fair share that wouldn't have happened.
Is your opinion that extremely wealthy don't try to reduce their tax share as much as possible, either through clever accounting on their current year taxes or by influencing politicians/policies to lower their taxes directly?
Why do most middle class earners pay more than their millionaire and billionaire counterparts as a percentage? Sure you might say W2 tax rate is higher than capital gains, but why is that the case?
Please explain how they get next to nothing? We have a pretty damn functional society - police, firemen, judges, law and order, a military, roads, and the ability for them to do business and get richer. Society entails that those able to provide more, so that's just part of it. We ask able bodied men to most serve on the front lines of our military, mothers most often play the role of raising our youth, we are have a role to play and in return we get live petty peacefully.
because i am a human who sees the inherent value of all humanity, divorced from their wealth. i see wealth hoarding as an addiction, a sickness, and a danger to others.
Soon-Shiong has aligned with Trump, and is openly forcing LA Times journalists to serve his interests. Usually a major newspaper owner would try to avoid the appearance of bias or of undermining the objectivity of the news.
It's of course terrible what's happening in LA. But we're talking about a rich area in a rich city in a state that is very rich and I just read an article about some pretty famous people that I've heard off losing their houses that collectively probably have a net worth hundreds of millions (or individually in some cases) that lost their houses. They'll be fine, financially at least. You'd struggle to find a richer place in the world.
Some things that crossed my mind:
- Affected people probably spend way more on personal security, lawyers, dog grooming, plastic surgery, etc. than on fire safety in that area. I.e. all the extravagant nonsense that spoiled millionaires in LA and these areas in LA specifically are famous for spending their money on. I watched the new beverly hills cop movie on Netflix over the summer (not amazing) that makes fun of that specifically.
- Given the string of wild fires specifically in LA in the last few years, how is it that they are not more prepared for this and what genius decided that now was a good moment to cut spending on the fire department? And who voted that clown into office? Oh wait that would be the same people that live there that donate money to all sorts of causes by the bucket load.
That doesn't help the people there right now. And I'm sure there are some people caught up in this that are less well off, which totally sucks. But I'm sure charity events will be organized and I'm sure there will be quite a few millionaires attending and performing at these events.
But my point is that they don't exactly have a lot of excuses for not organizing the most awesome, best funded and equipped fire department in the world. Also, on the prevention side there is probably a thing or two that could have been done to e.g. clear out areas of bone dry bushes, wood, etc. that are well known fire hazards. I don't think there's a lot of ignorance on that front that needs addressing.
also, it has been known for quite some time how damaging the near total reliance on cars and the associated infrastructure at that scale is. If you do absolutely nothing about climate change when you have the most resources to do so, then I cannot feel sorry about anything that's happening.
This whole subthread should be printed out, preserved, exhibited in museums about the spread of misinformation among gullible Silicon Valley commenters, but also deleted from this site. It's an embarrassment.
I’ve used #FireMappers 3.1 by NAPSG Foundation, found at https://napsg.maps.arcgis.com/. Would provide the full link, but the app value in the copied link is suspiciously long.
Palisades started Tuesday morning in someone's backyard. The Eaton fire started last evening near one of the campgrounds. The Hearst fire started late last night around 10pm (suspected cause was a vehicle fire from an accident that spread to the side of the road).
Hey there, do you have a source for the backyard? I'm not questioning it. I'd like to know the origin and what actually occurred in that yard to cause it.
Following up on this:
- No source given for the Lidia fire that started in the Angeles National Forest this afternoon.
- A specific house address was given on-air for the Sunset Fire in the Hollywood Hills that started this evening at around 5:40pm. The ABC7 copter crew had actually spotted the fire within the first minute or two of it forming (while they were trying to get in position to cover the Palisades fire after refueling), and (ABC and NBC) broadcast the first hour of the fire's growth (and provided live updates on new flare-ups). They may well have saved Hollywood from burning down.
There were several more fires that started on Thursday. Due to the unusual nature of these fires, authorities suspect arson. A person of interest was arrested for one of these fires after being observed trying to start a fire.
Actually, that was my first natural reaction. (Though I do live in the neighborhood of Russia, here probability of foul play is much higher up the list)
A "visit" or two are often all that is necessary to convince folks to pay protection money to gangs. Protectors always have a perverse incentive to remind people what they need protection from.
> With that, Shorty said, “Say, Ladd, why don’t you have Floyd and Carl here set a forest fire?”
> “Hey, just a minute!” Carl Abeyta stiffened self-righteously and stifled an urge to lunge across the room at Shorty. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
> “Setting a fire,” Shorty said calmly. “Christ, that’s one of the few ways those men down there have earned a living around here. I know of a dozen guys from town, the past twenty years, who've gone up and set the trees on fire. For crissakes, man, it’s—what is the pay now? Two-fifty an hour around the clock? Three dollars? And the Forest Service—God bless Smokey the Bear!—packs in potatoes and all the fresh-killed beef you can eat. You want to get this town’s mind off that beanfield, light the forest and hire all the heavies to put it out. And keep lighting little fires here and there—”
Whenever the media announces "extremely high chance of fire" in Australia, there is always at least one fire started. I think maybe we would be better off leaving it off the news.
Some fires are started by glass bottles causing the dry grass underneath to lit up, and then the wind takes care of the rest. But that's really, really rare.
It's most often someone doing something really stupid.
Tell people they can't come out of their house and they go stir crazy to go out... Tell people it's an absolute fire ban and the situation is extremely critical and it only takes 1 nut bag out of the entire population... The odds are high.
why did no one warn us every minute of every day for the last 10 years?!
But fret not, the right wing on Twitter is taking to blaming a minuscule water diversion to protect an endangered fish for the hydrants running dry.
Not the fact that we built a sprawling megalopolis with ultra-expensive infrastructure maintenance costs... in a desert... where we use the vast majority of local water to feed cows...
10 years? An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, that's nearly two decades and Gore didn't invent climate change any more than he invented the Internet.
It is ironic that LA is one of the oldest fossil industry originations, Pacific Palisades probably includes a lot of old LA oil money driving gas guzzling Range Rovers, and that the fire surrounds the Getty Villa of the OG Getty Oil Company.
'It will continue to happen until people realize the true root cause which is bad leadership... or continue blaming "climate change" and giving up because we're not changing how much China pollutes the air anytime soon. I would rather at least elect better leaders who have their priorities in order.
So you're saying you want leaders who address climate change. Bad leaders exacerbate climate change.
As the planet becomes hotter and drier, you will see more fires, unless you address climate change.
China makes all your stuff, including bibles, that's why there is more air pollution there. China is rapidly expanding it's renewables deployment and that will improve their air quality and resilience..
Climate change is not a variable in this scenario. Even if that's the actual cause it won't be changing anytime soon. The problem has to be dealt with anyway, and there are a lot of people saying it's due to lack of cleaning up the dry brush, not to mention taking preventative measures with water being ready to be used when it does happen.
This isn't a new problem or even a surprise. We had fires in NorCal the last few years already, and the people in charge are not afraid of losing their job, so there's no accountability until people start threatening them with a change.
Small wildfires happens all the time and in fact natural in that region. So much for wanting nature to return to its course, plenty of plants rely on the natural wildfire occurring. But we can't let that happen because we need to build fancy houses here.
Guess whats gonna happen in another 5 years? You're right, another fire. I am pre-ordering my thoughts and prayers right now. Maybe build your house in mud next time?
Its not my problem if you build your house in the literal line of fire. Climate change is still a thing but we can't blame everything on it.
The Santa Ana winds and the accompanying raging wildfires have been a part of the ecosystem of the Los Angeles Basin for over 5,000 years, dating back to the earliest habitation of the region by the Tongva and Tataviam peoples.
Honest question in good faith: For those that use the reductionist argument of global warming / climate change for every natural disaster, what do they expect to happen if we hypothetically cut all greenhouse gas production to zero? Some kind of climate stasis Garden of Eden scenario?
Imagine a steadily bubbling surface of mixed quasi fluid materials, every thing moves, none the less a pattern of long term "stability" exists wherein various regions have behaviours fixed within local constraints.
California has "behaved" in some manner for twenty thousand years, as has the Pacific North West and the Great lake regions to the north east (in central north america).
Now that the sea+land surface layer has more energy thanks to increased insulation above various parts of the globe are bubbling along more than they have the past; wet forests that have never experienced fire are drying out in a manner previously rare and having fires not experienced in human history, drier areas with a fire cycle (California, Australia) are experiencing more intense and more frequent fire events.
> if we hypothetically cut all greenhouse gas production to zero ..
it will take a lag time for the human added insulation to disapear from the atmosphere, when a new stable equilibrium is reached the energy driving the additional bubbling seen so far to date will be gone and the former equilibrium (of dynamic stability) would resume .. for a few thousand years.
> Honest question in good faith: For those that use the reductionist argument of global warming / climate change for every natural disaster, what do they expect to happen if we hypothetically cut all greenhouse gas production to zero? Some kind of climate stasis Garden of Eden scenario?
I think it's more innocent than that and that your characterization is a strawman. Climate change is real and scary. This type of fire might not be abnormal in LA on generational timescales but it is the kind of thing we would expect to see as a consequence of climate change. So even if this type of fire would have happened anyway it is a real manifestation of a real thing people are rightly concerned about. It's also possible that climate change (and/or the politicization of climate change!) made this fire worse.
The idea of a stable ecosystem is a myth. Yes, in hundreds of thousands and millions of years the region will change dramatically. The difference between natural variability and instability is the rate of change. If left to the "natural" cycles and instability of the earth's climate, you would see gradual changes over tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years.
What people like you don't understand is that our man made climate change is 100 to 1000 times faster than anything nature has dealt (except say a meteor hitting the earth).
So yes, the climate has always been unstable over long periods, but never changed as quickly as we are changing it today. We are the meteor now.
Prayers go out to Snapchat, Riot, Naughty Dog, TigerConnect (nee TigerText) and other West LA / Santa Monica companies whose staff may live in the Palisades , Topanga & Malibu. I remember .XYZ & Headspace are also in the neighborhood.
There's a lot of fingerpointing but as Daniel Swain put it:
1. This was completely expected and forecasted both short and long term by regional climate and weather experts. Two very wet winters caused fuel buildup followed by an extremely hot and dry year.
2. There is very little that can be done in these situations. 100 mph gusts of embers can't be fought with hoses and air attack isn't possible in high winds.
3. Hard to believe but it could have been a lot worse. Daniel Swain points out there could have been several more major fires like the two big ones but they got put out quickly before they spread.
4. California's climate has likely been this way for millions of years, long before human habitation.
You need to do fuel reduction burns during winter (when it's wet) so you can reduce the load.
They do this near my house in Australia every few years, it's somewhat terrifying to have a slow roll bushfire roll around the house, but it can be managed with care.
These aren’t “forests” like in other parts of the West so much as cliffs covered in dry, scrubby brush. I’m pessimistic that they could be systematically cleared or burned in a controlled way.
Burning in a dense residential area…no. Draconian clearing of all trees and brush except for selective fire-aware landscaping…yes, but you are paying significant money to make the residential area look uglier (in some eyes, it’s just a High Desert aesthetic for others), a hard sell.
Similar climates and geographies both either have the issue or manage it better.
Greece is a good example of also not managing this properly with its own regular massive fires, while national parks around Cape Town and other parts of South Africa do regular controlled burns in very rocky, hill-y terrain.
My other suggestion, which isn't super popular in australia, is we should consider deforesting / reforesting eucalyptus trees. They are a lot of trouble.
This was a wealthy area built within canyons and other natural areas. Controlled burns are possible in some areas but I can't imagine it would have been possible there.
I’m not sure precisely where the fires started, but the neighborhoods in the Palisades are impenetrable hillsides with roads and houses are intervals. They’re about as densely developed as practical given the geography. A controlled burn would be unimaginable there.
A controlled burn is impossible just from the sheer angle, you can hardly traverse those piles of conglomerate making following and pathing the fire impossible from anywhere but the air. I had problems hunting agates out of those hills due to the steepness, as I was on all fours and about 55 degrees off-horizontal most times.
Perhaps worth mentioning that Australia is doing less fuel reduction burns than in the past, especially near major urban centres with unfavourably wide directions.
