LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed | Hacker News Reader

LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

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360 pointsrntn646 comments

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.

Sorry friend, may your new place be even better.

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 lived through another major wildfire in SoCal and the organization that provided the best support was the California Community Foundation: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/953510055

I’d wait until the smoke settles (because the CCF focuses on less well-off communities than Altadena or the Palisades) but donating to their wildfire relief efforts does a lot of good regardless. They frequently give grants to the local organizations running the evacuation shelters.

I would second this and say donate today. Focusing on who has money and who doesn’t today is really not a good policy. It is a generalization that is bound to misclassify some old ladies on a fixed income (my mom has one sleeping on her couch because of this). People who lost their homes and all their possessions yesterday and today may not be as wealthy as they were 24 hours ago.

Where the hell is Karen Bass? Our government?

She just got back from Ghana: https://x.com/skynews/status/1877115173443400065?s=12

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.

Ok, I understand some of the criticism now. 1.) She cut funding to the fire department budget by millions of dollars. 2.) There is a video floating around where she is totally unresponsive to questions.

She cut some 2% of the LA fire department budget, 17M out of 837M. The outrage is politically fueled more than any rationale reasoning.

Is that reduction absolute or real terms? If it's absolute then that's a pretty large reduction considering inflation

"That assertion is wrong. The city was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted, so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund until that deal was finalized in November. In fact, the city’s fire budget increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget cycle, according to Blumenfield’s office, although overall concerns about the department’s staffing level have persisted for a number of years."

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/wildfire-threatens-...

Seeing people blame the fires on "DEI" is making my head exploded.

The fact that otherwise intelligent people are eating it up has made me give up for a generation.

It is a truly depressing state of affairs.

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

From behind a keyboard and who knows how far away from Los Angeles you are, you may look at it with other eyes than the people who lost their homes in the fires.

And yes, in the end the mayor is responsible for the wellbeing of the city. And people see the mayor is nowhere to be found when their homes burned down. Who do you want them to be mad at?

Texas governor was in Acapulco and nobody blamed him.

Anyway on topic an aunt of mine is a mayor of a small city (55k). Her opinion is that firefighters fight fires and having a politician walk around a disaster area with a hundred journalists isn't helping.

That’s a good point. They’d be a distraction to the fire chiefs

> Texas governor was in Acapulco and nobody blamed him.

Wasn't that Ted Cruz, the senator? During the blizzard?

That was Newsom

I think the outrage is part political, but it's also justified. The warnings were in place that the fire risk was extreme. The language experts were using to describe the upcoming weather conditions was "unprecedented," given both the winds and importantly the lack of measurable rain. These warnings were issued many days in advance of fires starting, before Karen Bass went to Africa, and yet, even with these warnings in place, she decided to get on a plane and head to Africa. I can 100% guarantee she was briefed on that, that she had deliberations with her staff about it, and that she decided to hop on the plane anyway. I do think it was a major strategic mistake on her part and I think people are rightly outraged about it. Of course the political part has poured gasoline on that legitimate outrage and that part is appalling since the crisis is still very much ongoing.

Of course that outrage assumes you believe that a mayor should be on the scene even if they're not, in this case, holding onto a hose and actively suppressing fire. I personally think that's a fair ask of her constituents. It would be an entirely different story if this was an unpredictable situation, but, again, every expert commenting pointed out how unique the upcoming weather was and that there was the very real potential for massive fires.

Many were asking the question when the news came out prior to the fires. In terms of actual management, I'd rather leave that to the city's experts. As long as the city didn't pay for it (which was the assumption), then I'm ok with it. Otherwise, I'd rather she spend her time here trying to fix domestic issues.

I think it's one of those issues where both sides of the aisle could agree except for the right-wing side turned it into this weird DEI stuff.

I don't live in LA but would Karen Bass even have much of any input? The palisades is mostly Santa Monica no? Sure its part of LA county but why would the mayor of LA have any input on Santa Monica / Santa Monica mountains. Genuinely curious why she is in the spotlight compared to the local officials in Santa Monica?

Edit: I continue to see her name pop up in the news and I have been trying to understand how LA works in that she is in the complete spotlight. There are fires in surrounding LA but does the city of LA mayor have any control in those?

Pacific Palisades is part of the city of Los Angeles and so falls under the mayor’s jurisdiction.

Thanks for the clarification. I missed that it juts around Santa Monica

I feel really sorry for you.

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:

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.)

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 there areas of California where insurers are not operating anymore because of wildfires? That's crazy

Yes, there are parts of California that are uninsurable against wildfires. Technically they could be insurable but State regulators will not allow insurance companies to raise premiums sufficient to cover the actuarial risk. The necessary premiums are prohibitively expensive for homeowners, but anything less risks bankrupting the insurance companies and increases their reinsurance costs which also must be passed on to homeowners.

This is mostly on the California government, since the high insurance premiums are a side effect of disastrous wildfire mitigation policy in California. More proactive and competent wildfire mitigation would reduce the risk and therefore make insurance premiums more reasonable.

Would it make sense to allow this? The models as you said make it a non viable buisness and where that gap exists scams move in, which the routinely have to be bailed out by the public.

> More proactive and competent wildfire mitigation would reduce the risk and therefore make insurance premiums more reasonable.

Or... not building mansions next to forestry? In Germany we have pretty strict requirements on distances, so it's rare for damages to occur. Also, most of our power grid infrastructure is buried below ground, so videos like the ones circulating on Twitter from arcing lines setting bushes and trees alight can't really happen here either.

Prevention is orders of magnitude cheaper in the long run.

Fwiw these aren't really forest fires, they are brush fires.

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...

> 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.

Here in CA, it's more about reducing the spreading speed than about the resistance level once the fire gets there. All the large structure fires in recent years spread at breakneck speeds during an offshore wind event. In these cases, all that firefighters can do early on is evacuate people.

This narrative about building houses out of sticks also rubs me the wrong way. It's an extremely naive take on why it happens. The reason most homes in America are wood framed is really down to economics. Europe does not have as vast of a forest stock for lumber as the US/Canada does. Over time we have specialized in building wood framed homes and because of lumber, its cheaper.

These homes would have been destroyed regardless of building material. The bigger issue is most of these homes have probably not properly gone through fire mitigation steps.

https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/Safer-from...

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 numbers of destroyed structures all at once, and <25% containment until the winds subside. The ignition source for most of the structures are burning wood-frame structures. Early on, firefighters can only help evacuate people.

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.

> 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.

It is not an aesthetic preference, the US used to construct housing like in Europe through the 19th century.

That style of construction was repeatedly catastrophically destroyed by severe earthquakes, killing many people needlessly, and is now illegal in many regions.

The US became strict about seismic safety after the famous 1906 San Francisco earthquake[0]. A few decades earlier, the 1872 Lone Pine earthquake[1] literally flattened entire towns of European-style construction; some of these are now ghost towns that were simply abandoned and never rebuilt. When you see surviving old masonry buildings, they usually have been retroactively refitted with steel frames to make the masonry mostly decorative.

The regions of the US prone to wildfire are also prone to severe earthquakes, so your options are wood or steel frame construction, neither of which is particularly wildfire resistant but at least it won't collapse during a severe earthquake. Many parts of the US also have to engineer for much higher wind loadings than in Europe.

You can build masonry buildings that meet the seismic standard but that requires a lot of steel and is expensive. Where I live, all modern construction is required to survive a M8.5 earthquake; I've never seen a house in Europe engineered to that standard.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1872_Owens_Valley_earthquake

Your argument only applies to unreinforced masonry, which is no longer allowed by code in seismically-prone areas. For fire resistance you can use reinforced concrete, steel or aluminum framing, or wood framing with non-combustible walls. Or even go exotic with various prefab options and 3D printing.

As for the higher cost, this has become mostly an urban myth. In regions with low construction costs such as the South or the Midwest ($130-180/sqft,) the cost difference is minimal. In areas with high construction costs such as CA ($200-700/sqft,) the difference is either immaterial or negative (thanks to the insurance savings.)

My argument applies to reinforced masonry as well. You seem to be operating from a naive model of what is required to prevent combustion of buildings. We already use non-flammable walls in a lot of places; it is a speed bump for a serious fire without a lot of additional mitigations.

