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.
That’s devastating, and I hope you can stay strong through the recovery process. As a nearby neighbor a couple of communities over, do you know of anything that I can do or donate to help generally that won’t be a waste/too late? Like donate masks or water or something?
The only guidance I’ve heard so far is that the shelters are in need of bedding. Neither of the press briefings today offered more opportunities for support.
I grew up in north-central Pasadena and had many friends who lived in Altadena, and it’s been heartbreaking to watch the news from a distance and realize that many of their homes might have burned.
Later: I came across a streamer’s video taken from his motorcycle as he rode through Altadena on Wednesday afternoon. In this part, he passes through a burned-out neighborhood I used to know:
From the street signs, I was able to identify a location where a high school friend of mine lived—the house now burned to the ground. (It’s been nearly fifty years since I graduated from high school, and I don’t know if her family still lives there or not.)
I'm sorry for your loss. Are you lucky enough to be in a place where insurers in California are still operating? Hopefully you can at least get financial situation taken off your mind
> Are you lucky enough to be in a place where insurers in California are still operating?
California has had a state fire insurer (FAIR) of last resort for over fifty years and fire insurance is practically mandatory for mortgages so there aren’t many places that are excluded.
It’s entirely funded by premiums and has never been bailed out by state or federal funds. It’s not like the National Insurance Flood Program that’s burned billions of dollars in federal funding to subsidize people living in flood plains and Florida.
Luckily we insured through the California State Fair plan. FEMA may also be able to provide some assistance. We’re learning as much as we can as fast as we can, but it can be difficult to source accurate information. Thank you for your kindness.
Houses almost all use wood framing. Rarely they use steel framing, which is more expensive and provides worse insulation. None use concrete or masonry because it is illegal to build a house that will collapse during a M7-8 earthquake. Like Japan, construction style in the western US is driven primarily by the requirement to be extremely seismic resistant, since that is a predictable and unavoidable risk.
In Southern California, it is typical to have tile roofs and stucco exteriors, which helps protect against the embers that will rain on your house during a major wildfire.
Most houses in the US are made of wood. In Los Angeles they often have tile/concrete roofs, but I've read that in a situation like this the problem is the vents under the edge of the roof that lead into the attic: if anything burning gets through there, the house is toast.
Source: used to live in a Los Angeles hilly suburb. If the fires get to where I used to live, that house will definitely burn despite having a cement tile roof.
The house was framed in 2x4 which is standard in most of the US. We did have modern fire resistant siding and roof tiles, but this was leagues beyond what any of those materials are designed for. It melted most of the steel around the property. Thank you for the kind words.
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. Hard to believe but it could have been a lot worse. Daniel Swain points out there could have been several more major fires like the two big ones but they got put out quickly before they spread.
4. California's climate has likely been this way for millions of years, long before human habitation.
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.
You need to do fuel reduction burns during winter (when it's wet) so you can reduce the load.
They do this near my house in Australia every few years, it's somewhat terrifying to have a slow roll bushfire roll around the house, but it can be managed with care.
This was a wealthy area built within canyons and other natural areas. Controlled burns are possible in some areas but I can't imagine it would have been possible there.
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.
> There is very little that can be done in these situations.
Ah yes, same response to school shootings; "No way to solve this, says the only country where this happens every year".
There's nothing that special about California that makes it different from many other places around the world with densely populated forested areas that do not get insane wildfires almost every single year.
There's nothing special indeed : this shrub biome gets devastated by firestorms on a regularish 30 to 150 years clock (looking at the past 520 years), regardless of what humans do (at least so far, uncertainty over the last few decades is of course high).
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.
> … we keep crowding in what seem to the worst places to live …
Malibu?
Pacific Palisades?
These are among the most pleasant places in the world to live. People are not going to stop wanting to live there — this isn’t a lost cause like a low-lying area exposed to floods. We have to find ways to mitigate the very real fire risk.
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.
Two very wet winters caused fuel buildup followed by an extremely hot and dry year.
References for the "hot and dry year" ('cause I hear it tossed around a lot). As far as I can tell, all of California had several relatively wet (but hot) years and nothing dry afterwards. I'm linking to NOAA's the California drought map, which shows "Abnormally Dry" (less than "moderate drought") for LA currently and I think showed "none" for much of the year [1].