Fuel reduction burning often requires blanketing millions of people with carcinogenic smoke for several weeks each year.
The greater good is to protect everyone’s lungs and accept that every few years we’ll have to rebuild a few homes.
That makes no sense. A controlled burn shouldn't be as large as an out of control wildfire. For the cost of those burned down homes the government could hand out n95 masks by the basket-full. Not to mention you'll still have the smoke inhalation problem when you have those wildfire cases anyways - and in those scenarios you can't control what is being release in the burn.
Hazard reduction burns need to occur on all land which is at risk of burning, whereas wildfires actually only occur on a small proportion of the land surrounding a population center each year.
The result is much more smoke being emitted overall.
Two very wet winters caused fuel buildup followed by an extremely hot and dry year.
References for the "hot and dry year" ('cause I hear it tossed around a lot). As far as I can tell, all of California had several relatively wet (but hot) years and nothing dry afterwards. I'm linking to NOAA's the California drought map, which shows "Abnormally Dry" (less than "moderate drought") for LA currently and I think showed "none" for much of the year [1].
The thing is, I agree this was to be expected. But only by the principle "climate change is going to cause disaster out of nowhere". We need to say this and let people understand.
This was also to be expected in the sense that forecasters for a week now have been warning about century long record wind speeds and the fire dangers those bring along with them
Sure but that's quite different from implications that the conditions of the past year pointed to this. I follow the Dought Monitor regularly and as a California resident, I want to know if rainfall patterns point to danger. I don't see indications here (see link in my parent post).
Wind speeds and live fuel moisture level are the critical measures of fire risk in chaparral. Fuel moisture levels have been approaching critical this season in Southern California and, due to lack of rain, didn't follow the seasonal pattern:
https://fire.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/All-Are...
I looked at your first link. The 2024 curve is incomplete but roughly follows (but is above) the average of the 1980-present average curve. The 2023 curve similarly.
Your other link is research saying that statistic matters for fires. I can believe it does but your other graphs don't show fuel moisture as even slightly below average. Maybe the last two months of no rain indeed put fuel moisture well average. But, this is California - rainfall varies widely. LA has had many winters without rain, I grew up there.
I can't claim to climatological understanding of the situation. But I variety of narratives that don't make sense and impulse is to say that these are a response the LA fires being almost entirely a sudden and a unpredictable event, an effect not of trends but of the situation of global warming overall, something people simply don't want to admit.
I don't agree with that. People can choose to not live there. There is an entire country to live in and we keep crowding in what seem to the worst places to live and then act surprised when it goes badly. Climate change is going to make some places uninhabitable, that's why we tried to prevent it, but no one cares.
> … we keep crowding in what seem to the worst places to live …
Malibu?
Pacific Palisades?
These are among the most pleasant places in the world to live. People are not going to stop wanting to live there — this isn’t a lost cause like a low-lying area exposed to floods. We have to find ways to mitigate the very real fire risk.
Correction: among the most pleasant _when natural wildfires don't burn everything down_. People need to take long-term conditions into account when choosing locations for habitation.
Northeast. Structural modifications for heavy snow are light (make sure the house is well-insulated, get yourself a nice heater, don't put any pipes in the exterior walls, and have sloped roofs rather than flat roofs), and they're not particularly dangerous if you're prepared to be cooped up in a house for a day or two (and you're not in the main lake effect snow belt, where snow can be rather constant).
Well, in good faith, if everyone in "dangerous" areas of the US moved to less dangerous areas, the resulting population density would still be less than Ohio's (~242/mi2, also LA's population density is ~8,000/mi2--well below places like Pittsburgh and Buffalo even--so keep that in mind), and I left Alaska out of both safe and dangerous lists because it's a cheat. And it's very OK there! Winter is fine. I grew up and lived in the Midwest for years; tornadoes, etc. are bad but they're not wildfires and hurricanes.
Is this a serious "proposal"? Definitely not. But a lot of people in this thread are acting like moving away from literal hellfire is impossible, and I respectfully submit that living in the interior is better than having everything you own burn down.
"Dangerous": California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Utah, Puerto Rico, Nevada, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, Hawaii, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa
"Safe": New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Missouri, West Virginia, Minnesota, Vermont, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa, Maine, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming
Costs since 2003 seem comparable (~62 billion for both). Tornadoes do outpace wildfires in immediate deaths 752 to 270, but the smoke from the wildfires kills 10000s more after the fact.
I've done a pretty bad comparison here though; there are a lot of differences between tornadoes and wildfires and the places they happen. What I feel confident in saying is you are very unlikely to be seriously affected by a tornado, even if you live in a place where they happen frequently. But if you live in a place where wildfires happen frequently, you're way more likely to be seriously affected.
Agreed. And I personally prefer living in an area with tornados over wild fires or hurricanes. That's one of the reasons why I stay in Missouri and would never move to southern California, Florida or the Texas coast.
Looking at only the last 7 years is a poor standard, and Oklahoma is a known active seismic zone with dedicated USGS risk models. Severe earthquakes occur much less frequently, often less than once per century. US Geological Survey seismic risk maps paint a different picture of actual risk than you are presenting.
For example, you've deemed the New Madrid seismic zone[0] as "safe", despite multiple M7-8+ earthquakes in the 19th century. The Cascadia subduction zone hasn't had a major event in 300+ years but no one considers that seismically safe.
(Sorry on phone) California famously also has earthquakes. You can't look at the USGS risk map and seriously say the risk between living in Missouri/Oklahoma and California is equivalent. Also I didn't include PNW states in the safe list. Also the NMSZ had only one >= 5.0 earthquake (5.4) in the entire 20th century. Also earthquake deaths are only around half wildfire deaths, and I'd guess the distance between them will only increase as wildfires are only gonna get worse.
Pacific Northwest earthquake codes are based on earthquakes that last happened more than 300 years ago. The New Madrid Seismic Zone has had multiple earthquakes more powerful than any in the Pacific Northwest during those intervening centuries.
Missouri could realistically experience a M8.0 earthquake tomorrow, just like Washington. That the NMSZ was relatively quiescent during the 20th century tells you little about the seismic risk. Geological risk isn't determined by what happened last week.
Mount Rainier has not been active since the 19th century either. Nonetheless, it is a Decade Volcano[0], one of the highest risk volcanoes in the world.
OK, I think I know what happened here. I was trying to say, "hey, earthquakes aren't great, but it's not like they happen every year (multiple times a year even!), unlike wildfires." Then it seemed like I was cherry picking lists and not using a wide enough window. I understand that; definitely not trying to do that. Great, let's continue.
I feel like everything you've brought up has to be factored into the USGS seismic risk map. But in case it's not, I searched the USGS earthquake database. Of the 1425 >= 5.0 earthquakes in the coterminous US since 1700, 12 of them occurred in the NMSZ (only 7 of which were >= 6.0). In the same amount of time, hundreds occurred in California (the USGS search is rectangular and I can't be arsed to separate out Nevada). There simply is no equivalence. If earthquakes are really a concern, definitely don't live in California! And if wildfires are a concern, also definitely don't live in California!
I tend to think many of humanity’s - and, by extension, the entire ecosystem’s - problems arise from overpopulation of homo sapiens. Perhaps the human race should depopulate entirely. Sadly, this won’t happen of its own volition.
Where should they live? People living in the Midwest being hit by freezing winters get told to move to warmer weather…then Georgia gets hit by hurricanes. Move to California to avoid those and your house burns down. It turns out that climate change affects weather everywhere.
The evacuation zones at their peak covered fewer than 200,000 people… in a state with a population of almost 39 million. That’s half a precent and these are the worst fires we’ve seen in years.
Most fires in California happen in places that haven’t burned for nearly a century.
> There is very little that can be done in these situations.
Ah yes, same response to school shootings; "No way to solve this, says the only country where this happens every year".
There's nothing that special about California that makes it different from many other places around the world with densely populated forested areas that do not get insane wildfires almost every single year.
There's nothing special indeed : this shrub biome gets devastated by firestorms on a regularish 30 to 150 years clock (looking at the past 520 years), regardless of what humans do (at least so far, uncertainty over the last few decades is of course high).
In the old days, where I live (and I'm guessing most of Mediterranean Europe) we had goats. It was a superb utilization of resources really, goats eat almost any vegetation - even hard bramble - so the shepherds would take them to the forest, and they would eat the vegetation buildup that serves as the fuel for these fires.
That would be a win-win situation for everyone. We would get goat meat/milk for free (minus the shepherd effort) and the forest would be mostly clean.
This is quite rare now. Sure, in some places in the mountains we still have that because life is hard there and there's little else you can get from the land. But it's mostly disappearing.
I’m guessing there were more profitable economic activities there. Gold mining, lumber industry, pelting, etc.
Here, in the mountains, there’s basically nothing really profitable. So, husbandry (using goats since they are adapted to this environment) was basically the only way to go.
Most of these wildfires are caused by humans. Not just because of climate change but because of people intentionally starting fires who want to watch the destruction unfold. There were fires near these exact areas where fires in homeless camps were found to be the cause. Not enough was done to enforce the law and stop street people from intentionally causing destruction and being pushing for it.
We also need to discuss clearing plants and other fuel that comes back as part of the drought / rain weather patterns we are seeing. Goats and other firefighting clearing efforts need to be discussed.
We know the solution - just give those people homes - but we don't want to do it because building homes makes them abundant and devalues existing homes.
Note that some of the small flagged regions are spurious triggers on industrial waste heat (oil refineries, power plants, and something else). There aren't as many fires as that map naively would suggest.
Wiki Santa Ana winds. They typically bring <10% humidity as they blow towards the pacific ocean. This can happen overnight and you'll wake up with "raisin-eyes".
I wonder if there is a problem with the data collection at that time? From your link, it looks like to drop much lower than 0.33, lowest value on that chart is 0.11, which is massively lower than any previous worldwide value, before jumping up to ~10.
We lost our house to the Eaton fire this morning. It’s difficult to describe the vastness of the destruction in our community. Everything within a couple square miles of us burned.
That’s devastating, and I hope you can stay strong through the recovery process. As a nearby neighbor a couple of communities over, do you know of anything that I can do or donate to help generally that won’t be a waste/too late? Like donate masks or water or something?
The only guidance I’ve heard so far is that the shelters are in need of bedding. Neither of the press briefings today offered more opportunities for support.
I lived through another major wildfire in SoCal and the organization that provided the best support was the California Community Foundation: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/953510055
I’d wait until the smoke settles (because the CCF focuses on less well-off communities than Altadena or the Palisades) but donating to their wildfire relief efforts does a lot of good regardless. They frequently give grants to the local organizations running the evacuation shelters.
I would second this and say donate today. Focusing on who has money and who doesn’t today is really not a good policy. It is a generalization that is bound to misclassify some old ladies on a fixed income (my mom has one sleeping on her couch because of this). People who lost their homes and all their possessions yesterday and today may not be as wealthy as they were 24 hours ago.
I keep seeing questions about the location of Karen Bass and I don't understand the outrage. Did she fly to Ghana when the fires erupted? Is she not allowed to take vacations? Was she expected to magically reappear in California when things got out of hand? Has her responsiveness been extremely latent.
Ok, I understand some of the criticism now. 1.) She cut funding to the fire department budget by millions of dollars. 2.) There is a video floating around where she is totally unresponsive to questions.
"That assertion is wrong. The city was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted, so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund until that deal was finalized in November. In fact, the city’s fire budget increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget cycle, according to Blumenfield’s office, although overall concerns about the department’s staffing level have persisted for a number of years."
From behind a keyboard and who knows how far away from Los Angeles you are, you may look at it with other eyes than the people who lost their homes in the fires.
And yes, in the end the mayor is responsible for the wellbeing of the city. And people see the mayor is nowhere to be found when their homes burned down. Who do you want them to be mad at?
Texas governor was in Acapulco and nobody blamed him.
Anyway on topic an aunt of mine is a mayor of a small city (55k). Her opinion is that firefighters fight fires and having a politician walk around a disaster area with a hundred journalists isn't helping.