Most typical reinforced masonry will fail during a severe earthquake, for which there is ample empirical evidence. The cost to reinforce masonry to e.g. a M8.5 standard is not small. The quantity of rebar, ties, etc required is expensive in both time and material. It isn’t cheap nor does the labor exist at the scale required.

I actually live in exotic construction, designed for extreme seismic and wind loads. Lots of steel, not much concrete, and extremely fire resistant (even though that isn’t a requirement here) but much cheaper to build and more seismic resistant (in theory) than reinforced concrete, which is what it replaces (its raison d’être). No structural wood either, but it wouldn’t be economical to construct a typical house this way.

This is an active area of research. If it was an “urban myth” there wouldn’t be so many engineering firms investing in developing new construction techniques that provide seismic resistance without the cost. If reinforced masonry actually worked in a reasonable way, we’d just use that.

I live in SF. The vast majority of new construction above 3 stories is reinforced concrete, including many high-rises such as the (infamous) 58-story Millenium Tower.[1] Seismically, modern reinforced concrete performs well.

As I explained in sibling threads, "speed bumps" are the most important thing here in CA. It's not about whether your structure can withstand a 1000-degree fire all around it. It's about whether your structure will set fire to three others within minutes of when it goes up in flames.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Tower_(San_Francisc...

As someone pointed out above, California has the FAIR plan for over 50 years which has been pretty effective. This LA fire might be its biggest test. Basically there's no part of California that is not insurable against wildfire

https://grist.org/extreme-weather/california-overhauled-its-...

> 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.

Mortgage firms demand Home insurance policies which it covers some fires, but not all fires. E.g. if there’s an earthquake and it causes a natural gas fire, you’re not covered by home insurance. Same goes for if there’s a flood and it causes a fire, not covered.

I suspect long term fire insurance due to wildfire will not be covered by home insurance policies. As it’s not a “random” event, and instead a risk of certain areas.

Your statement is not entirely accurate. Under the insuring agreement of a typical homeowner’s insurance policy, fire—including wildfire—is a covered peril, unless specifically excluded elsewhere in the policy. Standard policies are designed to provide coverage for direct physical loss or damage caused by fire, regardless of whether the fire is “random” or arises in wildfire-prone areas.

While some exclusions may apply to fires caused by excluded perils (e.g., floods or earthquakes) or to contributory factors like neglect, wildfires are generally not excluded in standard homeowner’s insurance policies.

And the policies could in the future explicitly not include wildfire risk

> I suspect long term fire insurance due to wildfire will not be covered by home insurance policies. As it’s not a “random” event, and instead a risk of certain areas.

Insurance companies cover known risks all the time. The greater the risk, the higher the premiums.

As long as insurance companies are permitted to accurately and fully price the risk into premiums, anything is insurable — at least in concept.

TIL! Thanks for the info. I didn't know there was an actually functioning state fire insurance plan. I guess all those news articles about insurers pulling out of California is political propaganda I fell for :/

Here's a link if anyone's interested https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/California...

That propaganda isn’t entirely wrong. There’s a regulatory agency in California that controls insurance premiums and they’ve kept the insurers from raising rates to account for the real risks so insurers have been pulling out. CalFAIR is still available for everyone so it’s not a total shit show but with over 10k structures destroyed so far, we’ll see whether the state has to bail the program out.

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.

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

Sorry for your loss.

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.

Insurers require ember resistant vulcan vents and the like now. It’s a relatively minor upgrade for most homeowners since its just a mesh over the vent.

Would that have stopped this fire from spreading?

Considering that winds both made the spread a lot further, faster and moving around fuel (trees/wood/material blowing around and ending up on streets and whatnot), it sounds unlikely any 1 solution would have prevented this.

No, vulcan vents only help when the exterior is capable of resisting the fire. These winds threw fist sized pieces of burning wood for hundreds of feet which is much harder to defend against.

All homeowners I know here have already had them installed over the last five years because of fire insurance inspections but I don’t know how representative my sample is.

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.

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.

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.

We do. And we have setbacks you must maintain and keep brush cleared. But there's still only so much you can do.

A lot more could be done: https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-better-approach-to-forest-man...

These aren’t “forests” like in other parts of the West so much as cliffs covered in dry, scrubby brush. I’m pessimistic that they could be systematically cleared or burned in a controlled way.

Burning in a dense residential area…no. Draconian clearing of all trees and brush except for selective fire-aware landscaping…yes, but you are paying significant money to make the residential area look uglier (in some eyes, it’s just a High Desert aesthetic for others), a hard sell.

The residential area being on fire looks significantly uglier to me.

Similar climates and geographies both either have the issue or manage it better.

Greece is a good example of also not managing this properly with its own regular massive fires, while national parks around Cape Town and other parts of South Africa do regular controlled burns in very rocky, hill-y terrain.

"There's only so much you can do" doesn't mean "we have done what we can" or even "we have done enough".

Shouldn’t have built expensive houses for a start

> Shouldn’t have built expensive houses for a start

Why not?

They burn down the same as cheap ones.

My other suggestion, which isn't super popular in australia, is we should consider deforesting / reforesting eucalyptus trees. They are a lot of trouble.

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.

I’m not sure precisely where the fires started, but the neighborhoods in the Palisades are impenetrable hillsides with roads and houses are intervals. They’re about as densely developed as practical given the geography. A controlled burn would be unimaginable there.

A controlled burn is impossible just from the sheer angle, you can hardly traverse those piles of conglomerate making following and pathing the fire impossible from anywhere but the air. I had problems hunting agates out of those hills due to the steepness, as I was on all fours and about 55 degrees off-horizontal most times.

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.

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.

[1] https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...

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

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 comprehensive measure that includes snowpack, rainfall, resevoir levels, etc.

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.

>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.

> … 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.

Correction: among the most pleasant _when natural wildfires don't burn everything down_. People need to take long-term conditions into account when choosing locations for habitation.

Does anyone do this?

SoCal, NorCal, Seattle - Earthquakes

SoCal, NorCal - Fires

Midwestern States - Tornadoes

North Easy - Blizzards

South Easy - Hurricanes

Which part do you suggest everyone move to?

Northeast. Structural modifications for heavy snow are light (make sure the house is well-insulated, get yourself a nice heater, don't put any pipes in the exterior walls, and have sloped roofs rather than flat roofs), and they're not particularly dangerous if you're prepared to be cooped up in a house for a day or two (and you're not in the main lake effect snow belt, where snow can be rather constant).

So the proposal is for 350 Million people to move to New England?

Well, in good faith, if everyone in "dangerous" areas of the US moved to less dangerous areas, the resulting population density would still be less than Ohio's (~242/mi2, also LA's population density is ~8,000/mi2--well below places like Pittsburgh and Buffalo even--so keep that in mind), and I left Alaska out of both safe and dangerous lists because it's a cheat. And it's very OK there! Winter is fine. I grew up and lived in the Midwest for years; tornadoes, etc. are bad but they're not wildfires and hurricanes.

Is this a serious "proposal"? Definitely not. But a lot of people in this thread are acting like moving away from literal hellfire is impossible, and I respectfully submit that living in the interior is better than having everything you own burn down.

"Dangerous": California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Utah, Puerto Rico, Nevada, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, Hawaii, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa

"Safe": New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Missouri, West Virginia, Minnesota, Vermont, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa, Maine, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming

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, even if you live in a place where they happen frequently. But if you live in a place where wildfires happen frequently, you're way more likely to be seriously affected.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_by_cost

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/18/1245068810/wildfire-smoke-con...

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.

Several of your "safe" States are prone to extremely strong earthquakes.

In the last ~7 years only Oklahoma has had a >= 5.0 earthquake (three of them). But even if you move it, you're still under Ohio.

https://earthquakelist.org/usa/#latest-earthquakes-mag-5-dis...

Looking at only the last 7 years is a poor standard, and Oklahoma is a known active seismic zone with dedicated USGS risk models. Severe earthquakes occur much less frequently, often less than once per century. US Geological Survey seismic risk maps paint a different picture of actual risk than you are presenting.

