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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

#361

Post by soared »

lend000 wrote: post #356

This saga has led me to do some research on the state of modern firefighting. From what I've gathered, we're still using the same methods (more or less) we've been using since the 1960's when Phos-Chek was introduced. There have been significant improvements in information (locating fires early with satellites and drones as such), which is no doubt valuable, but I was underwhelmed by the lack of advancements in actua…

Those things might make sense if one building is on fire, but the scale of these fires and similarly sized forest fires make targeting individual building useless - there are hundreds or thousands of buildings on fire.

Forest fire fighting is pretty contentious, but we now have very specialized planes and helicopters that I assume didn’t exist decades ago. Similarly there are 747s that drop 20k gallons of fire retardant that I assume is new tech. Not sure if trenches are new or not, but also pretty common for forest fires.

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

#362

Post by keane »

onecommentman wrote: post #323
383toast wrote: post #55

is there a wildfire tracker?

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.

#FireMappers 3.1 is found here: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/instant/media/index.html?appid=a...

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

#363

Post by Izikiel43 »

Mistletoe wrote: post #288
throwaway249281 wrote: post #115

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. Ha…

>very little that can be done in these situations 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.

You haven’t been to California right? Weather and location wise, it’s one of the best places in the world to live in

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

#364

Post by Izikiel43 »

Mistletoe wrote: post #345
saagarjha wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Midwest is paradise compared to crowding into a desert with no water and winds that whip flames into something like a blast furnace. https://gisgeography.com/us-precipitation-map/ https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/

Frozen paradise several months a year. Water is a solved problem, look at Israel

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

#365

Post by vachina »

lend000 wrote: post #356

This saga has led me to do some research on the state of modern firefighting. From what I've gathered, we're still using the same methods (more or less) we've been using since the 1960's when Phos-Chek was introduced. There have been significant improvements in information (locating fires early with satellites and drones as such), which is no doubt valuable, but I was underwhelmed by the lack of advancements in actua…

You do not want and cannot have a startup run these critical services. Just reeks of VC opportunists and cash grab.

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

#367

Post by jandrewrogers »

wk_end wrote: post #60
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14

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? [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…

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).

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

#368

Post by kristopolous »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #154
segasaturn wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question, lets take a look at the 2024-2025 budget sheet for LA City: 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 almo…

Crime is rampant, cut the police budget. I hear ya'.

If crime is rampant at a $2,000,000,000 spend, then you're spending it poorly.

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?

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

#369

Post by lightedman »

majormajor wrote: post #188
segasaturn wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question, lets take a look at the 2024-2025 budget sheet for LA City: 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 almo…

So the police budget is 2B. 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 hydrant…

"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.

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