I think the outrage is part political, but it's also justified. The warnings were in place that the fire risk was extreme. The language experts were using to describe the upcoming weather conditions was "unprecedented," given both the winds and importantly the lack of measurable rain. These warnings were issued many days in advance of fires starting, before Karen Bass went to Africa, and yet, even with these warnings in place, she decided to get on a plane and head to Africa. I can 100% guarantee she was briefed on that, that she had deliberations with her staff about it, and that she decided to hop on the plane anyway. I do think it was a major strategic mistake on her part and I think people are rightly outraged about it. Of course the political part has poured gasoline on that legitimate outrage and that part is appalling since the crisis is still very much ongoing.
Of course that outrage assumes you believe that a mayor should be on the scene even if they're not, in this case, holding onto a hose and actively suppressing fire. I personally think that's a fair ask of her constituents. It would be an entirely different story if this was an unpredictable situation, but, again, every expert commenting pointed out how unique the upcoming weather was and that there was the very real potential for massive fires.
Many were asking the question when the news came out prior to the fires. In terms of actual management, I'd rather leave that to the city's experts. As long as the city didn't pay for it (which was the assumption), then I'm ok with it. Otherwise, I'd rather she spend her time here trying to fix domestic issues.
I think it's one of those issues where both sides of the aisle could agree except for the right-wing side turned it into this weird DEI stuff.
I don't live in LA but would Karen Bass even have much of any input? The palisades is mostly Santa Monica no? Sure its part of LA county but why would the mayor of LA have any input on Santa Monica / Santa Monica mountains. Genuinely curious why she is in the spotlight compared to the local officials in Santa Monica?
Edit: I continue to see her name pop up in the news and I have been trying to understand how LA works in that she is in the complete spotlight. There are fires in surrounding LA but does the city of LA mayor have any control in those?
> She went to Ghana on a taxpayer paid political junket, which doesn't seem like something the mayor of even a major city would be officially involved in
I live in a very mid-size city for my province and our mayor goes on international trips on city business maybe once a year. The fact itself is not out of the ordinary.
That assertion is wrong. The city was in the process of negotiating a new
contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted,
so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund
until that deal was finalized in November. In fact, the city’s fire budget
increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget
cycle, according to Blumenfield’s office, although overall concerns about
the department’s staffing level have persisted for a number of years.
So… no?
DEI obsessed fire chief…DEI office and bureaucracy.
I grew up in north-central Pasadena and had many friends who lived in Altadena, and it’s been heartbreaking to watch the news from a distance and realize that many of their homes might have burned.
Later: I came across a streamer’s video taken from his motorcycle as he rode through Altadena on Wednesday afternoon. In this part, he passes through a burned-out neighborhood I used to know:
From the street signs, I was able to identify a location where a high school friend of mine lived—the house now burned to the ground. (It’s been nearly fifty years since I graduated from high school, and I don’t know if her family still lives there or not.)
I'm sorry for your loss. Are you lucky enough to be in a place where insurers in California are still operating? Hopefully you can at least get financial situation taken off your mind
Yes, there are parts of California that are uninsurable against wildfires. Technically they could be insurable but State regulators will not allow insurance companies to raise premiums sufficient to cover the actuarial risk. The necessary premiums are prohibitively expensive for homeowners, but anything less risks bankrupting the insurance companies and increases their reinsurance costs which also must be passed on to homeowners.
This is mostly on the California government, since the high insurance premiums are a side effect of disastrous wildfire mitigation policy in California. More proactive and competent wildfire mitigation would reduce the risk and therefore make insurance premiums more reasonable.
Would it make sense to allow this? The models as you said make it a non viable buisness and where that gap exists scams move in, which the routinely have to be bailed out by the public.
> More proactive and competent wildfire mitigation would reduce the risk and therefore make insurance premiums more reasonable.
Or... not building mansions next to forestry? In Germany we have pretty strict requirements on distances, so it's rare for damages to occur. Also, most of our power grid infrastructure is buried below ground, so videos like the ones circulating on Twitter from arcing lines setting bushes and trees alight can't really happen here either.
Prevention is orders of magnitude cheaper in the long run.
The largest power company in CA is in the process of burying its cables.
The risk level is not just affected by proximity to forests. For offshore (Santa Ana) wind events, the riskiest areas are the SW bottom of hills and near canyons. That's where the current LA fires are.
IMO, a better prevention measure would be to not build houses out of sticks. That's already the case for much of the housing in Europe. Alas, here in the US the colonial and cabin aesthetics still win out, even when fire-resistant options aren't more expensive.
Coffey Park in Santa Rosa was destroyed in 2017, and most properties were rebuilt to lower fire-resistance standards.[1] The second little pig just doesn't wanna hear it.
> IMO, a better prevention measure would be to not build houses out of sticks. That's already the case for much of the housing in Europe.
The only thing that helps against is hurricanes and other storm events. Once the fire has blown up the windows and embers (or outright flames) enter the interior, it's game over generally. You might be able to re-use a concrete or brick structure after a large fire, but if the fire ran unchecked until it burned out everything, no chance - concrete will have lost rebar integrity and bricks will have soaked up toxic combustion products.
Here in CA, it's more about reducing the spreading speed than about the resistance level once the fire gets there. All the large structure fires in recent years spread at breakneck speeds during an offshore wind event. In these cases, all that firefighters can do early on is evacuate people.
This narrative about building houses out of sticks also rubs me the wrong way. It's an extremely naive take on why it happens. The reason most homes in America are wood framed is really down to economics. Europe does not have as vast of a forest stock for lumber as the US/Canada does. Over time we have specialized in building wood framed homes and because of lumber, its cheaper.
These homes would have been destroyed regardless of building material. The bigger issue is most of these homes have probably not properly gone through fire mitigation steps.
> These homes would have been destroyed regardless of building material.
That's just not the case. Fire-resistant construction might not always help the first house at the subdivision's edge, but it will help the rest. One analogy is control rods in a reactor.
As I said in another post, the problem with firestorms here in CA is the rate of initial spread. We always get massive numbers of destroyed structures all at once, and <25% containment until the winds subside. The ignition source for most of the structures are burning wood-frame structures. Early on, firefighters can only help evacuate people.
I don’t think that is entirely correct in the cost angle but it’s ok.
As I said before the homes are of course an issue but the larger issue is basic fire prevention, not the fact that homes are as you say “built out of twigs”. It is certainly a factor but the more important piece are all the other steps that go before as I linked earlier.
This was a freak event with record wind speeds so basic fire prevention couldn’t help short of bulldozing every other house in the affected neighborhoods and salting the earth. After the Camp fire and the lightning complex fires, California insurers got really serious about fire insurance inspections and mitigation. Problem is that normal mitigation like setbacks and vulcan vents don’t help when Santa Ana winds send fist sized burning embers for up to a mile in front of the fire. Only really expensive and ecologically problematic measures like external Phos-Chek sprinklers would help in that case, which is what saved a few celebrity hokes in the Palisades.
Only well funded commercial and government campuses like JPL or the Getty can afford the kind of fire suppression measures required to defend against a conflagration of this magnitude.
> IMO, a better prevention measure would be to not build houses out of sticks. That's already the case for much of the housing in Europe. Alas, here in the US the colonial and cabin aesthetics still win out, even when fire-resistant options aren't more expensive.
It is not an aesthetic preference, the US used to construct housing like in Europe through the 19th century.
That style of construction was repeatedly catastrophically destroyed by severe earthquakes, killing many people needlessly, and is now illegal in many regions.
The US became strict about seismic safety after the famous 1906 San Francisco earthquake[0]. A few decades earlier, the 1872 Lone Pine earthquake[1] literally flattened entire towns of European-style construction; some of these are now ghost towns that were simply abandoned and never rebuilt. When you see surviving old masonry buildings, they usually have been retroactively refitted with steel frames to make the masonry mostly decorative.
The regions of the US prone to wildfire are also prone to severe earthquakes, so your options are wood or steel frame construction, neither of which is particularly wildfire resistant but at least it won't collapse during a severe earthquake. Many parts of the US also have to engineer for much higher wind loadings than in Europe.
You can build masonry buildings that meet the seismic standard but that requires a lot of steel and is expensive. Where I live, all modern construction is required to survive a M8.5 earthquake; I've never seen a house in Europe engineered to that standard.
Your argument only applies to unreinforced masonry, which is no longer allowed by code in seismically-prone areas. For fire resistance you can use reinforced concrete, steel or aluminum framing, or wood framing with non-combustible walls. Or even go exotic with various prefab options and 3D printing.
As for the higher cost, this has become mostly an urban myth. In regions with low construction costs such as the South or the Midwest ($130-180/sqft,) the cost difference is minimal. In areas with high construction costs such as CA ($200-700/sqft,) the difference is either immaterial or negative (thanks to the insurance savings.)
My argument applies to reinforced masonry as well. You seem to be operating from a naive model of what is required to prevent combustion of buildings. We already use non-flammable walls in a lot of places; it is a speed bump for a serious fire without a lot of additional mitigations.
Most typical reinforced masonry will fail during a severe earthquake, for which there is ample empirical evidence. The cost to reinforce masonry to e.g. a M8.5 standard is not small. The quantity of rebar, ties, etc required is expensive in both time and material. It isn’t cheap nor does the labor exist at the scale required.
I actually live in exotic construction, designed for extreme seismic and wind loads. Lots of steel, not much concrete, and extremely fire resistant (even though that isn’t a requirement here) but much cheaper to build and more seismic resistant (in theory) than reinforced concrete, which is what it replaces (its raison d’être). No structural wood either, but it wouldn’t be economical to construct a typical house this way.
This is an active area of research. If it was an “urban myth” there wouldn’t be so many engineering firms investing in developing new construction techniques that provide seismic resistance without the cost. If reinforced masonry actually worked in a reasonable way, we’d just use that.
I live in SF. The vast majority of new construction above 3 stories is reinforced concrete, including many high-rises such as the (infamous) 58-story Millenium Tower.[1] Seismically, modern reinforced concrete performs well.
As I explained in sibling threads, "speed bumps" are the most important thing here in CA. It's not about whether your structure can withstand a 1000-degree fire all around it. It's about whether your structure will set fire to three others within minutes of when it goes up in flames.
As someone pointed out above, California has the FAIR plan for over 50 years which has been pretty effective. This LA fire might be its biggest test. Basically there's no part of California that is not insurable against wildfire
> Are you lucky enough to be in a place where insurers in California are still operating?
California has had a state fire insurer (FAIR) of last resort for over fifty years and fire insurance is practically mandatory for mortgages so there aren’t many places that are excluded.
It’s entirely funded by premiums and has never been bailed out by state or federal funds. It’s not like the National Insurance Flood Program that’s burned billions of dollars in federal funding to subsidize people living in flood plains and Florida.
I recommend doing some careful consideration about how intrinsically tied up politics are to every facet of our lives. You may find this distasteful, but choosing to ignore it merely blinds you to the way that power works in the United States.
I recommend realizing how crass your comments are. You won’t though which is fine by, there will always be a population on each side that is blinded by their own ideology. Discussion is valuable, finger pointing is cheap and is a lame method that both sides on the fringes use. There is a reason your comment is below 0.
Mortgage firms demand Home insurance policies which it covers some fires, but not all fires. E.g. if there’s an earthquake and it causes a natural gas fire, you’re not covered by home insurance. Same goes for if there’s a flood and it causes a fire, not covered.
I suspect long term fire insurance due to wildfire will not be covered by home insurance policies. As it’s not a “random” event, and instead a risk of certain areas.
Your statement is not entirely accurate. Under the insuring agreement of a typical homeowner’s insurance policy, fire—including wildfire—is a covered peril, unless specifically excluded elsewhere in the policy. Standard policies are designed to provide coverage for direct physical loss or damage caused by fire, regardless of whether the fire is “random” or arises in wildfire-prone areas.
While some exclusions may apply to fires caused by excluded perils (e.g., floods or earthquakes) or to contributory factors like neglect, wildfires are generally not excluded in standard homeowner’s insurance policies.
> I suspect long term fire insurance due to wildfire will not be covered by home insurance policies. As it’s not a “random” event, and instead a risk of certain areas.
Insurance companies cover known risks all the time. The greater the risk, the higher the premiums.