For example, you've deemed the New Madrid seismic zone[0] as "safe", despite multiple M7-8+ earthquakes in the 19th century. The Cascadia subduction zone hasn't had a major event in 300+ years but no one considers that seismically safe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_seismic_zone

(Sorry on phone) California famously also has earthquakes. You can't look at the USGS risk map and seriously say the risk between living in Missouri/Oklahoma and California is equivalent. Also I didn't include PNW states in the safe list. Also the NMSZ had only one >= 5.0 earthquake (5.4) in the entire 20th century. Also earthquake deaths are only around half wildfire deaths, and I'd guess the distance between them will only increase as wildfires are only gonna get worse.

https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/hazard-map-2023-50-state-u...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_by_cost

Pacific Northwest earthquake codes are based on earthquakes that last happened more than 300 years ago. The New Madrid Seismic Zone has had multiple earthquakes more powerful than any in the Pacific Northwest during those intervening centuries.

Missouri could realistically experience a M8.0 earthquake tomorrow, just like Washington. That the NMSZ was relatively quiescent during the 20th century tells you little about the seismic risk. Geological risk isn't determined by what happened last week.

Mount Rainier has not been active since the 19th century either. Nonetheless, it is a Decade Volcano[0], one of the highest risk volcanoes in the world.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade_Volcanoes

OK, I think I know what happened here. I was trying to say, "hey, earthquakes aren't great, but it's not like they happen every year (multiple times a year even!), unlike wildfires." Then it seemed like I was cherry picking lists and not using a wide enough window. I understand that; definitely not trying to do that. Great, let's continue.

I feel like everything you've brought up has to be factored into the USGS seismic risk map. But in case it's not, I searched the USGS earthquake database. Of the 1425 >= 5.0 earthquakes in the coterminous US since 1700, 12 of them occurred in the NMSZ (only 7 of which were >= 6.0). In the same amount of time, hundreds occurred in California (the USGS search is rectangular and I can't be arsed to separate out Nevada). There simply is no equivalence. If earthquakes are really a concern, definitely don't live in California! And if wildfires are a concern, also definitely don't live in California!

California/Nevada earthquakes: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=28.32372...

NMSZ earthquakes: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=28.26568...

New Mexico is pretty relaxed

I tend to think many of humanity’s - and, by extension, the entire ecosystem’s - problems arise from overpopulation of homo sapiens. Perhaps the human race should depopulate entirely. Sadly, this won’t happen of its own volition.

You can pour concrete over all the shrubbery. Won’t be as nice, though.

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

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.

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.....

Don't forget the mud slides and earthquakes, but yeah.

“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.

> 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.

Australia is now in this situation as well, and we've seen it in Spain. It's just that LA gets way better global news coverage.

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).

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.

Why didn't this happen in this region (over the last half a millennium) ?

No goat equivalent in the Americas ?

Population density too low ?

I’m guessing there were more profitable economic activities there. Gold mining, lumber industry, pelting, etc.

Here, in the mountains, there’s basically nothing really profitable. So, husbandry (using goats since they are adapted to this environment) was basically the only way to go.

Caltrans uses goats to create fire breaks around highways: https://dot.ca.gov/caltrans-near-me/district-4/d4-popular-li...

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.

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.

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.

What is burning? Mostly bushes or mostly homes?

Both unfortunately. Many neighborhoods seem fully engulfed based on the maps: https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents.html#

In the Palisades? Nearly everything. Homes, the iconic Pali high school, the shops, the bushes — it's reportedly devastated.

From the initial National Weather Service alert:

> IMPACTS...If fire ignition occurs, conditions are favorable for very rapid fire spread and extreme fire behavior, including long range spotting, which would threaten life and property. There will be a high risk for widespread downed trees and powerlines, as well as widespread power outages. A Red Flag Warning means that critical fire weather conditions are either occurring now, or will shortly. Use extreme caution with anything that can spark a wildfire.

So seems the combination of the wind + fire makes for easy and fast fire propagation. The alert/warning in full is a pretty interesting read: https://alerts-v2.weather.gov/search?id=urn%3Aoid%3A2.49.0.1...

Some harrowing before and after photos from a Maxar instrument via LA Times (may be pay walled):

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-08/shocking...

This shows Altadena, just east of JPL, and Malibu (separate fires, of course).

This is a horrific satellite picture of Altadena:

https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/06-closer-s...

wow.

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 FIRIS (https://wifire.ucsd.edu/firis-in-depth). It also uses IR.

The image has the label MAXAR at top right. I believe that company only does satellite imagery? Also articles that link to the image call it satellite data, eg: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/08/us/video/images-fire-before-a...

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

https://archive.is/gMzez

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.

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.

Especially in this wind. Some of the strongest Santa Ana winds in a century

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.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/los-angeles-fires-m...

Edit: Changing a word, "gutted" -> "cut"

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.

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.

Are you for real?

It doesn't seem to me that the GP comment is arguing for the cut in funding, but rather that 'gutted' may reasonably imply to many readers that a relatively significant portion of the budget was cut, which would be misleading in this case even if unintentional. The percentage helps put the number into context as at least I would not have an intuitive sense of expected or historical LAFD budget numbers.

Thank you for providing context, I edited the comment and changed "gutted" to "cut".

Which other fat targets should local governments cut? Please be specific and quantitative.

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 almost $2 billion. The LAPD's budget for one fiscal year is larger than most country's GDPs, yet crime is still rampant in Los Angeles. So that's the first place I would start. You could probably find $23 million sitting between the couch cushions at LAPD's headquarters.

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

The question is whether quality of life can be improved in the city with a better allocation of the $2 billion dollars.

Some should go to policing, yes, community policing should increase, working the stats should decrease, dedicated mental health professionals should be funded and replace a good number of police interactions, etc.

This is a large and complex topic that deserves better than ankle deep engagement.

Red light and speed cameras would do 50x the work that cops are supposed to be doing here and cost substantially less

My idea is to have [optional] speed limiters. The generalized speed limits are very crude. Setting different speed for [small] parts of roads using signs has its limits. We attempt to fix dangerous spots by design, it is a wonderful art but not perfect. You can probably solve a lot of congestion by raising the maximum speed where it makes sense. It also allows for limited control over how many cars try to uses the same road. Traffic jams become bugs. It can log your speed on different roads, if there is a violation it can be treated like a bug too rather than a violation. If you don't have a limiter you can still move along with traffic. If there is a mark on the license plate it is not going to fast.

El Salvador fixed the crime issue with weapons and a strict policy, but in California it may not be such widely accepted.

Judging by the history of the Los Angeles Police Department and their own gangs, run by members of the department, policemen, getting rid of cops might actually help reduce crime!

FWIW that's LASD, not LAPD

LAPD has a history of its own…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources_Against_...

I was responding to the poster who also said:

"...why are we cutting fire department budgets when wildfires are becoming more frequent..."

If you're going to say we need more money budgeted to the Fire Dept. because fires are becoming frequent and then say in your next breath we need to cut the budget of the Police because crime is becoming more frequent....

For $2B you could save a lot of lives even through the overpriced medical system. With a number this big, whatever you do with $2B has to be way better than saving those lives.

Drastically cutting the police budget is almost certainly a good idea. The problem is that you can't just count everything you take from the police budget as extra money because even though the police aren't able to competently do a lot of the work they are currently being utilized for somebody still needs to do that work and they also have to be paid. At least initially it would require an investment to get a better agency to start handling that stuff.

That said, I'm sure there is plenty of opportunity to cut waste too and in addition to slashing the police budget a great way to recover some tax money being burned by the police would be to clean up the department so that taxpayers aren't on the hook for the millions spent in lawsuits generated by their repeated abuses, screw ups, workplace injustices, etc. Much of that actually would be free money.

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?

Couldn't the same be said of a fire department with a $800,000,000 budget? Clearly they're not doing so hot, we should cut it further.

no. not really. The spread of the viewline fire was contained, the getty villa was saved, the hurst fire is being contained and they were on the sunset one pretty quickly. There was one in culver city and woodley that they quashed quickly as well. They got the divide fire from igniting angeles national forest and the lidia. The royal fire is about where the 2018 fire was and that was taken down as well today as was the sunswept, freddy, and emma fire.

that's the past 24 hours.

If you've been following this, they've done a fairly amazing job at knocking out maybe a dozen fires in the past day. Many of these had the potential to be giant infernos and you can actively see very clear evidence of them being contained and suppressed as the fire crews responded.

The evacuation orders and rescue operations were also effective and remarkably little life has been lost.

On the contrary, with crime, there's things like the 1992 Watts truce, which is credited with a rapid decline in LA street violence, which happened without law enforcement at all.