The thing is, I agree this was to be expected. But only by the principle "climate change is going to cause disaster out of nowhere". We need to say this and let people understand.
This was also to be expected in the sense that forecasters for a week now have been warning about century long record wind speeds and the fire dangers those bring along with them
I was in Pacific Palisades when the fire started yesterday. I've never seen one spread so fast. It went from there being smoke way in the distance and people going about their lives normally, then 90 minutes later the fire was everywhere and people were panicking and evacuating en masse.
I was in a wildfire once. I was in a grocery store and I didn’t see anything burning. 2 minutes into the store, another person came in saying they saw smoke a few blocks away. I immediately left the store and went back to the car. Before I could leave the parking lot, everything around me was on fire, there was smoke so dense I couldn’t see anything beyond 10 feet and I genuinely thought I was going to die, if not in the fire, then in an accident. Wildfires move very fast and every second is precious.
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 comes through. Checking the most recent maps, the fire has burned through almost all of the Palisades and is getting into Brentwood. The fire may also reach Santa Monica at this rate. I'm stacking go bags by the door.
Folks say the same thing about the 1991 Oakland firestorm. If there's a fire in your area, pay attention and don't assume it'll be contained, the situation can change very quickly.
It’s definitely the worst fire I’ve ever seen here. Very surreal to watch houses burning while walking my dogs this morning. The only silver lining are the winds blowing the smoke out to sea rather than blanketing Santa Monica.
Los Angeles Fire Department funding was cut by over $23M only a few months ago. The fires are currently being fought by a skeleton crew of remaining fire fighters and volunteers. Can't say if that funding would have prevented it, but cutting it definitely has not helped.
Someone tweeted $23 million .. your linked article (thank you for source) follows that with:
City budget documents show the department’s more than $800 million budget decreased by around $17 million compared to the previous budget cycle.
Which makes the cuts less than %2.12
"Gutted" as a descripter seems extreme and the details that matter are whether these reductions simply trimmed fat, or denied something essential that would have made all the difference here.
The problem with that though is that the overall budget includes big ticket items like pensions and overtime. And cuts often directly are from live services. So even though it’s 2% of the overall budget, the cut could still be significant to the availability of firefighters and crucial things like response times.
Agreed. I don't see anything from a google search that suggests that they cut the number of firefighters, either.
Hyperbolic statements like "gutted" are just meant to get the knee jerk, frothing at the mouth "retweet" kind of reaction, and it seems to be being successful at that.
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?
I'm not sure why the percentage matters? Whether it's 2% or 20%, it's still millions of dollars that could have been used here. More broadly, why are we cutting fire department budgets when wildfires are becoming more frequent, more intense and a year round phenomenon due to global warming? If you want to trim fat in the government there are much bigger targets to go after than an essential service like firefighting.
Inflation in CA over the past 3 years is likely 50% (my personal estimation for necessities is over 100%) If you cut 2%, you're really cutting it by 52%. There's no way someone will want to work for peanuts. It has been gutted.
Unfortunately that 2% was the part going to actual firefighters. The other 98% was administrative overhead. Both remaining firefighters are spread thin.
> by a skeleton crew of remaining fire fighters and volunteers.
I think you're missing a major contributor which is California's prison population [0]. Prisoners getting paid around $3-$5 a day make up ~1/3 of California's wildfire fighting service. Maybe you consider them to be "volunteers" but that seems to be missing some important context.
I really don't understand how SoCal and California residents in general find the the state's response to wildfires in the last decade to be acceptable. Not only have fire departments seen cutbacks, but so has the forestry needed for preventative measures.
What really bugs me is what I find to be a disinterest and lack of belief in vastly expanding the fleet of water dropping aircraft. Letting fires burn to the extent that they have been isn't cheap, to put it lightly. Somehow, a state that is one of the largest economies in the world can't or won't expand its aerial response such that fires of the scale we are seeing become a thing of the past. With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress.
I can anticipate being told this is not possible or too expensive, which is what everyone I know seems to believe, but I don't buy it.
If anyone ever runs for governor and makes my proposal their single issue platform, I will vote for them regardless of political party or whether it is truly feasible up to the extent that I am imagining. Fuck wildfires.
