LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by BlueTemplar » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 11:46 AM UTC

eric-hu wrote: post #467

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?

Grew up in LA. I don't recall wildfires in the winter, generally. There were Santa Ana Winds this past week though, and I'm pretty sure that's the cause. In the mountains near me, wind speeds were said to be 80-100 mph. They were probably lower where I am, but my neighbor's backyard canopy blew over the wall to my backyard. I helped them hoist it back over the wall today and we estimated it was about 100 lbs. These a…

The issue here seems to be that human memory is going to be just short enough to be dangerously useless against a natural phenomenon that is decently regular, but happens in a 30 to 150 years intervals.

(See also : epidemics ?)

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

#472

Post by nonelog » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 11:53 AM UTC

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?

I find it astounding how almost nobody points out the obvious: Arson.

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

#473

Post by frostburg » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 11:56 AM UTC

throwbacktictac wrote: post #397

linotype wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where the hell is Karen Bass? Our government?

I keep seeing questions about the location of Karen Bass and I don't understand the outrage. Did she fly to Ghana when the fires erupted? Is she not allowed to take vacations? Was she expected to magically reappear in California when things got out of hand? Has her responsiveness been extremely latent.

Is the mayor expected to personally micromanage the fire deparment during fires? Criticism should be leveled at policy, not photo ops.

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

#474

Post by eesmith » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 12:00 PM UTC

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…

That's an awful lot of CO2. You need it to stay there a long time, until the temperature gets below the ignition point, otherwise once the O2 comes back it will relight. You'll need it to get above the vegetation. You'll somehow need to prevent mixing of CO2 and O2 - remember, fires produce CO2 already.

CO2 is heavier than air. It will not stay on a ridge but will flow downslope.

CO2 is an invisible suffocation risk, as over 1,000 people near Lake Nyos learned back in the 1980s.

"High-powered drones" have nothing like the carrying capacity of large aircraft. If that was all that's needed then just buy the aircraft.

You'll need a lot of water, which will need to come from somewhere. Water is heavy.

Explosives have long been used for point fires, like oil and gas well fires, to deprive the fire of oxygen. You cannot blow up 100 acres of fire at once.

The Santa Ana winds are powerful. The plume of smoke above the fires shows how much energy is in the rising heated air. Any covering must handle all that power, and not be torn up, and not be burnt up.

For comparison, the biggest sailing ships had less 1.5 acres of sail, and the biggest wind turbines have a swept area of about 12 acres.

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

#475

Post by Twisol » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 12:01 PM UTC

mturmon wrote: post #413

Twisol wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, most of the actual sensors are in space ;) but yes, telemetry collected via the DSN gets routed through JPL first. Also, in addition to the SSD website linked upthread, the NAIF site [0] (where the SPICE library and kernels can be downloaded) also seems to be down. It would not surprise me in any way if some of these facilities are hosted on-prem and are in a power-down state due to the fires. (Speaking of the…

You’re correct. The lab management sent out a message to this effect mid-day Wednesday. Many public-facing servers were taken down purposely due to the fires. Part of the lab HPC was also powered down, not sure what its status is now. The head nodes were up earlier today. There are generators for other critical servers, and in particular the DSN operations have been moved temporarily to another location so they could…

> There are generators for other critical servers, and in particular the DSN operations have been moved temporarily to another location so they could continue.

That's really good to hear. The DSN is a really, really important asset (not that everything else at JPL isn't, but!), so I'm glad they're not totally coupled to the physical JPL location.

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

#476

Post by CapricornNoble » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 12:02 PM UTC

defrost wrote: post #279

CapricornNoble wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding what was actually cut, do the cuts include the firefighting equipment sent to Ukraine? Sounds like that was mostly hoses and extra PPE, not major force-multiplier systems needed for this type of fire: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/vital-la-firefighting... And why is there apparently no water in the fire hydrants? Something about the reservoir not being refilled appropriately?

> why is there apparently no water in the fire hydrants? They emptied the tanks fighting the fire. From the article in the GP comment: The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in a Wednesday press conference refuted claims, including those made by Caruso, that water tanks in Pacific Palisades weren’t fully filled ahead of the fire. Departmental officials said the three tanks in the area were filled to capacity w…

Thanks for the info. So is the take-away here that the tanks are under-specified? Should they have maybe 10x the total capacity? Have there been other indications over the years that tank capacity might be a problem with a large enough fire?

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

#477

Post by baxtr » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 12:02 PM UTC

Such a tragedy. I am very sorry for anyone affected by this :(

As a non-local it’s hard to judge how big this is. Can anyone point to map or explain to what extend LA is affected?

Is it 5% of the area/population or rather 50%?

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

#478

Post by dbetteridge » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 12:03 PM UTC

defrost wrote: post #277

darth_avocado wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More information since my last comment, at least half the budget cuts indeed impacted large scale disaster response capabilities. https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california-wildfires/la-w... > The budget reduction, approved last year by Mayor Karen Bass, was mostly absorbed by leaving many administrative jobs unfilled, but that left about $7 million that was cut from its overtime budget that was used for training,…

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…

I seriously hope the rural WA fire season this year doesn't match California or we're going to be for lack of a better word fucked.

We just had a record dry year followed by a warm and wet start to summer which has caused a bunch of new growth, thats going to die and dry come Feb and i'll be keeping a go bag in my car.

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

#479

Post by Twisol » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 12:06 PM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #239

observationist wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't expect a lot of crossover between web dev and space exploration.

(As an ex-JPLer,) you would be very surprised how many internal tools this decade have been web-stack. Flight systems are one thing, but you need plenty of ground systems to support the effective use of assets in flight, and there's no reason to avoid one of the biggest UI platforms out there.

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

#480

Post by ramshanker » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 12:08 PM UTC

bloudermilk wrote: post #170

We lost our house to the Eaton fire this morning. It’s difficult to describe the vastness of the destruction in our community. Everything within a couple square miles of us burned.

What was the major building material? Wood or Concrete? I hear wood houses are a lot more popular in US.

Sorry for your loss.