So unlike with say fire-fighting, there's empirically more effective strategies for dealing with crime. They do, however, require us to not be ideologically committed to punitive incarceration.

Most of it is in liability payouts. The LA City Controller has a fantastic instagram account and website https://controller.lacity.gov/

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 hydrants? 100M more? 200M? 500M? 1B?

Is committing to that much more annually the best solution here?

"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.

It was a 17M cut from a greater than $800 million Fire allocation, not 23M. Of that:

> 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, fire prevention, and other key functions

(see up thread peer comment for source)

Further, with a constrained revenue and something like 63% of the entiire state budget going to Police and Fire it appears that the California Fire budget lost out a little to the California Police budget.

There's the arena for fighting this out, a good old badge on badge bar fight over $$$'s.

Factoring in inflation, anything other than positive is already a cut and there was an explicit cut on top

> totalling almost $2 billion. The LAPD's budget for one fiscal year is larger than most country's GDPs

In case anyone was curious, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... suggests that ~17 countries have a GDP of less than $2 billion per year. Seeing as how there are 193+ countries, this means that the LAPD budget exceeds the GDP of fewer than 10% of countries. (The median country GDP is ~$50 billion per year.)

For some extra context: while these 17 countries include some very poor countries, the primary reason that they have such small GDPs is their small population. Their combined population is approximately the same as the city of Los Angeles.

> It's 45% of LA County's entire budget, totalling almost $2 billion. The LAPD's budget for one fiscal year is larger than most country's GDPs, yet crime is still rampant in Los Angeles. So that's the first place I would start.

That's like arguing that since Los Angeles public school's budget is $18.8 billion[1], yet scores are still poor[2], we should cut the public school budget.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-26/lausd-ap... [2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-11/lausd-ma...

Wait a second - you're suggesting to cut LAPD funding because "crime is still rampant in Los Angeles"?

Wouldn't that be the same as advocating for cuts in the LAFD funding because they weren't able to do much about the wildfires anyway?

That doesn't seem to be the best way to go about things, at least not to me.

How much of the city budget does the LAPD need for crime to finally go down then? 60%? 80%? Maybe all of it, replace the mayor with the police commissioner and run the city like a quasi-military dictatorship?

Studies have found "no consistent correlations between increased police spending and municipal crime rates". Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/world/canada/canada-lette...

Unlike policing, where clear alternatives to it like mental healthcare, drug rehabilitation and social welfare programs exist, there isn't really an alternative to the firefighting service for stopping fires.

A smartass could say that national, state, and local legislatures could eliminate crime with a stroke of the pen - no money required. Just eliminate laws.

Meanwhile, people aren't necessarily concerned with the crime rate, per se. There are crimes we care about more than others, namely, violent personal crimes: muggings, felonious assault, rape, and murder. Close on its heels are property crimes: breaking and entering, vandalism, and robbery.

Given the crimes the majority of the people actually care about, can we say that the LA crime rate has not gone down?

Meanwhile, 20% of the hydrants ran dry in the Palisades. Increased LAFD funding isn't going to change anything about that. This isn't even getting into whether it's reasonable for a municipal government to be prepared to battle a wildfire enveloping an entire region. I don't think there's a city in the United States that could take that on.

Police helicopters

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.

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.

It appears we agree that the details of the cuts matters.

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 variable overtime hours, called "V-Hours" within the LAFD, were used to pay for FAA-mandated pilot training and helicopter coordination staffing for wildfire suppression, the memo said.

"Without this funding, pilot compliance and readiness are jeopardized, and aerial firefighting capabilities are diminished," it said. "Changes to the Air Operations Section impact the Department's ability to adhere to current automatic and mutual aid agreements, provide air ambulance service, and quickly respond to woodland fires with water dropping helicopters."

> The memo also highlighted other programs that would suffer under the cuts, including the Disaster Response Section, which funds the bulldozer teams that cut breaks and control lines around wildfires, and the Critical Incident Planning and Training Section, which develops plans for major emergencies.

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 making the best use of what was allocated to them.

I'm an outsider and I'm avoiding throwing shade, just highlighting the complexity of budget issues.

If the blame goes to the state then attention should be paid to the page 6 water flow from revenue to expenditures - if Fire needs more then Police(?) must get less .. etc.

Cali Budget: https://cao.lacity.gov/budget/summary/2024-25%20Budget%20Sum...

(page 11) $774 million went to salaries, $46 million to expenses.

The blame starts with the mayor and top brass of the city government. The literal job description involves running the city based on money they have, including prioritizing what’s important. Fire departments and emergency services are the last departments that need budget cuts. Obviously some blame does also fall on the fire chief, but fire departments are usually well run and from the looks of it, there seems to have been an effort to absorb most of the cost cutting in vacant admin positions. Whether there was an opportunity to make cuts elsewhere from the FD’s pov, we’d need to look at the data more closely.

> The literal job description involves running the city based on money they have, including prioritizing what’s important.

Sure, and to that end the Police and Fire together make up in excess of 60% of the entire budget.

Should all income go to the Fire Dept? (Obviously not) .. again, I'm an outsider, but from a helicopter perspective there already a good sized portion of the budget going towards Fire as a priority already. Should some of the Police budget be cut and redirected?

One a portion of total available has been allocated it does rather fall to the Fire Chief to make the most of what has been granted.

The challenge appears to be how to make what's available go the furtherest.

Here, not California, we make considerable use of volunteers .. well equiped and large well trained volunteers with solid liability insurance should they toast themselves and backed by a professional full time core.

I dare say similar things happen in California, I note the use of the prison population in fire fighting.

It's a tough problem domain, not helped by all the outside hot takes on twitter and elsewhere that casually claim budgets are being gutted, etc.

>Should some of the Police budget be cut and redirected?

I'm as far from this situation as you can be, but yes, absolutely, it's ridiculous how much money is set on fire on ineffective budget items, while at the same time AFAIU the police force is not really held responsible to do its job.

> Sure, and to that end the Police and Fire together make up in excess of 60% of the entire budget.

Of the LA City Fiscal Year 2025 (July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025) of $12.90 billion, $1.98 billion (15.36%) is Police and $820 million (6.36%) is Fire. Combined, this is less than 22%, not in excess of 60%.

https://openbudget.lacity.org/#!/year/2025/operating/0/depar...

Agree with everything you have said in this thread, just want to also draw attention to the fact that there are 2400 fewer firefighters in California because California has rightfully reduced the amount of inmate firefighters. I don't know whether they were counted on for these emergency situations.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-09/californ...

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.

I recommend to everyone to get out of cities and counties that have large pension liabilities. You will be less safe, your kids will be educated more poorly, and your quality of public services will be whittled away because the money is going to retirees and debt.

E.g. Retirement benefits and debt service took up 43% of Chicago’s budget in 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/opinion/chicago-illinois-.... A decade ago my wife and I decided to abandon our efforts to move back to the city (where we went to law school) because we saw this coming.

Orleans Parish certainly used Katrina to dump pension liabilities but I don’t know if I feel any safer for it.

And go where exactly? To towns that don't even have the tax base to support themselves and lack jobs?

It's not like suburbs aren't sitting on financial bombs either.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/fiscal-stab...

I moved to unincorporated exurban Maryland. The state government is a mess, but it’s mostly preoccupied dealing with Baltimore. Our county is great. Good schools with modest per student spending, the friendliest police I’ve ever interacted with. Even our county landfill is one of the cleanest and most orderly facilities I’ve ever seen. Nicer than most of New York City for sure.

I'd imagine that a lot of the people reading this work in tech, where pretty much every company has instituted return-to-office mandates.

And of course, even if you were willing to spend several hours a day commuting, if you're in California exurban areas aren't exactly safer from wildfires.

That is unfortunate for them. But let me tell you how amazing our landfill is. To me, it exemplifies the best of America. It’s so clean and organized, run by orderly, polite, and helpful people. Every time I have to throw out some bulky items, the experience gives me confidence in our local government. My parents, who grew up in Bangladesh, are also amazed by it. Our local county clerk’s office is amazing too. I needed to get one of my kid’s birth certificates reprinted. I went down the street, to the basement of some sober and cost-effective building that was built in the 1980s, and had a new copy in 20 minutes.

I grew up in northern VA in the 1990s and I thought that the whole of America (besides NYC obviously) was like that. Super clean, orderly, and efficient. Then I lived in Wilmington Delaware, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC, and it reminded me too much of the third world.

