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LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

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Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

#101
post #52
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://wifire.ucsd.edu/firis-in-depth

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.

Knowing how things actually work in reality can help guide the imagination.

Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

#102
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you under the impression that their website is hosted on-premises? This ain't the early 90s

As an ex-JPLer, it would not have surprised me for this to be the case even in the early 2010s.

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.

Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

#103
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

What is burning? Mostly bushes or mostly homes?

From the initial National Weather Service alert:

> 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...

Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you for providing context, I edited the comment and changed "gutted" to "cut".

Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

#106
post #2

I was wondering why JPL website was not working, I guess this answers that.

Are you under the impression that their website is hosted on-premises? This ain't the early 90s

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.

Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

#107
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's working fine.

https://downfor.io/ssd.jpl.nasa.gov

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.

[0] https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/

Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

#108
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hurri…

Are there estimates for the cost of fireproofing Californian construction?

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.

Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

#109
post #82

Global warming doing it's thing.

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...

Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

#110
post #91
post #82

Global warming doing it's thing.

Wildfires have always occurred, just that mansions are now in the way

It's a multifaceted problem that includes development decisions, but Climate Change plays a large role in all of this.
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