Wildfires, unfortunately, have a way of "not caring in the slightest about what people think of them." Throw in the winds of southern CA, and a wildfire can go from "freshly started" to "a few thousand acres" by the time anyone manages to get their boots on and equipment started. You don't fight wildfires in 60-100mph winds. Firebombers can't fly in those winds (or at night, since it's close to terrain), and even if they did, that sort of wind will scatter your drop before it has a chance to do anything useful.
> With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress.
Great, you've just put out the fire, and kicked the can for next time. Even if it did work that way, it doesn't fix the root problem, which is simply:
Many western forests need to burn. Not in the sort of uncontrolled canopy fires we see with this sort of situation, but a lower, "clean the brush out, candle off some weaker trees, and open up the seeds" sort of fire. The problem is, for most of the past century, we haven't been allowing them to burn. Wildfire fighting in the US really ramped up and became a capable force with the post-WWII surplus - Jeeps, bombers that could be bought for nothing and converted to fire bombers, cheap spotting aircraft. So, for about 80 years, we've been fighting fires - or, explained differently, "We've been letting fire load build up for 80 years." When those areas light, with most of a century worth of buildup, they go off like a bomb, and your option in high winds is to "get out of the way."
You cannot allow endless fuel growth in a forest without consequences - and we're out of runway on that. All the aerial firefighting in the world won't fix that problem, because it's not the problem that needs fixing.
It's not a binary choice between expanding aircraft and doing nothing. I have seen some convincing arguments that firefighting aircraft are mostly for show against large fires. Essentially the amount of water/chemicals they can move is trivial compared to land approaches, and the cost is significant. That doesn't mean that nothing should be done, just that the money should be spent on more effective measures.
Lord knows I'm not going to defend the competence of the CA state govt and I'm sure they could be protecting against wildfires better, but I don't know that railing about the number of aircraft involved will help anything.
How much water do you need to dump enough to saturate all the territory that would need to be covered with wind gusts up to 100MPH? (How do you fly and aim the water in those winds?)
Wildfires are obviously not new, if you're saying the fault is of the administration of the last 10 years, how do you explain that the earlier government for the fifty years prior ALSO failed to see and implement your "just dump the water everywhere from planes" approach to the fires in the 90s, say?
We're, what, 13 years from terrible financials for the state and local governments that forced widespread major cuts and furloughs and reduction in hours? Everyone who's been hit by those can point to negative outcomes somewhere or other (crime is up! education achievement stats are down! wait times are up! etc) but there's no free lunch here to just have avoided any cutbacks in any area.
Buying more firefighting equipment is like building a dam higher and higher every year as the reservoir fills up, instead of letting it drain out gradually. The natural cycle in California is for there to be periodic fires, but due to the policy of suppression, they haven't happened for 70 years or more, so now when they do, they are these massive infernos.
Better and better fire suppression tech over the years that enables a quicker response, like aircraft, satellite monitoring, remote video cameras, etc, has just served to make the problem worse in the long run.
California has a problem with overly aggressive fire suppression over the last 100 years creating a buildup of extra-flammable burnable areas. Literally, you need to let a certain amount of burning go on, continuously over time, so that the burnable areas aren't over-fueled tinderboxes that get very hot, very fast.
Part of this is using controlled burns to mitigate the buildup, another thing that's been under-resourced in California.
I had a discussion at a B and B with a guy who flew F-16s in the USAF, then U2s once they were going to promote him out of flying. He'd just left the service and had retrained to fly Grumman water bombers for Calfire. The problem as I've described it is apparently well-known in the wildfire fighting community in Californa.
California recently acquired several C-130H firefighting aircraft. These are extremely expensive platforms and while they're useful for fast response in some scenarios they're hardly a complete solution. For these particular fires the winds were often too strong for air tankers to fly. Effective fire prevention and suppression requires a variety of different solutions. It would be foolish to focus on a single issue.
The wind is too high for aerial firefighting. You could have every firefighting plane in the world in LA right now and it wouldn't matter. None of them can fly.
Do you have some reason to believe more planes is the best allocation of resources?
Not an expert: I think one of the issues is that there's only a handful[0] of satellites with the appropriate infrared instruments, which means that any given point of Earth is only sampled at a multiple-hour cadence.
It's a generic problem for any sensing problem that's real-time + low-orbit.