Not every city is drowning in those kinds of liabilities.

Insert Homer Simpson meme “Not every city is drowning in those kinds of liabilities, yet”

> It's not like suburbs aren't sitting on financial bombs either.

Reminds me of a video (part of series), titled "Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme". Previous HN submission and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32495647

TLDR: Suburban and certain commercial development is money-loser because tax-revenue is way under the long-term costs of the infrastructure to support it, and already denser areas (including the housing of poorer people) are subsidizing spread-out/richer zones.

This is just false, and a quick look at any municipal budget is enough to confirm it. Infrastructure costs are small fraction of spend of any municipality. It’s typically under 10%. Making infra spend twice aa efficient will only increase ability to spend by 5%, which is equivalent to two years of revenue growth. The growth Ponzi scheme people say that it’s all deferred maintenance and in long term it will collapse, but it simply has not happened anywhere, even in places where suburban development pattern has existed for three quarters of a century.

My impression has been that Strong Towns' analysis of the growth Ponzi scheme was correct, or at least not obviously incorrect, in its original context, which was watching small towns far away from large cities become hollowed out by people moving outside the city limits into unincorporated land. If you actually look at the examples on the original Strong Towns' site, you will see that they're largely not suburbs or even exurbs of major cities.

But both that site and its readers have tried to apply that conclusion to suburbs of major cities, which is ludicrously wrong to anyone that actually knows anything about the causes of municipal bankruptcy (almost always due to pension obligations , and often in a vicious cycle with high taxes raised to pay for pensions that drive away residents).

i dont think i want to live in a place that will abandon me when im old. doesnt seem ideal

Local governance in general is FUBAR. Here in CA, housing supply policies from the legislature have gotten a lot better in recent years, but construction still gets bogged down at the local level.

Most budgeting should be moved to the state level, IMO. It's crazy for Western Springs, Atherton and Beverly Hills to waste money while Chicago and Oakland fall behind. If some magnates decide to move to Texas as a result, good riddance. The dependence on property taxes is particularly perverse, as it incentivizes the housing pyramid scheme.

Why would you want more decisions to be moved up to the state level, where officials will be elected by a low-information statewide electorate, instead of a local level, where there’s at least hope of an informed electorate that’ll hold the government accountable? That’s certainly been my experience living in a well-run county in Maryland.

This guy is my county executive: https://www.aacounty.org/pittmanandfriends. I trust him to make sure our trash gets picked up on time and to keep the community safe. I certainly don’t trust the Maryland government to do that.

It's not so much an informed electorate as a rent-seeking one.[1] The regulatory capture [2] of obscure local boards is much easier than that of state agencies. Voters who are part of a special interest group are much more aware of what and who they're voting for. The prime example are landlords and homeowners. They have managed to strangle the supply of housing to inflate prices, creating the crisis we're in now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

The home ownership rate in my county is 75%, so “landlords and homeowners” is the vast majority of the population, not a “special interest group.”

And your point doesn’t contradict mine. The homeowners in my county are highly informed and conscientious voters, and their decisions are good for most of the people who already live in the county.

I agree in certain circumstances, including land use, you want to make decisions at the state level. But for most government services, like education, policing, local roads, etc., I want Kim who runs our HOA to be voting on who makes those decisions and hassling those officials to keep them accountable.

It's still a special interest group, even if it happens to be a large one. It's orchestrating decisions that effectively siphon money from non-members (e.g. renters and young families), and in proportion to the number of properties each member owns no less.

In any case, we don't seem to disagree all that much. My original point was more legislative than executive in nature. Local executive accountability is desirable, provided that the budgeting and rulemaking were made uniform state-wide. Education already works that way.

Not just cities or counties.

The entire state of New Jersey exists to pay pensions. The 2025 general budget is $55 billion, $7 billion went to funding the pension for one year, again.

Unfortunately that 2% was the part going to actual firefighters. The other 98% was administrative overhead. Both remaining firefighters are spread thin.

From the budget papers (page 11) themselves, $774 million went to salaries, $46 million to expenses.

https://cao.lacity.gov/budget/summary/2024-25%20Budget%20Sum...

Page 6 shows a water flow from revenues to expenditures.

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 with around 1 million gallons of water each, but those supplies were tapped out by early Wednesday morning.

  “We ran out of water and the first tank about 4:45pm yesterday, we ran out of water on the second tank about 8:30pm and the third tank about 3am this morning,” said Janisse Quiñones, CEO of LADWP.

Three million gallons is a few large swimming pools of water. Is there no way to draw from a larger source? For comparison, the Hollywood reservoir is 2.5 billion gallons.

> Is there no way to draw from a larger source?

What are your thoughts on that question?

I'm in Australia, while I cannot personally answer your question wrt these specific tanks I do imagine there was some means by which they were filled to the brim.

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?

Not my country .. but .. I did read that the Fire Chiefs wanted more tanks but NIMBY resistance prevailed.

Fire tanks are generally "slow to fill* and "fast to empty" in relative terms - they form a local cache for rapid drawdown at rates much faster than "normal" water system draw.

There's also strong element in twitter and US news of petty critic for politic points .. "The hydrants are empty and there's no water" might be that kind of complaint, eg: "we emptied the tanks here holding the fire front back, the front has now moved, the tanks are now refilling" might well be the source of what became a damning meme "the hydrants are empty".

That’s on top of about 3.4% inflation from 2023 to 2024. So over a 5% cut in real terms.

Actually we don’t have that information. Often when governments talk about budget cuts they already are pricing it in real terms, or against projected budget increase.

Unfortunately we have a news article reporting a tweet.

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.

For reference the LAPD budget is $175 million per month.

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.

2% means gutted? 2% less funding means only a skeleton crew is left?

Depends: did it have a lot of excess capacity before the cuts?

That’s wholly immaterial to the word choice. Come on.

"Gutted" sure, but yes it's absolutely possible to go from functional staffing to totally non-functional with a 2% budget reduction depending on the org's structure and where the budget cuts come from.

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.

https://www.joinlafd.org/salary-and-benefits

> The city of Los Angeles and the Mayor have been requesting volunteers from the public

That's not true. The call last night was for all off-duty firefighters to report their availability, not for members of the public.

Clearly LAFD / LACFD need more manpower, but there's more then enough merit to make that case without misinformation.

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.

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.

That's not quite what's going on with these particular fires. They weren't caused by excessive fire suppression. Most of the terrain involved is chaparral rather than forest. The previous two years had relatively high rainfall which caused a lot of fast brush growth. This season has had much less rainfall so everything dried out, creating tinderbox conditions. In those areas we have to rely more on clearing defensible space around structures.

https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE

The forest management issues are valid but apply more to other parts of the state.

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.

Essentially the amount of water/chemicals they can move is trivial compared to land approaches

I'm sure that's correct for many geographies, but most of this fire is burning on steep mountainsides and in canyons without road access, or an occasional dirt road and no water connection. With the amount of wind, probably nothing could be done, land or air, once this started.

edit: Here is a glimpse of the terrain: https://x.com/firevalleyphoto/status/1876731317464760629

Even the populated areas in the Palisades fire have roads that are remarkably poor. A lot of them are windy, with negligible visibility around corners, and are barely a single lane. I doubt that a fire truck can get through many of them easily even under ideal conditions.

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.

That's true in general but not really applicable to these fires. It's mostly chaparral that's burning, and most of the dry brush has built up over only a few years — not 100. We had two years of heavy rains that caused a lot of brush growth, and then this season it all dried out.

Controlled burns in that terrain are impractical because there are too many structures nearby and a controlled burn can turn into an uncontrolled burn in minutes. A more realistic approach would be expanding defensible space and culling non-native flora.

https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE

Very good info.

Interesting. Wikipedia [1] also says that these biomes are supposed to have canopy fires rather than smaller burns. I'm a bit skeptical (seems awefully convenient), but it looks like the 500 year climate record supports this idea [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral

[2] https://doi.org/10.1006/qres.1999.2035

If this is the case, then homes in this biome need to be engineered to survive nearby canopy fires every few generations.

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.

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.

Where I live we routinely do prescribed (planned) burns and aim to mosaic the landscape | fuel load regions to break up high load buildups.