As long as insurance companies are permitted to accurately and fully price the risk into premiums, anything is insurable — at least in concept.
TIL! Thanks for the info. I didn't know there was an actually functioning state fire insurance plan. I guess all those news articles about insurers pulling out of California is political propaganda I fell for :/
That propaganda isn’t entirely wrong. There’s a regulatory agency in California that controls insurance premiums and they’ve kept the insurers from raising rates to account for the real risks so insurers have been pulling out. CalFAIR is still available for everyone so it’s not a total shit show but with over 10k structures destroyed so far, we’ll see whether the state has to bail the program out.
Luckily we insured through the California State Fair plan. FEMA may also be able to provide some assistance. We’re learning as much as we can as fast as we can, but it can be difficult to source accurate information. Thank you for your kindness.
Most houses in the US are made of wood. In Los Angeles they often have tile/concrete roofs, but I've read that in a situation like this the problem is the vents under the edge of the roof that lead into the attic: if anything burning gets through there, the house is toast.
Source: used to live in a Los Angeles hilly suburb. If the fires get to where I used to live, that house will definitely burn despite having a cement tile roof.
Insurers require ember resistant vulcan vents and the like now. It’s a relatively minor upgrade for most homeowners since its just a mesh over the vent.
Considering that winds both made the spread a lot further, faster and moving around fuel (trees/wood/material blowing around and ending up on streets and whatnot), it sounds unlikely any 1 solution would have prevented this.
No, vulcan vents only help when the exterior is capable of resisting the fire. These winds threw fist sized pieces of burning wood for hundreds of feet which is much harder to defend against.
All homeowners I know here have already had them installed over the last five years because of fire insurance inspections but I don’t know how representative my sample is.
Houses almost all use wood framing. Rarely they use steel framing, which is more expensive and provides worse insulation. None use concrete or masonry because it is illegal to build a house that will collapse during a M7-8 earthquake. Like Japan, construction style in the western US is driven primarily by the requirement to be extremely seismic resistant, since that is a predictable and unavoidable risk.
In Southern California, it is typical to have tile roofs and stucco exteriors, which helps protect against the embers that will rain on your house during a major wildfire.
The house was framed in 2x4 which is standard in most of the US. We did have modern fire resistant siding and roof tiles, but this was leagues beyond what any of those materials are designed for. It melted most of the steel around the property. Thank you for the kind words.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] thread[0] https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/
Also, in addition to the SSD website linked upthread, the NAIF site [0] (where the SPICE library and kernels can be downloaded) also seems to be down. It would not surprise me in any way if some of these facilities are hosted on-prem and are in a power-down state due to the fires.
(Speaking of the DSN, their website [1] is also down.)
[0] https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit.html
[1] https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/
There are generators for other critical servers, and in particular the DSN operations have been moved temporarily to another location so they could continue.
That's really good to hear. The DSN is a really, really important asset (not that everything else at JPL isn't, but!), so I'm glad they're not totally coupled to the physical JPL location.
I hope these days it's more spread out and backed up, but at one point they did a lot of phyical archiving related to space exploration there, including huge amounts of transparencies.
Thankfully the wind has died down significantly from last night, so we’re in a better shape, but there are still high wind warnings till 6pm and the fires are 0% contained.
I prefer HN over some other news sources, which seem less concerned about presenting information to the degree the news article can vouch for. Media literacy is a two-way street and we need better reporting standards. If reading and writing is a lot like parsing, then anyone who spreads misinformation is just a parsehole.
https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/getty-villa-threatened-pal...
Looks like 3 independent fires?
There's been a huge amount of wind throughout So Cal today and yesterday that is driving the rapid spread of these fires.
As I type this, ABC7 is providing intersections-specific location information for their reporters-on-the-ground so that people can track the progress of the fire and hopefully determine the status of their houses.
Edit: seems like 5 now. Another one near Hollywood
Edit: And hotspots - https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;@-118.21,3...
Is that true in this case, too? (Being so close to LA, it doesn’t strike me that it could be.) If not, is my general thesis off?
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/11/06/1204923950/arizona-california...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...
California fires are a classic case of "We tried nothing and we're out of ideas!", speaking as a former Californian I honestly think the faster solution at this point is for enough of the state to burn down that pretending the problem doesn't exist is no longer good enough.
Deserts don’t have wildfires. (EDIT: They do!)
Most desert areas in the US are a lot more lush than the blank sand dunes many people think of as desert. Usually there are a lot of bushes and grasses, and higher elevations can pine, juniper, oak, and other trees.
As with many other landscapes, climate change, drought, and aquifer depletion have made deserts increasingly vulnerable to large wildfires.
[0]https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-07-31/york-fir...
When lightning or people start a fire in the desert, both relatively rare, they tend to be limited by two things. First, if areas that have been burned out sometime in the last century or two, the plants haven’t grown back enough to really support a proper wildfire, so it is easier to contain. Prior burns are a natural firebreak and they last a really long time. Second, the high desert of the US is an active volcanic province. There are fresh basalt flows everywhere, some less than a thousand years old, in the terrain. It takes tens of thousands of years for these to support enough plant life to carry a burn. These natural barriers place limits on where they can go and how far they can get.
The desert does have fires but they tend to be muted and often self-limiting because large contiguous regions of dense fuel aren’t as common.
If it takes enough of the state burning down for another path to gain lesser resistance, then so be it. That is certainly going to happen if California keeps going down the same path. I'm certainly not pleased that a piece of my childhood is burning down in unprecedented terms.
Part of climate change is that this man-induced change is making previously hospitable areas much less so.
Agree on Palisades. My original thesis is about new construction in Florida and Houston and in e.g. the middle of the California woods. That is settlement done when we did know the risks.
Fire is oxygen plus fuel. We entirely know how to manage it.
We were looking to buy a house in Orange or Anaheim Hills because those areas are comparatively affordable. But after the airport fire we steered clear. I took a fire insurance quote on an Orange property, their model says the fire risk is 4 on a scale of 15, but they treat it like 10 because the variance is too high.
Also, there's the complete polar opposite approach: build something "disposable". In the "old days" (including with my extended family) there was a style of "summer camp" for example that was ultra simple. Some small single floor deal, uninsulated, maybe some power but often not even that, composting/pit toilet, some simple wood furniture, that's it. People bring their own everything, be there for a few weeks/months a year, and then go home. Such a structure can't survive much of anything but that doesn't matter because it's so cheap, if it burns/blows down/washes away once every 5 years or whatever so be it. It's a problem though when people convert what should be cheap into some full fledged thing, but then don't take environment into account.
I think this distinction is super important, because a lot of these places are beautiful and desirable much of the time, and a blanket "no you shouldn't build there ever" isn't likely to be heeded and does not get to the root actual problem, which is that the true costs of doing so aren't being priced in. The reasons for that distortion are myriad, but that's the actual issue. I think it's much more productive and convincing to the public to say "it's fine to build where you like, but it's not fine to hit other people up for money to cover it or cause unreasonable costs to safety services/environmental damage (homes burning or floating away means massive pollution), you just need be responsible in how you build."
FWIW to specifics:
>With much of California, Texas and Florida it seems pretty clear people built where they shouldn’t have.
In some cases sure but in others I guess it'd be reasonable to say that things built long enough before anthropogenic global warming really kicked off can't be reasonably blamed for that, particularly if they correct gauged the risk for themselves (ie, someone built something 50 years ago as a life thing and it did indeed last the remaining 40 years of their life, well you can't really say they got it wrong and built it wrong or it's still their problem). What is bad though is new stuff getting built or worst of all things getting REbuilt after destruction but not to updated standards each time.
https://news.mongabay.com/2024/11/as-global-fire-risk-rises-...
Things fall off of shelves, but the buildings seem to come out OK.
The Japanese are hard core about building standards.
Compared to other nations (deliberately not gonna name them), that have corruption problems, as well as frequent earthquakes, you always have a bunch of buildings fall down, there's a surge of anger, a couple of unpopular scapegoats get jailed, then, it happens again, the next time.
I have a bunch of friends in the LA area. So far, none of them have been in the line of [literal] fire, but everyone is freaking out. These fires are under no control, whatsoever.
Note that this has been built on their fair share of blood and tears[1].
Japan gloated in the wakes of the 1989 Loma Prieta[2] and 1994 Northridge[3] earthquakes that such structural destruction[3][4] would be impossible for them, but then they got their gloating ass burned off.[6]
Japan has been dead fucking serious about earthquake measures ever since, never taking anything for granted and certainly never ever pretending they are kings of the earthquake world anymore.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanshin_earthquake
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Northridge_earthquake
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cypress_structure.jpeg
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Northridge_earthquake_10_...
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hanshin_Expressway_Nada_b...
"such structural destruction[3][4]" should be [4] and [5] instead, apologies.
Side note: modern media has used exaggeration and hype to make a myriad of small or remote things sound scary. Wildfires are actually scary…what words do we use to describe the clear and present threat of death within minutes when the media has described minor inconveniences as “horrors” and “catastrophes”? People today should refamiliarize themselves with the story of the “boy who cried wolf”.
Sure. That doesn’t mean you can’t mitigate damage.
Not e.g. building on the Houston flood plain is one such example [1].
[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...
On the other hand, you better hope your AC works in the summer.
The lack of a real need for natural disaster planning feels like it's left local governance complacent about issues that would barely be a problem anywhere else. I know folks in Dallas, Houston, and Austin who have been without power and water longer from a few hours of freezing rain than folks in Florida that got direct hit with a Cat 4 hurricane. There's certainly disasters that you can only do so much prep for, but there's rigor that comes with having to prep for something that generally helps you not totally fall apart when more minor stuff happens.
The two cities I’ve seen most commonly used for these purposes are San Antonio and Salt Lake City. Phoenix and Las Vegas are also sometimes used. Most of the sites are in the western US away from the coasts. I believe parts of the upper midwest are also sometimes used for these purposes, though these areas have to contend with extreme cold (which is more difficult to deal with than extreme heat).
These are both mitigated with on-site reserves.
Also, a lot of the houses burning in the Eaton fire (especially in Altadena) are surrounded by miles of development, but very-low-humidity hurricane-strength Santa Ana wind gusts can carry (and keep alive) burning embers for miles.
In the northern parts of Altadena it says the fire risk is 33% chance of a fire within the next 30 years. Going south toward Pasadena it gets lower. At the southern parts of the evacuation zone I'm seeing it mostly range from "minimal" to numbers under 1%. "Minimal" is the category for the places with the least risk, and is described as "Unlikely to be in a wildfire in the next 30 years".
In the warning zone south of that, which looks like to goes south to the 210, so far all I've found is "Minimal".
As a testament to the speed of the winds, I've never seen a smoke column visually move so quickly. Usually at that size and distance, they feel more like static objects.
Edit: I'm preparing to evacuate tonight in case the order comes through. Checking the most recent maps, the fire has burned through almost all of the Palisades and is getting into Brentwood. The fire may also reach Santa Monica at this rate. I'm stacking go bags by the door.
> IMPACTS...If fire ignition occurs, conditions are favorable for very rapid fire spread and extreme fire behavior, including long range spotting, which would threaten life and property. There will be a high risk for widespread downed trees and powerlines, as well as widespread power outages. A Red Flag Warning means that critical fire weather conditions are either occurring now, or will shortly. Use extreme caution with anything that can spark a wildfire.
So seems the combination of the wind + fire makes for easy and fast fire propagation. The alert/warning in full is a pretty interesting read: https://alerts-v2.weather.gov/search?id=urn%3Aoid%3A2.49.0.1...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-08/shocking...
This shows Altadena, just east of JPL, and Malibu (separate fires, of course).
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/06-closer-s...
Presumably it's measuring heat or something vaguely relevant but I don't trust my immediate visceral reaction to it.
Several instruments can sense emissions in short-wave IR which light up for fires (and hot smoke plumes, and some industrial plants). E.g., VIIRS which is a successor to MODIS (https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/instruments/viirs/viirs-...).
The resolution in the posted image is much better than satellite, however. This implies that it's an airborne platform like FIRIS (https://wifire.ucsd.edu/firis-in-depth). It also uses IR.
This is the worst fire I’ve seen in SoCal since the Valley fire.
