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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

#681

Post by throwup238 »

infecto wrote: post #661
friend_Fernando wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See sibling posts for the cost argument. > 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…

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.

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

#682

Post by throwup238 »

lkjdsklf wrote: post #383
Izikiel43 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mean... other than the fires ripping through and destroying everything.....

“Everything”? Seriously?

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.

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

#683

Post by throwup238 »

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/

That’s probably why the Midwest paradise produces half the fruits and vegetables in the US.

No wait that’s the desert. The midwest produces mostly corn for corn syrup, ethanol, and grains… and dust bowls.

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

#684

Post by scarab92 »

Ancalagon wrote: post #671
scarab92 wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#685

Post by joe_the_user »

tafda wrote: post #436
joe_the_user wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... Some relevant research: https://moritzfirelab.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/denniso... Drought is a more compreh…

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.

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

#686

Post by bragr »

mturmon wrote: post #596
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blue and green colour small areas suggest this is a false color image that maps colours to a value and coincidentally looks like a fire. Presumably it's measuring heat or something vaguely relevant but I don't trust my immediate visceral reaction to it.

The image filename contains SWIR which is a clue. 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 F…

They've been doing FIRIS flights over the fires under the call sign INTEL 24

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

#687

Post by 20after4 »

camgunz wrote: post #595
20after4 wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EF5 tornado can be every bit as destructive as a wildfire and in some areas they recur pretty frequently.

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,…

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.

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

#688

Post by dredmorbius »

prennert wrote: post #463

This is probably a naive question because I am not local, but how usual are wild fires during the winter? There seems to be snow large parts of the US and freezing temperatures. In LA it is currently 8°C (46°F), which is not freezing, but also not hot. Does this suggest even bigger fires are to be expected in the summer this year when it is actually hot?

Relatively rare, but SoCal in particular sees dry-ish winters and high, dry winds, the Santa Anas. Humidity has been in the single or low-double digits. During the recent Malibu fires I saw a 7% RH reading, in the past week ~17%. Both of those are quite dry.

Much of the area sees repeat fires at ~20 year intervals or so. Several of the fire maps I was looking at were showing prior burns within the past five years, of which there were several in the vicinity of the Palisades fire. I've yet to check back to see how the burned-over areas fared in the current burn, but I'm suspecting that even recent fire activity is no longer the protection it once was.

Ironically, heavy rains in recent years can also compound fire hazard as the precipitation promotes plant growth and hence fuel load. Unless rain is recent (within the past 14-30 days or so) it's not going to be protective.

Keep in mind that average annual precip in Los Angeles is less than 15 inches (38 cm). San Francisco sees roughly double that, and isn't a particularly high-rainfall region itself.

https://www.laalmanac.com/weather/we13.php>

A midwestern location such as Chicago sees 50 inches (127 cm):

https://www.weather.gov/lot/chicago_climate_records>

Moreover, California's precipitation tends to be concentrated into a relatively small number of storms, mostly between November and May.

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

#689

Post by sahila »

baggy_trough wrote: post #678
sahila wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Of course they do, same as everyone else. The rich pay the vast majority of taxes and get next to nothing for it.

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.

Do you have a better model?

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

#690

Post by School-Cotton »

khafra wrote: post #485
jandrewrogers wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suitab…

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.

People can and do live in Phoenix. Yes it’s unpleasantly hot, but anyone who claims it’s unfit for human habitation is exaggerating.
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