See (for example): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKsLRNbczJY

Cool burning's been going on for several thousand years (geolocked?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM72NtXxyLs

That’s a political hot potato in California right now. CALFIRE has been advocating for prescribed burns for decades but it doesn’t have jurisdiction over all the lands owned by the federal government and the 35 California Air Districts mired in local politics are responsible for issuing the permits for those burns. Lots of NIMBYs who pressure the district boards to withhold those permits for air quality reasons.

There’s hope that this series of events will cause them to reevaluate but prescribed burns wouldn’t have helped in the Palisades anyway.

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?

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.

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/08/26/c-130-hercules-is-now-figh...

Hundreds or thousands of planes???

“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-...

I was throwing out a number. Clearly, my perspective is that we need more water-dropping aircraft than we have or that we are borrowing.

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.

[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

> 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.

0. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-history-of-califo...

(Very interesting info you found!)

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.

I wonder if they have favorable consideration when applying to fire departments after they get out.

It's often the opposite, where their conviction bars them from even applying for a job.

As I understand it, no. Most counties require that you have an EMT license to be a firefighter, and many people with conviction histories are barred from getting EMT licenses (Title 22 § 100214.3(c)). There was a bill a few years ago that allowed CalFire specifically to hire people as firefighters with an alternate credential that doesn't have a blanket-ban on people with conviction histories.

> Not so sure the $5 are the driver here.

There aren't a lot of opportunities to earn money in prison. Having money in prison is important. Although having work time credits are more important as those earn you an early release.

> Better than watching a cellmate all day.

No one is doing that anyways.

Slave labor (which is permitted under the 13th amendment as punishment for a crime) undercuts the wages that you would pay in the market hurting both the prisoners (as they aren't paid appropriately or given appropriate medical care for injuries, etc) and the would-be non-prison firefighters.

Worse, you generally can't be a firefighter once you get out of prison as they don't hire ex-convicts. Consequently you're not even learning a useful job skill. Note that this hard-ban was relaxed in California specifically in 2020 under AB2147 (allowing prisoners who participated in firefighting programs to apply to have their records expunged in certain cases) -- but applies elsewhere in the US.

I'm not informed on the specifics on these cases, but I generally view that (many/most) prisoners have a debt to society for breaking the social contract and serving the community by making it safer is a generally positive activity. I'm happy to adjust my opinion on this topic if provided evidence that inmate firefighters either are unsafe for the community or have worse outcomes than other inmates.

I find it curious that some people here consider it as slavery ?

It is an optional activity if I understand right.

It seems rewarding to do a training to become a firefighter and join the team, than to idle in prison.

It is a volunteer role. Many people in the world become volunteers in the firefighters, a lot are unpaid. They do it for reasons beyond money (making friends, feeling useful, helping people, etc).

A prisoner may get some carrot as a reward (like less served time) but at the end, they all benefit.

Volunteering to do work so you can shorten your sentence is slavery, yes.

Not volunteering and not shortening your sentence… isn’t?

> I'm not informed on the specifics on these cases, but I generally view that (many/most) prisoners have a debt to society for breaking the social contract and serving the community by making it safer is a generally positive activity.

Yes -- but -- by undercutting the wages you would have to pay people outside, it lowers the pay of the non-prison laborers. This hurts that community.

You can achieve the same result by paying them prevailing wage. This has the extra benefit of giving them some saved up money to start a new life when they get out, helping them avoid falling back into a life of crime to make ends meet.

> You can achieve the same result by paying them prevailing wage. This has the extra benefit of giving them some saved up money to start a new life when they get out, helping them avoid falling back into a life of crime to make ends meet.

I don’t see how you can do this, because you turn punishment into privilege. If the way to firefighter pay is through a jail cell you create all kind of problems around perverse incentives.

No one has a response, they just downvote because they don’t like the reality of the situation?

Because no one is actually seriously proposing to pay prisoners the same rate as real firefighters; we just shouldn't be using prisoners. Would you allow prisoners to volunteer as teachers, nurses, engineers? Why is the market for firefighters the only one that gets free volunteers from this pool?

But it's not just hurting the firefighter market, lots of people just have issues with using prisoners as slaves.

> Would you allow prisoners to volunteer as teachers, nurses, engineers?

If part of their job description was the equivalent of clearing brush/cutting fire lines in emergencies, I might consider it.

> Why is the market for firefighters the only one that gets free volunteers from this pool?

Do you have another source of willing, not-risk-averse, physically fit and competent people that are not doing anything else, know each other already, can be there ready to work together at a moment’s notice, and won’t bail partway through to go fill an instacart order?

Nobody is stopping you from being a firefighter outside of jail.

Have you tried? Do you have your certs? Would you pass the physical? Background check?

I mean if your concern is "people in prison have an easier path to being a firefighter" maybe we should reconsider what it means to be one?

My concern only becomes an issue if prisons put them on parity with actual trained firefighters (as was being suggested, but is not the case). Presently they are not, and they are not used that way. They usually do not do the same types or level of work.

I think the first step is people educating themselves even marginally on the topic of discussion before proposing policy changes.

And if the way to cheap labor for risky, highly needed manual labor is through incarcerating people, you create all kind of problems around perverse incentives.

Yes, unless it is voluntary, which it is.

Is anything in prison really voluntary?

This also has to be balanced against the perverse incentive to construct bullshit laws to justify mass incarceration to get more prison slaves. Not a hypothetical either; this actually happened, because the US Constitution actually says very little about human rights.

Like HB1 workers broke the social contract by being not born in the us?

Yep, and just to drive home the point the official motto of the California Conservation Corps, which does a lot fire fighting and prevention in the state, is “Hard work, low pay, miserable conditions, and more.”[0]

I get that the motto is somewhat tongue in cheek but still, slave labor does tend to distort markets.

[0]https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/natio...

To be clear, fighting fires is done by prisoners who volunteer and my understanding is that it is highly sought after

Can the prisoners volunteer to be teachers or work at Meta too, or is only one market affected?

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.

I would be more concerned about Climate Change. No amount of money will help.

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.

I was curious to learn why we "never allow the forest to burn", given that Cal Fire for example has a whole department of Prescribed Fire. Sounds like the problem is lawyers and property owners:

> One of the primary obstacles to increasing the pace and scale of beneficial fire use in California is the difficulty for practitioners to obtain adequate liability coverage, although the rates and losses from escapes are very low.

https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/natural-resource-manageme...

> Sounds like the problem is lawyers and property owners:

Some of them might change their mind now that they’re owners of some acres of charcoal.

You cannot not choose a time - it’ll get chosen for you. Schedule should be known, cost included in taxes, risks known when property was acquired, liabilities limited in state or federal regulation. Weather doesn’t care about lawyers.

These fires are mostly burning chaparral, not forest. Better forest management is a good idea in general but not relevant to this article.

This is slightly misleading because it doesn't take into account the extra funding they got when contract negotiations finished

> 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.

"fair share" is always defined as more than they pay now, I've noticed.

lol exactly

Seems like he knows his way around the financial system:

https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/politico-uncovers-more...

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 case?

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?

They certainly hoard more than their "fair share" of wealth.

Nothing certain about that.

100% certain that no human deserves to be a billion times wealthier than the least wealthy human.

I don't know why you think that.

because i am a human who sees the inherent value of all humanity, divorced from their wealth. i see wealth hoarding as an addiction, a sickness, and a danger to others.

Inherit value has nothing to do with wealth, and billionaires are not hoarding.

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.

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...

There is no meaningful sense in which firefighters are "fighting" this fire, nor could they.

Interesting that at the same time the police department's budget increased by $126 million

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.

Your source debunked itself a few hours later.

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.

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 remember that time. What a nightmare. Was saying the current one is probably the worst I have ever seen.

Used to go to that place all the time, friend was working when it happened.

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!

NASA's FIRMS site shows the scale of both fires. They are huge given their proximity to the city.

https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;@-118.57,3...

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.

Map of evacuation zones: https://protect.genasys.com/Search?z=9.689266971108566&latlo...

Looks like 3 independent fires?

Yep, 3 separate fires. The first in West LA blew up late yesterday afternoon and blew through a bunch of residential areas by the looks of it. From watching Flight Radar, it seems to be getting most of the air resources, although that could just be because wind conditions are favorable on that fire today. The second fire near Pasadena started yesterday as well, but really blew up overnight. The third fire up North I think started overnight.

There's been a huge amount of wind throughout So Cal today and yesterday that is driving the rapid spread of these fires.