A drone is up against the same physical constraints - water is heavy, and you need a lot of it to have a material impact on a fire, even one you've caught early.
yep. Yet they still have to push through the air and have the mass and the cost of the plane for that unnecessary 6x volume. That is because the plane is retrofitted instead of having been built for the purpose of carrying high density payload. (also that 6x larger than needed volume makes those retrofitted planes much more susceptible to the high wind gusts, etc. which almost always an issue with those fires)
CA has C-130 water tankers with 20 ton payload (16 ton is the water itself). Total capacity of C-130 when used as fuel tanker - ie. when its own fuel and payload combined - is 30 ton. Empty it is 35 ton, max - 70 tons, and cost $60M+.
Taking a real cheap large drone as an example to have real base numbers to work with - German V1 (pulsejet doesn't matter, the piston engine of course would be the way to go here as we don't need jet speed) - 2.2 ton total weight with 0.5 ton fuel and 0.85 ton payload. The ratio of fuel plus payload to weight is already better than C-130's (at that ratio the C-130 would have to carry 35 ton payload instead of its current 20 and 20 ton fuel instead of its current 10), and with piston engine of the same weight as the pulsejet we'd get even larger thrust - i.e can get even higher payload ratio - while using much less fuel (the pulsejet had atrocious efficiency).
So, it would take 15 drones of that size for one C-130. These drones are much simpler and easier to build and thus cheaper than even small Cesna, thus 15 of them would be at least ~10x cheaper than one C-130.
Dropping 15 loads of 1+ ton water instead of one 16 ton load seems to be better in most cases as the fire line isn't a straight line, and the large plane like C-130 has to maneuver, etc. while flying low over the fire and being subjected to the fire draft, wind gusts, etc.
The 15 drones can drop those 15 loads of 1 ton using dive-bomber style - impossible for C-130 or any other air tanker currently in use - thus avoiding that prolonged horizontal low-flying over fire and thus having much less risk/danger form the wind gusts, etc.
But I do love the image of a satellite spotting a quarter-acre IR hotspot and firing a dozen USFS Tomahawks filled with with retardant to nip it in the bud.
Smokey would have a different tone too. "Only you, plus our array of guided missiles, can prevent forest fires."
as i said in original post - "not small quadcopters, more like WWII size bombers". I use V1 as a close and real existing example of a drone wrt. size and simplicity/cheapness of construction. Though i think 2x-4x of that size would be more suitable and convenient.
>how to make the vehicle recoverable/reusable
just regular software for a plane type drone. The drone comes, drops the water and returns. Can do it GPS/inertial, AI targeted or remote controlled (like say put a Starlink on it how Ukrainians do it sometimes).
>else how to avoid causing more fire than you're putting out when the vehicle splatters against terrain
while normally the drone would return back, accidental crashes of course unavoidable. You don't have to carry much fuel as the drones can be spread around the state on say a 200km grid. The fuel tank can be made with automatic foam generator or something like this triggered if/when the drone goes down crashing.
the most dangerous word in software engineering
What are you basing this on? Being able to see something once you know it’s there is a different problem from detecting it in the first place.
Both of these produce lots of smoke. Neither can be doused by drones.
i suggest you view a bunch of real IR footage.
> Neither can be doused by drones.
I'm pretty sure 20 tons of water would douse a house fire. It would take 10 flights of an F8F Bearcat sized drone. Though the F8F is an overkill built for speed. One can carry 1-2 ton with much simpler plane today for that purpose.
An acre size fire - an acre-inch of water is 100 ton. So 10 drones 10 flights at 1 ton/drone.
For what? I’m familiar with very sensitive IR systems. I’m struggling to see the advantage of having them on drones versus satellites, particularly if the threshold is an entire house is on fire.
An IR camera on drone can be fine-grain controlled from the ground when needed - say zoom-in from a 100km on something detected in the sweep like even a camp-fire so you can confirm whether it is a starting wildfire or just a camp-fire - that of course requires hardware like on those pricey military drones, yet it is still a pocket change in this context. You can also much easily reroute the drone. Again, if you watch the drone war footage there is a lot of scenarios where satellite wouldn't work.
Identification only by drone. Then the dousing is done by conventional means, but dispatched locally.
A class 1 fire truck (the big red ones used in sub/urban areas) and class 3 wildland off road trucks carry around 500 gallons of water which is a drop in the bucket. Fire hydrants on the other hand can supply 250-750 gallons per minute.
The best they can do is try to create firebreaks using bulldozers and other off road vehicles while preemptively dousing properties with water to defend them, because they’ll usually have road access. Doesn’t do a damn when Santa Ana winds are causing 90mph gusts that throw embers for hundreds of feet.
They're the real world "ignore friction, air resistance, &c." of kids physics exercises books.
Depending on the sensor payload (what it's looking for) and how the data is stored and used, it wouldn't really entail a huge privacy problem unless you show up on IR sensors as well as a fire.
If you’re hoping to do better than sighting a smoke column, you will absolutely have to be. We’re not at a loss of detecting entire houses burning.
Again, at that point you’re no longer adding value over the status quo. We don’t have a problem detecting large fires near population centres.
People aren't the only (or largest hotter-than-background, and maybe not hottest-human-sized) thing on your property that a privacy-violating IR sensor drone might want to detect.
> Versus a sensor tuned to an actual fire which is substantially hotter and larger.
If you want an early-detection sensor for fires, they'll be substantially hotter but not substantially larger than an adult human.
It's fun/useful to think of things we can do.
Managing wildfire risks mean letting a certain amount burn every year, including deliberately setting fires to create firebreaks and clearing out areas overdue for it. A fleet of drones constantly finding and stopping wildfires in their early stages would do nothing but set the stage for cataclysmic fires down the road.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42643189
He did not. It would be worth re-reading his comment. He's pointing out that we do have technology that could help with containment: quickly identify fires, communicate their location, and dispatch some local water carriers. He's also surmising that the cost of keeping these active would be less than the cost of damages, which could very well be true.
Something like a Reaper drone, which he specifically mentions, works fine in the wind, as do the water carriers, that fly at hundreds of miles an hour, that have been actively helping this whole time.
I think this is probably all true, but probably not the future since it would require a competent state government who embraces tech.
Water carriers fly close to the ground and make sharp turns because they need to pick up water and make targeted drops, so they are heavily affected by the wind. The water carriers weren't able to start flying until late this morning/early this afternoon due to the winds being too strong (>75+mph gusts).
Or are small fires indistinguishable from a million other hot objects, until the point where they get large enough to detect reliably, it's already obvious to everyone on the ground from the smoke?
With dry conditions and high winds, that is an extremely slow response to an uncontrolled fire...
And to others that said that the winds are dangerous, do quadcopter drones (which tend to be more stable anyway) have algorithms to account for that?
while they have such algorithms, a quadcopter wouldn't able to achieve needed stability in 100mph wind. A heavy plane would do much better.
The current issue is that all those existing water-carrying planes have to go low over fire - thus wind is a problem - as they can't dive-bomb and can't be retrofitted for that. It is just different types of planes.
A dive-bomber would do much better - would deliver the water precisely from a bit higher altitude and from a much more stable, even in the strong wind, trajectory. An unmannend dive-bomber is even easier, can go for even better trajectories.
The problem is that with these winds and humidity small fires become huge fires before anybody can react. Once they are huge fires, detection isn't the problem.
The problem is fighting fires in steep, mountainous terrain filled with dryed out brush and trees when the winds are so strong (hurricane-strength gusts) that you can't provide any air support. The problem is that the winds were so strong last night and this morning that burning embers in the air could fly to and light structures miles away (which is how most of the current fires in Altadena started).
I hope everyone gets to safety.
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/los-angeles-fires-m...
Edit: Changing a word, "gutted" -> "cut"
"Gutted" as a descripter seems extreme and the details that matter are whether these reductions simply trimmed fat, or denied something essential that would have made all the difference here.
https://cao.lacity.gov/budget/summary/2024-25%20Budget%20Sum...
(This PDF is great, props to whoever made it for making it so easy and accessible for normal people to read.)
If you look at the pie chart on Page 11, you will see that by far the largest slice of the pie is the police budget. It's 45% of LA County's entire budget, totalling almost $2 billion. The LAPD's budget for one fiscal year is larger than most country's GDPs, yet crime is still rampant in Los Angeles. So that's the first place I would start. You could probably find $23 million sitting between the couch cushions at LAPD's headquarters.
Some should go to policing, yes, community policing should increase, working the stats should decrease, dedicated mental health professionals should be funded and replace a good number of police interactions, etc.
This is a large and complex topic that deserves better than ankle deep engagement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources_Against_...
"...why are we cutting fire department budgets when wildfires are becoming more frequent..."
If you're going to say we need more money budgeted to the Fire Dept. because fires are becoming frequent and then say in your next breath we need to cut the budget of the Police because crime is becoming more frequent....
That said, I'm sure there is plenty of opportunity to cut waste too and in addition to slashing the police budget a great way to recover some tax money being burned by the police would be to clean up the department so that taxpayers aren't on the hook for the millions spent in lawsuits generated by their repeated abuses, screw ups, workplace injustices, etc. Much of that actually would be free money.
If the strategy isn't working at $2 billion, what makes you think it will start working at $2.1 billion?
The responsibility is on the supporters to demonstrate the efficacy of the current approach. Where are the results?
that's the past 24 hours.
If you've been following this, they've done a fairly amazing job at knocking out maybe a dozen fires in the past day. Many of these had the potential to be giant infernos and you can actively see very clear evidence of them being contained and suppressed as the fire crews responded.
The evacuation orders and rescue operations were also effective and remarkably little life has been lost.
On the contrary, with crime, there's things like the 1992 Watts truce, which is credited with a rapid decline in LA street violence, which happened without law enforcement at all.
So unlike with say fire-fighting, there's empirically more effective strategies for dealing with crime. They do, however, require us to not be ideologically committed to punitive incarceration.
The fire budget is ~800M. Pretty significant by itself.
You keep throwing around this 23M number like a 3% change would make a material impact on 3 fast-spreading huge fires in worst-case-scenario conditions.
What do you think the budget would need to be to handle this? In a scenario that goes deep, such as how water pressure is low because of how much demand is coming from so many hydrants? 100M more? 200M? 500M? 1B?
Is committing to that much more annually the best solution here?
Take 23M and tell me how many firefighters that'd hire, plus equipment to support them. then tell me if that equipment would've been sufficient to at least contain the fires instead of having the damage we have now.
Protip as a former Memphis FD Volunteer: Every damn dollar counts.
> The budget reduction, approved last year by Mayor Karen Bass, was mostly absorbed by leaving many administrative jobs unfilled, but that left about $7 million that was cut from its overtime budget that was used for training, fire prevention, and other key functions
(see up thread peer comment for source)
Further, with a constrained revenue and something like 63% of the entiire state budget going to Police and Fire it appears that the California Fire budget lost out a little to the California Police budget.
There's the arena for fighting this out, a good old badge on badge bar fight over $$$'s.
In case anyone was curious, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... suggests that ~17 countries have a GDP of less than $2 billion per year. Seeing as how there are 193+ countries, this means that the LAPD budget exceeds the GDP of fewer than 10% of countries. (The median country GDP is ~$50 billion per year.)
For some extra context: while these 17 countries include some very poor countries, the primary reason that they have such small GDPs is their small population. Their combined population is approximately the same as the city of Los Angeles.
That's like arguing that since Los Angeles public school's budget is $18.8 billion[1], yet scores are still poor[2], we should cut the public school budget.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-26/lausd-ap... [2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-11/lausd-ma...
Wouldn't that be the same as advocating for cuts in the LAFD funding because they weren't able to do much about the wildfires anyway?
That doesn't seem to be the best way to go about things, at least not to me.
Studies have found "no consistent correlations between increased police spending and municipal crime rates". Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/world/canada/canada-lette...
Unlike policing, where clear alternatives to it like mental healthcare, drug rehabilitation and social welfare programs exist, there isn't really an alternative to the firefighting service for stopping fires.
Meanwhile, people aren't necessarily concerned with the crime rate, per se. There are crimes we care about more than others, namely, violent personal crimes: muggings, felonious assault, rape, and murder. Close on its heels are property crimes: breaking and entering, vandalism, and robbery.