I speculate adding instruments to large LEO constellations, en masse, would solve that problem—though I have no clue if that's practical. (Perhaps if the same instrument were doing other kinds of real-time imaging, you could piggyback wildfire alerts on that datastream, and the get the functionality essentially for free?)
edit: More info:
- "Geostationary satellite sensors view the same area of Earth’s surface at all times while polar-orbiting sensors, such as MODIS and VIIRS, typically view the same area of Earth’s surface twice daily. Consequently, geostationary satellite sensors can provide repeated observations on a sub-hourly basis, making it possible to detect fires which may not be detected at longer temporal intervals. Geostationary satellites provide data at 10-15 minute intervals, so they can detect more fire events and capture their growth and change. However, the spatial resolution of geostationary satellite data is coarser and therefore less sensitive to small fires."
The city of Los Angeles and the Mayor have been requesting volunteers from the public, due to lack of manpower. According to their website [1] the salary for firefighters in Los Angeles is $85,000 to $125,000 (rounded). Assuming the average ($105,000), that amount of funding could have paid 161 firefighters salaries for the entire year, not including benefits (unsure how that is priced in), and much more than that if they were part-time which most of the force are.
> Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, slammed Bass in an X post claiming the mayor slashed the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget, despite the high risk of wildfires in the region, and raised questions about reports that some fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades had run dry.
It's kind of rich that a local billionaire would complain about this. I'm going to guess that the $23M was cut due to budget shortfalls. Maybe if the billionaires and multi-millionaires in the area were willing to pay their fair share that wouldn't have happened.
Soon-Shiong has aligned with Trump, and is openly forcing LA Times journalists to serve his interests. Usually a major newspaper owner would try to avoid the appearance of bias or of undermining the objectivity of the news.
this is disinformation. CalFIRE at the State of California had a 10x budget increase in the 2020 time frame under Gov Newsom. LA County has budgets larger than small countries. Fire suppression is a priority.
These fires have spread quickly and it is true that fire fighters are spread thin.
Exactly. There's only so much they can do. They couldn't fly aircraft. Spread to a huge area rapidly, the area isn't even that easy to get in/out of on a good day. Add in another couple fires that also rapidly spread and it really doesn't matter how much money they had, you can't just bring on firefighters that fast.
I'm glad to see all the aircraft are working the fires and hopefully they'll make some good progress before night.
This whole subthread should be printed out, preserved, exhibited in museums about the spread of misinformation among gullible Silicon Valley commenters, but also deleted from this site. It's an embarrassment.
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 bigger deal.
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.
also, it has been known for quite some time how damaging the near total reliance on cars and the associated infrastructure at that scale is. If you do absolutely nothing about climate change when you have the most resources to do so, then I cannot feel sorry about anything that's happening.
Many neighborhoods and landmarks along PCH in Malibu just gone. There's nothing left. Hard to fathom or overstate what the impact of all this will be. Every year I go down to the beach at sunrise on January 1st with my dad. We pulled over somewhere, don't know where, along the way, to catch the sunrise. Today when I first woke up I opened twitter and saw a video of the charred skeletons of the houses right where we were standing just one week ago. Recognized it from the background of the picture I took of him. Fucking insane.
edit: much of today has been giving me flashbacks of the Woolsey fire. the only way, probably, this fire today is better than the Woolsey fire, is that there likely won't be a mass shooting the very next day, like what happened back then, at the Borderline shooting.
I live south of the evacuation warning zone and the wind and fires have turned the entire San Gabriel Valley into an apocalyptic scene. Detritus littered all over the roads (with tons of dry flammable eucalyptus branches, yay!) and there’s ash falling from the sky in big flakes. Air quality in the tank though it was even worse a few hours ago and everything smells like smoke.
This is the worst fire I’ve seen in SoCal since the Valley fire.
A cousin works at JPL leading the Mars Rover program. Her house burnt down this afternoon :(
She's moved to an RV on her parent's property an hour away, temporarily. Thankful for backup option, but she put a lot of sweat and tears (and money) into fixing that little house up!
Note that some of the small flagged regions are spurious triggers on industrial waste heat (oil refineries, power plants, and something else). There aren't as many fires as that map naively would suggest.
Readit News
I grew up in north-central Pasadena and had many friends who lived in Altadena, and it’s been heartbreaking to watch the news from a distance and realize that many of their homes might have burned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D29RXlm4yE&t=584s
From the street signs, I was able to identify a location where a high school friend of mine lived—the house now burned to the ground. (It’s been nearly fifty years since I graduated from high school, and I don’t know if her family still lives there or not.)