I saw a video of of it burning down down houses and commecial building Altedena, unlike newscasts where the lip flappers are blabbing over everything you could hear the wind howling and see streams of embers blowing down the street and overhead.

The lip flappers, as you call them, are providing valuable information to people who lived and/or worked in the areas where the fires are occurring.

As I type this, ABC7 is providing intersections-specific location information for their reporters-on-the-ground so that people can track the progress of the fire and hopefully determine the status of their houses.

There are 4 now (can no longer edit my original comment)

Edit: seems like 5 now. Another one near Hollywood

https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2025/1/7/palisades-fire

Edit: And hotspots - https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;@-118.21,3...

The relative humidity is 0.33 [1]. The previous lowest recorded relative humidity was 0.36 in Needles CA and Iran [2]

[1] https://www.weather.gov/wrh/timeseries?site=KSMO

[2] https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/world-record-low-humidity-...

Maximum being 1 or 100?

I believe 100, because lower than 36% humidity is fairly common while lower than 1% is incredibly rare.

The graph and chart indicate it's 0 to 100%, so 0.33 is indeed one third of one percent.

What causes the humidity to be so low? Is the fire lowering the humidity? Or the lower humidity causing the fire?

Wiki Santa Ana winds. They typically bring <10% humidity as they blow towards the pacific ocean. This can happen overnight and you'll wake up with "raisin-eyes".

You have your units mixed up - Iran record is two orders if magnitude lower than in LA (30% vs 0.3%)

That’s not what his link [1] shows. Santa Monica airport appears to have reported a relative humidity of 0.33%

I wonder if there is a problem with the data collection at that time? From your link, it looks like to drop much lower than 0.33, lowest value on that chart is 0.11, which is massively lower than any previous worldwide value, before jumping up to ~10.

JPL would be a national loss. I hope it doesn't come to that. Stay safe, SoCal folks!

No joke.

I hope these days it's more spread out and backed up, but at one point they did a lot of phyical archiving related to space exploration there, including huge amounts of transparencies.

I hope nothing will be damaged! Those are priceless treasures.

All the big campuses here like JPL and the Getty are built for this (it’s more or less standard now for insuring anything high value). They have landscaping designed to slow down fires, dedicated water systems, and firebreaks all around the buildings. The civilian evacuation order is because the area south of the fire is densely built up with single family homes without much in the way of defenses and JPL has to comply with that.

Thankfully the wind has died down significantly from last night, so we’re in a better shape, but there are still high wind warnings till 6pm and the fires are 0% contained.

Will look into options for supporting these folks. Thank you for the level-headed and informative response.

I prefer HN over some other news sources, which seem less concerned about presenting information to the degree the news article can vouch for. Media literacy is a two-way street and we need better reporting standards. If reading and writing is a lot like parsing, then anyone who spreads misinformation is just a parsehole.

The Getty Villa has reported that some landscaping burned, but the buildings and collections are safe.

https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/getty-villa-threatened-pal...

Note that Getty Villa != Getty Museum. The Villa is near Malibu, the Museum is miles away near the 405.

This is sad, devastating, and not surprising. Yet, people voted for policies that will further accelerate climate change and its consequential destructions in the next four years. As someone not living in the US, this is unbelievable to witness. Where did it all go wrong inside of people's heads?

Because no one thinks their house will burn down or flood, or that they will starve.

We're supposed to be self-interested individuals, but sadly most people only seem to wake up the moment their own safety is directly threatened.

Such a shame that 50 years of climate warnings have done practically nothing to stop us reaching the tipping point. If we aren't there yet, we will be in our lifetimes no doubt.

Most people that voted for Trump I’d say is not that they don’t think climate change will affect them, it’s that they don’t think there’s climate change at all, or even if it there is, it’s not caused by humans.

"climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it" - @PerthshireMags on ex-twitter

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/abs/pii/S09218...

Deserts are generally uninhabitable by their very nature, but these persistent fires are primarily due to lack of proper underbrush care and other preventative measures.

California fires are a classic case of "We tried nothing and we're out of ideas!", speaking as a former Californian I honestly think the faster solution at this point is for enough of the state to burn down that pretending the problem doesn't exist is no longer good enough.

> Deserts are generally uninhabitable by their very nature

Deserts don’t have wildfires. (EDIT: They do!)

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-07-31/york-fir...

I stand corrected! I guess the rains caused the desert to burn?

Lightning strikes and humans are probably the most common causes for fires in the desert.

Most desert areas in the US are a lot more lush than the blank sand dunes many people think of as desert. Usually there are a lot of bushes and grasses, and higher elevations can pine, juniper, oak, and other trees.

But PJ high desert areas don’t have the same level of destructive wildfires as, say, the Ponderosa pines found at higher elevations or cottonwood bosques. My impression is the fire load per acre in PJ is much lower and the fires are just not destructive. Adobe/masonry construction probably helps too, as does lower density urbanization. Probably easier to fight such fires too. (Limited experience)

Deserts absolutely have wildfires, and are even pretty common in California deserts. The second largest fire in the state for 2023 was the York Fire in the Mojave Desert[0]. There have been many other sizable desert fires in recent years as well.

As with many other landscapes, climate change, drought, and aquifer depletion have made deserts increasingly vulnerable to large wildfires.

[0]https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-07-31/york-fir...

A lot of the risk in the high desert of the western US is the ubiquitous sagebrush. Old growth sagebrush is basically a short tree and it burns pretty easily and very hot (excellent wood for grilling though). Fortunately, the large plants of the high desert (sagebrush, juniper, etc) grow very slowly.

When lightning or people start a fire in the desert, both relatively rare, they tend to be limited by two things. First, if areas that have been burned out sometime in the last century or two, the plants haven’t grown back enough to really support a proper wildfire, so it is easier to contain. Prior burns are a natural firebreak and they last a really long time. Second, the high desert of the US is an active volcanic province. There are fresh basalt flows everywhere, some less than a thousand years old, in the terrain. It takes tens of thousands of years for these to support enough plant life to carry a burn. These natural barriers place limits on where they can go and how far they can get.

The desert does have fires but they tend to be muted and often self-limiting because large contiguous regions of dense fuel aren’t as common.

As a current Californian we really don’t need that right now.

I'm speaking of the reality of man. The path of least resistance will be the path that is taken, and so far it (apparently) makes more sense to cry "Climate Change!" than actually do something about preventing these fires.

If it takes enough of the state burning down for another path to gain lesser resistance, then so be it. That is certainly going to happen if California keeps going down the same path. I'm certainly not pleased that a piece of my childhood is burning down in unprecedented terms.

This is wrong. California may not do enough to mitigate fire damage but they are certainly doing more than nothing.

Your thesis is way off, and people didn’t understand climate back when these areas were settled. And really, we still don’t know how to or can’t politically manage wildfires well.

Part of climate change is that this man-induced change is making previously hospitable areas much less so.

> people didn’t understand climate back when these areas were settled

Agree on Palisades. My original thesis is about new construction in Florida and Houston and in e.g. the middle of the California woods. That is settlement done when we did know the risks.

And all the maps are political, like houston is no where near correct, its all flood zone

> we still don’t know how to or can’t politically manage wildfires well.

Fire is oxygen plus fuel. We entirely know how to manage it.

They've actually stopped permitting new builds or rebuild of burned houses in Santa Ana mountains since last year's airport fire.

Huh, I’m actually surprised a high-risk area is that close to LA. (Santa Monica, no less.)

LA is surrounded by high fire risk areas. The wildfire risk is also really unpredictable. The rule of thumb is the closer you are to the beach, the lower the risk.

We were looking to buy a house in Orange or Anaheim Hills because those areas are comparatively affordable. But after the airport fire we steered clear. I took a fire insurance quote on an Orange property, their model says the fire risk is 4 on a scale of 15, but they treat it like 10 because the variance is too high.

My sister lives in Anaheim Hills. A couple years ago a brush fire burned right up to the property line behind her house. Fortunately her house was undamaged. Last year the insurance company declined to renew her policy. I think you made a wise choice to avoid that area.

I guess so. I hope your sister is doing alright. Nobody wanted to insure properties in Orange or Anaheim Hills for me either, only option was to get calfair policy. We ended up buying in Aliso Viejo.

LA is surrounded by hills and mountains. Hollywood sign has burned down before.