Given the crimes the majority of the people actually care about, can we say that the LA crime rate has not gone down?
Meanwhile, 20% of the hydrants ran dry in the Palisades. Increased LAFD funding isn't going to change anything about that. This isn't even getting into whether it's reasonable for a municipal government to be prepared to battle a wildfire enveloping an entire region. I don't think there's a city in the United States that could take that on.
Hyperbolic statements like "gutted" are just meant to get the knee jerk, frothing at the mouth "retweet" kind of reaction, and it seems to be being successful at that.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california-wildfires/la-w...
> The budget reduction, approved last year by Mayor Karen Bass, was mostly absorbed by leaving many administrative jobs unfilled, but that left about $7 million that was cut from its overtime budget that was used for training, fire prevention, and other key functions.
> The variable overtime hours, called "V-Hours" within the LAFD, were used to pay for FAA-mandated pilot training and helicopter coordination staffing for wildfire suppression, the memo said.
"Without this funding, pilot compliance and readiness are jeopardized, and aerial firefighting capabilities are diminished," it said. "Changes to the Air Operations Section impact the Department's ability to adhere to current automatic and mutual aid agreements, provide air ambulance service, and quickly respond to woodland fires with water dropping helicopters."
> The memo also highlighted other programs that would suffer under the cuts, including the Disaster Response Section, which funds the bulldozer teams that cut breaks and control lines around wildfires, and the Critical Incident Planning and Training Section, which develops plans for major emergencies.
So.. cheers for the update and context, that does highlight a 'loss' of $7 million in training alocation from an over 800 million budget.
Do 'we' hold the state of California responsible here for allocating less overall, or the LA Fire Chief for perhaps not making the best use of what was allocated to them.
I'm an outsider and I'm avoiding throwing shade, just highlighting the complexity of budget issues.
If the blame goes to the state then attention should be paid to the page 6 water flow from revenue to expenditures - if Fire needs more then Police(?) must get less .. etc.
Cali Budget: https://cao.lacity.gov/budget/summary/2024-25%20Budget%20Sum...
(page 11) $774 million went to salaries, $46 million to expenses.
Sure, and to that end the Police and Fire together make up in excess of 60% of the entire budget.
Should all income go to the Fire Dept? (Obviously not) .. again, I'm an outsider, but from a helicopter perspective there already a good sized portion of the budget going towards Fire as a priority already. Should some of the Police budget be cut and redirected?
One a portion of total available has been allocated it does rather fall to the Fire Chief to make the most of what has been granted.
The challenge appears to be how to make what's available go the furtherest.
Here, not California, we make considerable use of volunteers .. well equiped and large well trained volunteers with solid liability insurance should they toast themselves and backed by a professional full time core.
I dare say similar things happen in California, I note the use of the prison population in fire fighting.
It's a tough problem domain, not helped by all the outside hot takes on twitter and elsewhere that casually claim budgets are being gutted, etc.
I'm as far from this situation as you can be, but yes, absolutely, it's ridiculous how much money is set on fire on ineffective budget items, while at the same time AFAIU the police force is not really held responsible to do its job.
Of the LA City Fiscal Year 2025 (July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025) of $12.90 billion, $1.98 billion (15.36%) is Police and $820 million (6.36%) is Fire. Combined, this is less than 22%, not in excess of 60%.
https://openbudget.lacity.org/#!/year/2025/operating/0/depar...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-09/californ...
We just had a record dry year followed by a warm and wet start to summer which has caused a bunch of new growth, thats going to die and dry come Feb and i'll be keeping a go bag in my car.
E.g. Retirement benefits and debt service took up 43% of Chicago’s budget in 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/opinion/chicago-illinois-.... A decade ago my wife and I decided to abandon our efforts to move back to the city (where we went to law school) because we saw this coming.
It's not like suburbs aren't sitting on financial bombs either.
I moved to unincorporated exurban Maryland. The state government is a mess, but it’s mostly preoccupied dealing with Baltimore. Our county is great. Good schools with modest per student spending, the friendliest police I’ve ever interacted with. Even our county landfill is one of the cleanest and most orderly facilities I’ve ever seen. Nicer than most of New York City for sure.
And of course, even if you were willing to spend several hours a day commuting, if you're in California exurban areas aren't exactly safer from wildfires.
I grew up in northern VA in the 1990s and I thought that the whole of America (besides NYC obviously) was like that. Super clean, orderly, and efficient. Then I lived in Wilmington Delaware, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC, and it reminded me too much of the third world.
Reminds me of a video (part of series), titled "Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme". Previous HN submission and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32495647
TLDR: Suburban and certain commercial development is money-loser because tax-revenue is way under the long-term costs of the infrastructure to support it, and already denser areas (including the housing of poorer people) are subsidizing spread-out/richer zones.
But both that site and its readers have tried to apply that conclusion to suburbs of major cities, which is ludicrously wrong to anyone that actually knows anything about the causes of municipal bankruptcy (almost always due to pension obligations , and often in a vicious cycle with high taxes raised to pay for pensions that drive away residents).
Most budgeting should be moved to the state level, IMO. It's crazy for Western Springs, Atherton and Beverly Hills to waste money while Chicago and Oakland fall behind. If some magnates decide to move to Texas as a result, good riddance. The dependence on property taxes is particularly perverse, as it incentivizes the housing pyramid scheme.
This guy is my county executive: https://www.aacounty.org/pittmanandfriends. I trust him to make sure our trash gets picked up on time and to keep the community safe. I certainly don’t trust the Maryland government to do that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
And your point doesn’t contradict mine. The homeowners in my county are highly informed and conscientious voters, and their decisions are good for most of the people who already live in the county.
I agree in certain circumstances, including land use, you want to make decisions at the state level. But for most government services, like education, policing, local roads, etc., I want Kim who runs our HOA to be voting on who makes those decisions and hassling those officials to keep them accountable.
In any case, we don't seem to disagree all that much. My original point was more legislative than executive in nature. Local executive accountability is desirable, provided that the budgeting and rulemaking were made uniform state-wide. Education already works that way.
The entire state of New Jersey exists to pay pensions. The 2025 general budget is $55 billion, $7 billion went to funding the pension for one year, again.
https://cao.lacity.gov/budget/summary/2024-25%20Budget%20Sum...
Page 6 shows a water flow from revenues to expenditures.
And why is there apparently no water in the fire hydrants? Something about the reservoir not being refilled appropriately?
They emptied the tanks fighting the fire.
From the article in the GP comment:
What are your thoughts on that question?
I'm in Australia, while I cannot personally answer your question wrt these specific tanks I do imagine there was some means by which they were filled to the brim.
Fire tanks are generally "slow to fill* and "fast to empty" in relative terms - they form a local cache for rapid drawdown at rates much faster than "normal" water system draw.
There's also strong element in twitter and US news of petty critic for politic points .. "The hydrants are empty and there's no water" might be that kind of complaint, eg: "we emptied the tanks here holding the fire front back, the front has now moved, the tanks are now refilling" might well be the source of what became a damning meme "the hydrants are empty".
Unfortunately we have a news article reporting a tweet.
The fire budget was cut by $17.6 million for the year, the 23M cut was proposed. The police budget was increased by $126M for the year.
For context, the LAFD annual budget is $820M and the LAPD annual budget is $2140M.
https://www.joinlafd.org/salary-and-benefits
That's not true. The call last night was for all off-duty firefighters to report their availability, not for members of the public.
Clearly LAFD / LACFD need more manpower, but there's more then enough merit to make that case without misinformation.
What really bugs me is what I find to be a disinterest and lack of belief in vastly expanding the fleet of water dropping aircraft. Letting fires burn to the extent that they have been isn't cheap, to put it lightly. Somehow, a state that is one of the largest economies in the world can't or won't expand its aerial response such that fires of the scale we are seeing become a thing of the past. With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress.
I can anticipate being told this is not possible or too expensive, which is what everyone I know seems to believe, but I don't buy it.
If anyone ever runs for governor and makes my proposal their single issue platform, I will vote for them regardless of political party or whether it is truly feasible up to the extent that I am imagining. Fuck wildfires.
Better and better fire suppression tech over the years that enables a quicker response, like aircraft, satellite monitoring, remote video cameras, etc, has just served to make the problem worse in the long run.
https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE
The forest management issues are valid but apply more to other parts of the state.
Lord knows I'm not going to defend the competence of the CA state govt and I'm sure they could be protecting against wildfires better, but I don't know that railing about the number of aircraft involved will help anything.
I'm sure that's correct for many geographies, but most of this fire is burning on steep mountainsides and in canyons without road access, or an occasional dirt road and no water connection. With the amount of wind, probably nothing could be done, land or air, once this started.
edit: Here is a glimpse of the terrain: https://x.com/firevalleyphoto/status/1876731317464760629
Part of this is using controlled burns to mitigate the buildup, another thing that's been under-resourced in California.
I had a discussion at a B and B with a guy who flew F-16s in the USAF, then U2s once they were going to promote him out of flying. He'd just left the service and had retrained to fly Grumman water bombers for Calfire. The problem as I've described it is apparently well-known in the wildfire fighting community in Californa.
Controlled burns in that terrain are impractical because there are too many structures nearby and a controlled burn can turn into an uncontrolled burn in minutes. A more realistic approach would be expanding defensible space and culling non-native flora.
https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral
[2] https://doi.org/10.1006/qres.1999.2035
If this is the case, then homes in this biome need to be engineered to survive nearby canopy fires every few generations.
Wildfires are obviously not new, if you're saying the fault is of the administration of the last 10 years, how do you explain that the earlier government for the fifty years prior ALSO failed to see and implement your "just dump the water everywhere from planes" approach to the fires in the 90s, say?
We're, what, 13 years from terrible financials for the state and local governments that forced widespread major cuts and furloughs and reduction in hours? Everyone who's been hit by those can point to negative outcomes somewhere or other (crime is up! education achievement stats are down! wait times are up! etc) but there's no free lunch here to just have avoided any cutbacks in any area.
> With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress.
Great, you've just put out the fire, and kicked the can for next time. Even if it did work that way, it doesn't fix the root problem, which is simply:
Many western forests need to burn. Not in the sort of uncontrolled canopy fires we see with this sort of situation, but a lower, "clean the brush out, candle off some weaker trees, and open up the seeds" sort of fire. The problem is, for most of the past century, we haven't been allowing them to burn. Wildfire fighting in the US really ramped up and became a capable force with the post-WWII surplus - Jeeps, bombers that could be bought for nothing and converted to fire bombers, cheap spotting aircraft. So, for about 80 years, we've been fighting fires - or, explained differently, "We've been letting fire load build up for 80 years." When those areas light, with most of a century worth of buildup, they go off like a bomb, and your option in high winds is to "get out of the way."
You cannot allow endless fuel growth in a forest without consequences - and we're out of runway on that. All the aerial firefighting in the world won't fix that problem, because it's not the problem that needs fixing.
See (for example): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKsLRNbczJY
Cool burning's been going on for several thousand years (geolocked?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM72NtXxyLs
There’s hope that this series of events will cause them to reevaluate but prescribed burns wouldn’t have helped in the Palisades anyway.
Do you have some reason to believe more planes is the best allocation of resources?
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/08/26/c-130-hercules-is-now-figh...
“Federal agencies are responsible for managing 200 to 300 wildland fire aircraft.” - Nat’l Interagency Fire Center, https://www.nifc.gov/resources/aircraft
“CAL FIRE’s fleet of more than 60 fixed and rotary wing aircraft make it the largest civil aerial firefighting fleet in the world.” — CAL FIRE, https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-protection/aviation-...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Information_for_Resource_...
It's a generic problem for any sensing problem that's real-time + low-orbit.