California has had a state fire insurer (FAIR) of last resort for over fifty years and fire insurance is practically mandatory for mortgages so there aren’t many places that are excluded.
It’s entirely funded by premiums and has never been bailed out by state or federal funds. It’s not like the National Insurance Flood Program that’s burned billions of dollars in federal funding to subsidize people living in flood plains and Florida.
Sorry for your loss.
In Southern California, it is typical to have tile roofs and stucco exteriors, which helps protect against the embers that will rain on your house during a major wildfire.
Source: used to live in a Los Angeles hilly suburb. If the fires get to where I used to live, that house will definitely burn despite having a cement tile roof.
Dead Comment
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.
No goat equivalent in the Americas ?
Population density too low ?
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.
Ah yes, same response to school shootings; "No way to solve this, says the only country where this happens every year".
There's nothing that special about California that makes it different from many other places around the world with densely populated forested areas that do not get insane wildfires almost every single year.
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.
Malibu?
Pacific Palisades?
These are among the most pleasant places in the world to live. People are not going to stop wanting to live there — this isn’t a lost cause like a low-lying area exposed to floods. We have to find ways to mitigate the very real fire risk.
References for the "hot and dry year" ('cause I hear it tossed around a lot). As far as I can tell, all of California had several relatively wet (but hot) years and nothing dry afterwards. I'm linking to NOAA's the California drought map, which shows "Abnormally Dry" (less than "moderate drought") for LA currently and I think showed "none" for much of the year [1].
The thing is, I agree this was to be expected. But only by the principle "climate change is going to cause disaster out of nowhere". We need to say this and let people understand.
[1] https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...
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 comes through. Checking the most recent maps, the fire has burned through almost all of the Palisades and is getting into Brentwood. The fire may also reach Santa Monica at this rate. I'm stacking go bags by the door.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/los-angeles-fires-m...
Edit: Changing a word, "gutted" -> "cut"
"Gutted" as a descripter seems extreme and the details that matter are whether these reductions simply trimmed fat, or denied something essential that would have made all the difference here.
Hyperbolic statements like "gutted" are just meant to get the knee jerk, frothing at the mouth "retweet" kind of reaction, and it seems to be being successful at that.
And why is there apparently no water in the fire hydrants? Something about the reservoir not being refilled appropriately?
I think you're missing a major contributor which is California's prison population [0]. Prisoners getting paid around $3-$5 a day make up ~1/3 of California's wildfire fighting service. Maybe you consider them to be "volunteers" but that seems to be missing some important context.
0. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-history-of-califo...
It seems to be a great way to reengage in the community and feel useful as a human being (and see people being grateful to you).
Not so sure the $5 are the driver here.
Better than watching a cellmate all day.
What really bugs me is what I find to be a disinterest and lack of belief in vastly expanding the fleet of water dropping aircraft. Letting fires burn to the extent that they have been isn't cheap, to put it lightly. Somehow, a state that is one of the largest economies in the world can't or won't expand its aerial response such that fires of the scale we are seeing become a thing of the past. With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress.
I can anticipate being told this is not possible or too expensive, which is what everyone I know seems to believe, but I don't buy it.
If anyone ever runs for governor and makes my proposal their single issue platform, I will vote for them regardless of political party or whether it is truly feasible up to the extent that I am imagining. Fuck wildfires.
> With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress.
Great, you've just put out the fire, and kicked the can for next time. Even if it did work that way, it doesn't fix the root problem, which is simply:
Many western forests need to burn. Not in the sort of uncontrolled canopy fires we see with this sort of situation, but a lower, "clean the brush out, candle off some weaker trees, and open up the seeds" sort of fire. The problem is, for most of the past century, we haven't been allowing them to burn. Wildfire fighting in the US really ramped up and became a capable force with the post-WWII surplus - Jeeps, bombers that could be bought for nothing and converted to fire bombers, cheap spotting aircraft. So, for about 80 years, we've been fighting fires - or, explained differently, "We've been letting fire load build up for 80 years." When those areas light, with most of a century worth of buildup, they go off like a bomb, and your option in high winds is to "get out of the way."
