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California hasn't built a reservoir since 1979. They released all the water during the last season which ended the drought and left the reservoirs over capacity.
LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed
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Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed
#292[flagged]
So Newsom made NorCal ship all its water to SoCal, but it’s Newsom’s fault the hydrants ran dry in the Palisades last night? Or that the brush was dry? Come on, at least try to be self-consistent if you’re going spout this stuff.
It's Newsom's (and Schwarzeneggers and Davis, etc...) fault that California hasn't meaningfully added to its reservoir capacity since 1979 yes.
Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
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 hav…
> 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.
Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
FWIW that's LASD, not LAPD
LAPD has a history of its own…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources_Against_...
Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed
#295With 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? [1] https://www.npr.org/2023/11/06/1204923950/arizona-california... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article…
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…
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.
Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be more concerned about Climate Change. No amount of money will help.
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…
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.
https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/natural-resource-manageme...
Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed
#297I see there are three separate fires several km apart. How do they start so synchronously?
They didn't. 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).
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.
Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed
#298Earlier 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…
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'…
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”.
Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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 inc…
No one has a response, they just downvote because they don’t like the reality of the situation?
Re: LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed
#300Earlier 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?
Some harrowing before and after photos from a Maxar instrument via LA Times (may be pay walled):
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-08/shocking...
This shows Altadena, just east of JPL, and Malibu (separate fires, of course).