LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

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.

https://wildfiretoday.com/2019/11/19/after-the-tubbs-fire-ho...

>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.

> 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.

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.

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.