I speculate adding instruments to large LEO constellations, en masse, would solve that problem—though I have no clue if that's practical. (Perhaps if the same instrument were doing other kinds of real-time imaging, you could piggyback wildfire alerts on that datastream, and the get the functionality essentially for free?)
edit: More info:
- "Geostationary satellite sensors view the same area of Earth’s surface at all times while polar-orbiting sensors, such as MODIS and VIIRS, typically view the same area of Earth’s surface twice daily. Consequently, geostationary satellite sensors can provide repeated observations on a sub-hourly basis, making it possible to detect fires which may not be detected at longer temporal intervals. Geostationary satellites provide data at 10-15 minute intervals, so they can detect more fire events and capture their growth and change. However, the spatial resolution of geostationary satellite data is coarser and therefore less sensitive to small fires."
https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/tools/firms/faq
I think you're missing a major contributor which is California's prison population [0]. Prisoners getting paid around $3-$5 a day make up ~1/3 of California's wildfire fighting service. Maybe you consider them to be "volunteers" but that seems to be missing some important context.
0. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-history-of-califo...
It seems to be a great way to reengage in the community and feel useful as a human being (and see people being grateful to you).
Not so sure the $5 are the driver here.
Better than watching a cellmate all day.
There aren't a lot of opportunities to earn money in prison. Having money in prison is important. Although having work time credits are more important as those earn you an early release.
> Better than watching a cellmate all day.
No one is doing that anyways.
Worse, you generally can't be a firefighter once you get out of prison as they don't hire ex-convicts. Consequently you're not even learning a useful job skill. Note that this hard-ban was relaxed in California specifically in 2020 under AB2147 (allowing prisoners who participated in firefighting programs to apply to have their records expunged in certain cases) -- but applies elsewhere in the US.
It is an optional activity if I understand right.
It seems rewarding to do a training to become a firefighter and join the team, than to idle in prison.
It is a volunteer role. Many people in the world become volunteers in the firefighters, a lot are unpaid. They do it for reasons beyond money (making friends, feeling useful, helping people, etc).
A prisoner may get some carrot as a reward (like less served time) but at the end, they all benefit.
Yes -- but -- by undercutting the wages you would have to pay people outside, it lowers the pay of the non-prison laborers. This hurts that community.
You can achieve the same result by paying them prevailing wage. This has the extra benefit of giving them some saved up money to start a new life when they get out, helping them avoid falling back into a life of crime to make ends meet.
I don’t see how you can do this, because you turn punishment into privilege. If the way to firefighter pay is through a jail cell you create all kind of problems around perverse incentives.
But it's not just hurting the firefighter market, lots of people just have issues with using prisoners as slaves.
If part of their job description was the equivalent of clearing brush/cutting fire lines in emergencies, I might consider it.
> Why is the market for firefighters the only one that gets free volunteers from this pool?
Do you have another source of willing, not-risk-averse, physically fit and competent people that are not doing anything else, know each other already, can be there ready to work together at a moment’s notice, and won’t bail partway through to go fill an instacart order?
I think the first step is people educating themselves even marginally on the topic of discussion before proposing policy changes.
I get that the motto is somewhat tongue in cheek but still, slave labor does tend to distort markets.
[0]https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/natio...
These fires have spread quickly and it is true that fire fighters are spread thin.
I'm glad to see all the aircraft are working the fires and hopefully they'll make some good progress before night.
Proper management of the forest means selecting a time to do these burns. If we don't select a time, mother nature will select one for us.
Yes, global temperature rise is real, and could potentially have had some effect on the fire. Completely disrupting the natural cycle of the forest is a much bigger deal.
> One of the primary obstacles to increasing the pace and scale of beneficial fire use in California is the difficulty for practitioners to obtain adequate liability coverage, although the rates and losses from escapes are very low.
https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/natural-resource-manageme...
Some of them might change their mind now that they’re owners of some acres of charcoal.
You cannot not choose a time - it’ll get chosen for you. Schedule should be known, cost included in taxes, risks known when property was acquired, liabilities limited in state or federal regulation. Weather doesn’t care about lawyers.
It's kind of rich that a local billionaire would complain about this. I'm going to guess that the $23M was cut due to budget shortfalls. Maybe if the billionaires and multi-millionaires in the area were willing to pay their fair share that wouldn't have happened.
https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/politico-uncovers-more...
Why do most middle class earners pay more than their millionaire and billionaire counterparts as a percentage? Sure you might say W2 tax rate is higher than capital gains, but why is that the case?
The rich pay the vast majority of taxes and get next to nothing for it.
Do you have a better model?
https://www.thewrap.com/la-times-case-against-trump-kamala-e...
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/24/nx-s1-5163293/la-times-editor...
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/dec/18/la-times-patri...
Some things that crossed my mind:
- Affected people probably spend way more on personal security, lawyers, dog grooming, plastic surgery, etc. than on fire safety in that area. I.e. all the extravagant nonsense that spoiled millionaires in LA and these areas in LA specifically are famous for spending their money on. I watched the new beverly hills cop movie on Netflix over the summer (not amazing) that makes fun of that specifically.
- Given the string of wild fires specifically in LA in the last few years, how is it that they are not more prepared for this and what genius decided that now was a good moment to cut spending on the fire department? And who voted that clown into office? Oh wait that would be the same people that live there that donate money to all sorts of causes by the bucket load.
That doesn't help the people there right now. And I'm sure there are some people caught up in this that are less well off, which totally sucks. But I'm sure charity events will be organized and I'm sure there will be quite a few millionaires attending and performing at these events.
But my point is that they don't exactly have a lot of excuses for not organizing the most awesome, best funded and equipped fire department in the world. Also, on the prevention side there is probably a thing or two that could have been done to e.g. clear out areas of bone dry bushes, wood, etc. that are well known fire hazards. I don't think there's a lot of ignorance on that front that needs addressing.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/wildfire-threatens-...
This whole subthread should be printed out, preserved, exhibited in museums about the spread of misinformation among gullible Silicon Valley commenters, but also deleted from this site. It's an embarrassment.
This one is pretty good
Palisades started Tuesday morning in someone's backyard. The Eaton fire started last evening near one of the campgrounds. The Hearst fire started late last night around 10pm (suspected cause was a vehicle fire from an accident that spread to the side of the road).
- A specific house address was given on-air for the Sunset Fire in the Hollywood Hills that started this evening at around 5:40pm. The ABC7 copter crew had actually spotted the fire within the first minute or two of it forming (while they were trying to get in position to cover the Palisades fire after refueling), and (ABC and NBC) broadcast the first hour of the fire's growth (and provided live updates on new flare-ups). They may well have saved Hollywood from burning down.
There were several more fires that started on Thursday. Due to the unusual nature of these fires, authorities suspect arson. A person of interest was arrested for one of these fires after being observed trying to start a fire.
Extreme dryness, high wind, failing electrical infrastructure, overburdened emergency response.
Also embers can easily be blown miles away to ignite another "new" fire.
Every few years in Australia we get a story of arsonists setting fires. Sometimes they're firefighters, too.
Actually, that was my first natural reaction. (Though I do live in the neighborhood of Russia, here probability of foul play is much higher up the list)
> Sometimes they're firefighters, too.
That is messed up.
A "visit" or two are often all that is necessary to convince folks to pay protection money to gangs. Protectors always have a perverse incentive to remind people what they need protection from.
One shouldn't rush to accuse though.
> With that, Shorty said, “Say, Ladd, why don’t you have Floyd and Carl here set a forest fire?”
> “Hey, just a minute!” Carl Abeyta stiffened self-righteously and stifled an urge to lunge across the room at Shorty. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
> “Setting a fire,” Shorty said calmly. “Christ, that’s one of the few ways those men down there have earned a living around here. I know of a dozen guys from town, the past twenty years, who've gone up and set the trees on fire. For crissakes, man, it’s—what is the pay now? Two-fifty an hour around the clock? Three dollars? And the Forest Service—God bless Smokey the Bear!—packs in potatoes and all the fresh-killed beef you can eat. You want to get this town’s mind off that beanfield, light the forest and hire all the heavies to put it out. And keep lighting little fires here and there—”
Some fires are started by glass bottles causing the dry grass underneath to lit up, and then the wind takes care of the rest. But that's really, really rare.
It's most often someone doing something really stupid.
Tell people they can't come out of their house and they go stir crazy to go out... Tell people it's an absolute fire ban and the situation is extremely critical and it only takes 1 nut bag out of the entire population... The odds are high.
But fret not, the right wing on Twitter is taking to blaming a minuscule water diversion to protect an endangered fish for the hydrants running dry.
Not the fact that we built a sprawling megalopolis with ultra-expensive infrastructure maintenance costs... in a desert... where we use the vast majority of local water to feed cows...
As the planet becomes hotter and drier, you will see more fires, unless you address climate change.
China makes all your stuff, including bibles, that's why there is more air pollution there. China is rapidly expanding it's renewables deployment and that will improve their air quality and resilience..
This isn't a new problem or even a surprise. We had fires in NorCal the last few years already, and the people in charge are not afraid of losing their job, so there's no accountability until people start threatening them with a change.
Guess whats gonna happen in another 5 years? You're right, another fire. I am pre-ordering my thoughts and prayers right now. Maybe build your house in mud next time?
Its not my problem if you build your house in the literal line of fire. Climate change is still a thing but we can't blame everything on it.
The Santa Ana winds and the accompanying raging wildfires have been a part of the ecosystem of the Los Angeles Basin for over 5,000 years, dating back to the earliest habitation of the region by the Tongva and Tataviam peoples.
Honest question in good faith: For those that use the reductionist argument of global warming / climate change for every natural disaster, what do they expect to happen if we hypothetically cut all greenhouse gas production to zero? Some kind of climate stasis Garden of Eden scenario?
California has "behaved" in some manner for twenty thousand years, as has the Pacific North West and the Great lake regions to the north east (in central north america).
Now that the sea+land surface layer has more energy thanks to increased insulation above various parts of the globe are bubbling along more than they have the past; wet forests that have never experienced fire are drying out in a manner previously rare and having fires not experienced in human history, drier areas with a fire cycle (California, Australia) are experiencing more intense and more frequent fire events.
> if we hypothetically cut all greenhouse gas production to zero ..
it will take a lag time for the human added insulation to disapear from the atmosphere, when a new stable equilibrium is reached the energy driving the additional bubbling seen so far to date will be gone and the former equilibrium (of dynamic stability) would resume .. for a few thousand years.
I think it's more innocent than that and that your characterization is a strawman. Climate change is real and scary. This type of fire might not be abnormal in LA on generational timescales but it is the kind of thing we would expect to see as a consequence of climate change. So even if this type of fire would have happened anyway it is a real manifestation of a real thing people are rightly concerned about. It's also possible that climate change (and/or the politicization of climate change!) made this fire worse.
What people like you don't understand is that our man made climate change is 100 to 1000 times faster than anything nature has dealt (except say a meteor hitting the earth).
So yes, the climate has always been unstable over long periods, but never changed as quickly as we are changing it today. We are the meteor now.
Any other Silicon Beach companies that I missed?
I live in the area and have never seen a fire move this rapidly. The high winds were a major culprit.
Greece is a good example of also not managing this properly with its own regular massive fires, while national parks around Cape Town and other parts of South Africa do regular controlled burns in very rocky, hill-y terrain.
Why not?
Fuel reduction burning often requires blanketing millions of people with carcinogenic smoke for several weeks each year.
The greater good is to protect everyone’s lungs and accept that every few years we’ll have to rebuild a few homes.
The result is much more smoke being emitted overall.
References for the "hot and dry year" ('cause I hear it tossed around a lot). As far as I can tell, all of California had several relatively wet (but hot) years and nothing dry afterwards. I'm linking to NOAA's the California drought map, which shows "Abnormally Dry" (less than "moderate drought") for LA currently and I think showed "none" for much of the year [1].
The thing is, I agree this was to be expected. But only by the principle "climate change is going to cause disaster out of nowhere". We need to say this and let people understand.
[1] https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...
Some relevant research: https://moritzfirelab.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/denniso...
Drought is a more comprehensive measure that includes snowpack, rainfall, resevoir levels, etc.
Your other link is research saying that statistic matters for fires. I can believe it does but your other graphs don't show fuel moisture as even slightly below average. Maybe the last two months of no rain indeed put fuel moisture well average. But, this is California - rainfall varies widely. LA has had many winters without rain, I grew up there.
I can't claim to climatological understanding of the situation. But I variety of narratives that don't make sense and impulse is to say that these are a response the LA fires being almost entirely a sudden and a unpredictable event, an effect not of trends but of the situation of global warming overall, something people simply don't want to admit.