You cannot allow endless fuel growth in a forest without consequences - and we're out of runway on that. All the aerial firefighting in the world won't fix that problem, because it's not the problem that needs fixing.
Lord knows I'm not going to defend the competence of the CA state govt and I'm sure they could be protecting against wildfires better, but I don't know that railing about the number of aircraft involved will help anything.
Wildfires are obviously not new, if you're saying the fault is of the administration of the last 10 years, how do you explain that the earlier government for the fifty years prior ALSO failed to see and implement your "just dump the water everywhere from planes" approach to the fires in the 90s, say?
We're, what, 13 years from terrible financials for the state and local governments that forced widespread major cuts and furloughs and reduction in hours? Everyone who's been hit by those can point to negative outcomes somewhere or other (crime is up! education achievement stats are down! wait times are up! etc) but there's no free lunch here to just have avoided any cutbacks in any area.
“Federal agencies are responsible for managing 200 to 300 wildland fire aircraft.” - Nat’l Interagency Fire Center, https://www.nifc.gov/resources/aircraft
“CAL FIRE’s fleet of more than 60 fixed and rotary wing aircraft make it the largest civil aerial firefighting fleet in the world.” — CAL FIRE, https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-protection/aviation-...
Better and better fire suppression tech over the years that enables a quicker response, like aircraft, satellite monitoring, remote video cameras, etc, has just served to make the problem worse in the long run.
Part of this is using controlled burns to mitigate the buildup, another thing that's been under-resourced in California.
I had a discussion at a B and B with a guy who flew F-16s in the USAF, then U2s once they were going to promote him out of flying. He'd just left the service and had retrained to fly Grumman water bombers for Calfire. The problem as I've described it is apparently well-known in the wildfire fighting community in Californa.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/08/26/c-130-hercules-is-now-figh...
Do you have some reason to believe more planes is the best allocation of resources?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Information_for_Resource_...
It's a generic problem for any sensing problem that's real-time + low-orbit.
I speculate adding instruments to large LEO constellations, en masse, would solve that problem—though I have no clue if that's practical. (Perhaps if the same instrument were doing other kinds of real-time imaging, you could piggyback wildfire alerts on that datastream, and the get the functionality essentially for free?)
edit: More info:
- "Geostationary satellite sensors view the same area of Earth’s surface at all times while polar-orbiting sensors, such as MODIS and VIIRS, typically view the same area of Earth’s surface twice daily. Consequently, geostationary satellite sensors can provide repeated observations on a sub-hourly basis, making it possible to detect fires which may not be detected at longer temporal intervals. Geostationary satellites provide data at 10-15 minute intervals, so they can detect more fire events and capture their growth and change. However, the spatial resolution of geostationary satellite data is coarser and therefore less sensitive to small fires."
https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/tools/firms/faq
https://www.joinlafd.org/salary-and-benefits
The fire budget was cut by $17.6 million for the year, the 23M cut was proposed. The police budget was increased by $126M for the year.
For context, the LAFD annual budget is $820M and the LAPD annual budget is $2140M.
It's kind of rich that a local billionaire would complain about this. I'm going to guess that the $23M was cut due to budget shortfalls. Maybe if the billionaires and multi-millionaires in the area were willing to pay their fair share that wouldn't have happened.
https://www.thewrap.com/la-times-case-against-trump-kamala-e...
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/24/nx-s1-5163293/la-times-editor...
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/dec/18/la-times-patri...
Dead Comment
These fires have spread quickly and it is true that fire fighters are spread thin.
I'm glad to see all the aircraft are working the fires and hopefully they'll make some good progress before night.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/wildfire-threatens-...
This whole subthread should be printed out, preserved, exhibited in museums about the spread of misinformation among gullible Silicon Valley commenters, but also deleted from this site. It's an embarrassment.
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 bigger deal.
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.
Dead Comment
edit: much of today has been giving me flashbacks of the Woolsey fire. the only way, probably, this fire today is better than the Woolsey fire, is that there likely won't be a mass shooting the very next day, like what happened back then, at the Borderline shooting.
Used to go to that place all the time, friend was working when it happened.
This is the worst fire I’ve seen in SoCal since the Valley fire.
She's moved to an RV on her parent's property an hour away, temporarily. Thankful for backup option, but she put a lot of sweat and tears (and money) into fixing that little house up!
https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;@-118.57,3...