I don't agree with that. People can choose to not live there. There is an entire country to live in and we keep crowding in what seem to the worst places to live and then act surprised when it goes badly. Climate change is going to make some places uninhabitable, that's why we tried to prevent it, but no one cares.
Malibu?
Pacific Palisades?
These are among the most pleasant places in the world to live. People are not going to stop wanting to live there — this isn’t a lost cause like a low-lying area exposed to floods. We have to find ways to mitigate the very real fire risk.
SoCal, NorCal, Seattle - Earthquakes
SoCal, NorCal - Fires
Midwestern States - Tornadoes
North Easy - Blizzards
South Easy - Hurricanes
Which part do you suggest everyone move to?
Is this a serious "proposal"? Definitely not. But a lot of people in this thread are acting like moving away from literal hellfire is impossible, and I respectfully submit that living in the interior is better than having everything you own burn down.
"Dangerous": California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Utah, Puerto Rico, Nevada, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, Hawaii, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa
"Safe": New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Missouri, West Virginia, Minnesota, Vermont, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa, Maine, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming
I've done a pretty bad comparison here though; there are a lot of differences between tornadoes and wildfires and the places they happen. What I feel confident in saying is you are very unlikely to be seriously affected by a tornado, even if you live in a place where they happen frequently. But if you live in a place where wildfires happen frequently, you're way more likely to be seriously affected.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_by_cost
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/18/1245068810/wildfire-smoke-con...
https://earthquakelist.org/usa/#latest-earthquakes-mag-5-dis...
For example, you've deemed the New Madrid seismic zone[0] as "safe", despite multiple M7-8+ earthquakes in the 19th century. The Cascadia subduction zone hasn't had a major event in 300+ years but no one considers that seismically safe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_seismic_zone
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/hazard-map-2023-50-state-u...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_by_cost
Missouri could realistically experience a M8.0 earthquake tomorrow, just like Washington. That the NMSZ was relatively quiescent during the 20th century tells you little about the seismic risk. Geological risk isn't determined by what happened last week.
Mount Rainier has not been active since the 19th century either. Nonetheless, it is a Decade Volcano[0], one of the highest risk volcanoes in the world.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade_Volcanoes
I feel like everything you've brought up has to be factored into the USGS seismic risk map. But in case it's not, I searched the USGS earthquake database. Of the 1425 >= 5.0 earthquakes in the coterminous US since 1700, 12 of them occurred in the NMSZ (only 7 of which were >= 6.0). In the same amount of time, hundreds occurred in California (the USGS search is rectangular and I can't be arsed to separate out Nevada). There simply is no equivalence. If earthquakes are really a concern, definitely don't live in California! And if wildfires are a concern, also definitely don't live in California!
California/Nevada earthquakes: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=28.32372...
NMSZ earthquakes: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=28.26568...
https://gisgeography.com/us-precipitation-map/
https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/
No wait that’s the desert. The midwest produces mostly corn for corn syrup, ethanol, and grains… and dust bowls.
The evacuation zones at their peak covered fewer than 200,000 people… in a state with a population of almost 39 million. That’s half a precent and these are the worst fires we’ve seen in years.
Most fires in California happen in places that haven’t burned for nearly a century.
Ah yes, same response to school shootings; "No way to solve this, says the only country where this happens every year".
There's nothing that special about California that makes it different from many other places around the world with densely populated forested areas that do not get insane wildfires almost every single year.
That would be a win-win situation for everyone. We would get goat meat/milk for free (minus the shepherd effort) and the forest would be mostly clean.
This is quite rare now. Sure, in some places in the mountains we still have that because life is hard there and there's little else you can get from the land. But it's mostly disappearing.
No goat equivalent in the Americas ?
Population density too low ?
Here, in the mountains, there’s basically nothing really profitable. So, husbandry (using goats since they are adapted to this environment) was basically the only way to go.
We also need to discuss clearing plants and other fuel that comes back as part of the drought / rain weather patterns we are seeing. Goats and other firefighting clearing efforts need to be discussed.
https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;@-118.57,3...
[1] https://www.weather.gov/wrh/timeseries?site=KSMO
[2] https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/world-record-low-humidity-...
Altadena fire
I’d wait until the smoke settles (because the CCF focuses on less well-off communities than Altadena or the Palisades) but donating to their wildfire relief efforts does a lot of good regardless. They frequently give grants to the local organizations running the evacuation shelters.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/wildfire-threatens-...
The fact that otherwise intelligent people are eating it up has made me give up for a generation.
It is a truly depressing state of affairs.
And yes, in the end the mayor is responsible for the wellbeing of the city. And people see the mayor is nowhere to be found when their homes burned down. Who do you want them to be mad at?
Anyway on topic an aunt of mine is a mayor of a small city (55k). Her opinion is that firefighters fight fires and having a politician walk around a disaster area with a hundred journalists isn't helping.
Wasn't that Ted Cruz, the senator? During the blizzard?
Of course that outrage assumes you believe that a mayor should be on the scene even if they're not, in this case, holding onto a hose and actively suppressing fire. I personally think that's a fair ask of her constituents. It would be an entirely different story if this was an unpredictable situation, but, again, every expert commenting pointed out how unique the upcoming weather was and that there was the very real potential for massive fires.
I think it's one of those issues where both sides of the aisle could agree except for the right-wing side turned it into this weird DEI stuff.
Edit: I continue to see her name pop up in the news and I have been trying to understand how LA works in that she is in the complete spotlight. There are fires in surrounding LA but does the city of LA mayor have any control in those?
I live in a very mid-size city for my province and our mayor goes on international trips on city business maybe once a year. The fact itself is not out of the ordinary.
https://youtu.be/u8c_3YEosk4
I grew up in north-central Pasadena and had many friends who lived in Altadena, and it’s been heartbreaking to watch the news from a distance and realize that many of their homes might have burned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D29RXlm4yE&t=584s
From the street signs, I was able to identify a location where a high school friend of mine lived—the house now burned to the ground. (It’s been nearly fifty years since I graduated from high school, and I don’t know if her family still lives there or not.)
This is mostly on the California government, since the high insurance premiums are a side effect of disastrous wildfire mitigation policy in California. More proactive and competent wildfire mitigation would reduce the risk and therefore make insurance premiums more reasonable.
Or... not building mansions next to forestry? In Germany we have pretty strict requirements on distances, so it's rare for damages to occur. Also, most of our power grid infrastructure is buried below ground, so videos like the ones circulating on Twitter from arcing lines setting bushes and trees alight can't really happen here either.
Prevention is orders of magnitude cheaper in the long run.
The risk level is not just affected by proximity to forests. For offshore (Santa Ana) wind events, the riskiest areas are the SW bottom of hills and near canyons. That's where the current LA fires are.
IMO, a better prevention measure would be to not build houses out of sticks. That's already the case for much of the housing in Europe. Alas, here in the US the colonial and cabin aesthetics still win out, even when fire-resistant options aren't more expensive.
Coffey Park in Santa Rosa was destroyed in 2017, and most properties were rebuilt to lower fire-resistance standards.[1] The second little pig just doesn't wanna hear it.
https://wildfiretoday.com/2019/11/19/after-the-tubbs-fire-ho...
The only thing that helps against is hurricanes and other storm events. Once the fire has blown up the windows and embers (or outright flames) enter the interior, it's game over generally. You might be able to re-use a concrete or brick structure after a large fire, but if the fire ran unchecked until it burned out everything, no chance - concrete will have lost rebar integrity and bricks will have soaked up toxic combustion products.
These homes would have been destroyed regardless of building material. The bigger issue is most of these homes have probably not properly gone through fire mitigation steps.
https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/Safer-from...
> These homes would have been destroyed regardless of building material.
That's just not the case. Fire-resistant construction might not always help the first house at the subdivision's edge, but it will help the rest. One analogy is control rods in a reactor.
As I said in another post, the problem with firestorms here in CA is the rate of initial spread. We always get massive numbers of destroyed structures all at once, and <25% containment until the winds subside. The ignition source for most of the structures are burning wood-frame structures. Early on, firefighters can only help evacuate people.
As I said before the homes are of course an issue but the larger issue is basic fire prevention, not the fact that homes are as you say “built out of twigs”. It is certainly a factor but the more important piece are all the other steps that go before as I linked earlier.
Only well funded commercial and government campuses like JPL or the Getty can afford the kind of fire suppression measures required to defend against a conflagration of this magnitude.
It is not an aesthetic preference, the US used to construct housing like in Europe through the 19th century.
That style of construction was repeatedly catastrophically destroyed by severe earthquakes, killing many people needlessly, and is now illegal in many regions.
The US became strict about seismic safety after the famous 1906 San Francisco earthquake[0]. A few decades earlier, the 1872 Lone Pine earthquake[1] literally flattened entire towns of European-style construction; some of these are now ghost towns that were simply abandoned and never rebuilt. When you see surviving old masonry buildings, they usually have been retroactively refitted with steel frames to make the masonry mostly decorative.
The regions of the US prone to wildfire are also prone to severe earthquakes, so your options are wood or steel frame construction, neither of which is particularly wildfire resistant but at least it won't collapse during a severe earthquake. Many parts of the US also have to engineer for much higher wind loadings than in Europe.
You can build masonry buildings that meet the seismic standard but that requires a lot of steel and is expensive. Where I live, all modern construction is required to survive a M8.5 earthquake; I've never seen a house in Europe engineered to that standard.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1872_Owens_Valley_earthquake
As for the higher cost, this has become mostly an urban myth. In regions with low construction costs such as the South or the Midwest ($130-180/sqft,) the cost difference is minimal. In areas with high construction costs such as CA ($200-700/sqft,) the difference is either immaterial or negative (thanks to the insurance savings.)
Most typical reinforced masonry will fail during a severe earthquake, for which there is ample empirical evidence. The cost to reinforce masonry to e.g. a M8.5 standard is not small. The quantity of rebar, ties, etc required is expensive in both time and material. It isn’t cheap nor does the labor exist at the scale required.
I actually live in exotic construction, designed for extreme seismic and wind loads. Lots of steel, not much concrete, and extremely fire resistant (even though that isn’t a requirement here) but much cheaper to build and more seismic resistant (in theory) than reinforced concrete, which is what it replaces (its raison d’être). No structural wood either, but it wouldn’t be economical to construct a typical house this way.
This is an active area of research. If it was an “urban myth” there wouldn’t be so many engineering firms investing in developing new construction techniques that provide seismic resistance without the cost. If reinforced masonry actually worked in a reasonable way, we’d just use that.
As I explained in sibling threads, "speed bumps" are the most important thing here in CA. It's not about whether your structure can withstand a 1000-degree fire all around it. It's about whether your structure will set fire to three others within minutes of when it goes up in flames.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Tower_(San_Francisc...
https://grist.org/extreme-weather/california-overhauled-its-...
California has had a state fire insurer (FAIR) of last resort for over fifty years and fire insurance is practically mandatory for mortgages so there aren’t many places that are excluded.
It’s entirely funded by premiums and has never been bailed out by state or federal funds. It’s not like the National Insurance Flood Program that’s burned billions of dollars in federal funding to subsidize people living in flood plains and Florida.
Please leave politics out of this discussion, it's immature.
I suspect long term fire insurance due to wildfire will not be covered by home insurance policies. As it’s not a “random” event, and instead a risk of certain areas.
While some exclusions may apply to fires caused by excluded perils (e.g., floods or earthquakes) or to contributory factors like neglect, wildfires are generally not excluded in standard homeowner’s insurance policies.
Insurance companies cover known risks all the time. The greater the risk, the higher the premiums.
As long as insurance companies are permitted to accurately and fully price the risk into premiums, anything is insurable — at least in concept.
Here's a link if anyone's interested https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/California...
Sorry for your loss.
Source: used to live in a Los Angeles hilly suburb. If the fires get to where I used to live, that house will definitely burn despite having a cement tile roof.
All homeowners I know here have already had them installed over the last five years because of fire insurance inspections but I don’t know how representative my sample is.
In Southern California, it is typical to have tile roofs and stucco exteriors, which helps protect against the embers that will rain on your house during a major wildfire.