To start with the last first, I would argue your general (and not uncommon) thesis is off in one key respect: it's not primarily (though in some percentage it may be) a matter of people building where they shouldn't have per se, but that they built what they shouldn't have where they did. Ie, it's 100% feasible as a matter of architecture/engineering/construction to build a structure that will shrug off a Cat 5 hurricane including storm surge. And while it adds a real premium, it's also not at some impossible cost either. People have done it, and it works. Same with most other natural disasters. It's "only" a matter of cost and standards. It's worth noting too in many cases societies have indeed done exactly that, like with earthquakes, or in areas of high risk tornadoes. Building standards have been set to match the risk. There is plenty of low hanging fruit that can severely diminish the impact of a lot of the disasters causing massive damage if it's just standard upfront.

Also, there's the complete polar opposite approach: build something "disposable". In the "old days" (including with my extended family) there was a style of "summer camp" for example that was ultra simple. Some small single floor deal, uninsulated, maybe some power but often not even that, composting/pit toilet, some simple wood furniture, that's it. People bring their own everything, be there for a few weeks/months a year, and then go home. Such a structure can't survive much of anything but that doesn't matter because it's so cheap, if it burns/blows down/washes away once every 5 years or whatever so be it. It's a problem though when people convert what should be cheap into some full fledged thing, but then don't take environment into account.

I think this distinction is super important, because a lot of these places are beautiful and desirable much of the time, and a blanket "no you shouldn't build there ever" isn't likely to be heeded and does not get to the root actual problem, which is that the true costs of doing so aren't being priced in. The reasons for that distortion are myriad, but that's the actual issue. I think it's much more productive and convincing to the public to say "it's fine to build where you like, but it's not fine to hit other people up for money to cover it or cause unreasonable costs to safety services/environmental damage (homes burning or floating away means massive pollution), you just need be responsible in how you build."

FWIW to specifics:

>With much of California, Texas and Florida it seems pretty clear people built where they shouldn’t have.

In some cases sure but in others I guess it'd be reasonable to say that things built long enough before anthropogenic global warming really kicked off can't be reasonably blamed for that, particularly if they correct gauged the risk for themselves (ie, someone built something 50 years ago as a life thing and it did indeed last the remaining 40 years of their life, well you can't really say they got it wrong and built it wrong or it's still their problem). What is bad though is new stuff getting built or worst of all things getting REbuilt after destruction but not to updated standards each time.

Are there estimates for the cost of fireproofing Californian construction?

Fireproof to what level? Pretty much anything will burn if you get it hot enough. The cost will depend on what level of fire resistance you want to target.

The problem with fireproofing one building in a fire-prone area is that neighboring buildings that aren't fireproof will build, and they will release toxic substances that make your fireproof building toxic.

Seems like properly-priced insurance should fix that, if you add a little bit of tort for the owners of the hazardous housing?

It's more like all of us have houses that release toxic fumes in fires. It's in the basic building material and furnishings.

https://news.mongabay.com/2024/11/as-global-fire-risk-rises-...

Right; and houses release those toxic fumes when they're on fire. If poisoning other structures with your house fire was an actionable tort, insurance would incentivize owners (and builders) to make houses that were less likely to catch on fire and poison others, and/or find less toxic building materials and furnishings.

I never experienced an earthquake, in Tokyo, but those who have, say that the buildings wave around like drunk dancers.

Things fall off of shelves, but the buildings seem to come out OK.

The Japanese are hard core about building standards.

Compared to other nations (deliberately not gonna name them), that have corruption problems, as well as frequent earthquakes, you always have a bunch of buildings fall down, there's a surge of anger, a couple of unpopular scapegoats get jailed, then, it happens again, the next time.

I have a bunch of friends in the LA area. So far, none of them have been in the line of [literal] fire, but everyone is freaking out. These fires are under no control, whatsoever.

>The Japanese are hard core about building standards.

Note that this has been built on their fair share of blood and tears[1].

Japan gloated in the wakes of the 1989 Loma Prieta[2] and 1994 Northridge[3] earthquakes that such structural destruction[3][4] would be impossible for them, but then they got their gloating ass burned off.[6]

Japan has been dead fucking serious about earthquake measures ever since, never taking anything for granted and certainly never ever pretending they are kings of the earthquake world anymore.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanshin_earthquake

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Northridge_earthquake

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cypress_structure.jpeg

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Northridge_earthquake_10_...

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hanshin_Expressway_Nada_b...

Addendum to note I got my reference numbers subtly wrong.

"such structural destruction[3][4]" should be [4] and [5] instead, apologies.

David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was quoted as saying “It's hard to bullshit the ocean. It's not listening, you know what I mean.” True for wildfires under windy conditions as well. Probably the reason why the word “wildfire” in American English is used as a simile to refer to any fast, destructive, uncontrolled phenomenon, appearing back when those earlier generations lived though them without modern firefighting tech. Your friends’ go-to attack and defense strategies, perhaps their entire realities, are just words…but wildfires have no online presence and can’t read. Umm, earthquakes don’t read either.

Side note: modern media has used exaggeration and hype to make a myriad of small or remote things sound scary. Wildfires are actually scary…what words do we use to describe the clear and present threat of death within minutes when the media has described minor inconveniences as “horrors” and “catastrophes”? People today should refamiliarize themselves with the story of the “boy who cried wolf”.

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 and mountains?

> there's increasingly few places where natural disasters, of one sort or another, aren't inevitable

Sure. That doesn’t mean you can’t mitigate damage.

Not e.g. building on the Houston flood plain is one such example [1].

[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...

You wouldn't think you'd need to point out building on the water side of a levee is a bad idea, even for a "dry reservoir", but here we are.

Huston regularly gets battered by hurricanes.

South Texas? We lived in San Antonio for last 5 years, and the weather does not really get extreme. Well you get consecutive weeks of 105-110 highs in summer. But it is far enough from the gulf coast so no hurricanes, and apart from the 2021 snowpocalypse, we didn't get any extreme weather. Austin is also okay. If you get too far north up to Dallas you start to get the snowstorms and tornadoes though.

Nobody wants to live here, but Ohio is pretty safe. There are tornadoes but they're very localized and not common. Really not much else to worry about, aside from being in Ohio of course.

Phoenix and Tucson are pretty mild for disasters. There are sometimes violent storms in the late summer but nothing that ever rises to the level of requiring evacuation as far as I know.

On the other hand, you better hope your AC works in the summer.

Yea, the potential disasters in the south west are mostly man-made in the sense of underinvesting in the electrical grid to make sure the months of 100+ degree high temps don't kill you, or a snap freeze in the winter doesn't take down power either.

The lack of a real need for natural disaster planning feels like it's left local governance complacent about issues that would barely be a problem anywhere else. I know folks in Dallas, Houston, and Austin who have been without power and water longer from a few hours of freezing rain than folks in Florida that got direct hit with a Cat 4 hurricane. There's certainly disasters that you can only do so much prep for, but there's rigor that comes with having to prep for something that generally helps you not totally fall apart when more minor stuff happens.

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).

Salt Lake City is about to be devastated by the drying up of the lake.

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.

> for humans, they are very vulnerable to water shortages, and power outages during the summer can be deadly

These are both mitigated with on-site reserves.

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

Many of these houses are decades old and were built in areas that weren't fire risks when the houses were built; Altadena had the opposite problem: it generally received a lot of rain so people were concerned about flooding and mudslides and so a lot of the infrastructure is designed to maximize the channeled flow of water down the hillsides.

Also, a lot of the houses burning in the Eaton fire (especially in Altadena) are surrounded by miles of development, but very-low-humidity hurricane-strength Santa Ana wind gusts can carry (and keep alive) burning embers for miles.

Presumably that property is worth more in the first place. Damage by value is a poor metric to use here. Aside from that is there any indication that the fires occur because people "build where they shouldn't have?" Or is it just the case that more "value" is destroyed when a fire eventually reaches them?

The Eaton fire is currently destroying Altadena in what I would call regular neighborhoods on regular streets. On a good day, it's like 20 minutes from Downtown LA. It's hard to fathom. https://www.reddit.com/r/pasadena/comments/1hwv3od/much_of_a...

I took a look at a map of the Eaton fire and its evacuation area and warning area, then looked up several houses for sale in those areas on Redfin. Redfin includes a section that lists environmental risks.

In the northern parts of Altadena it says the fire risk is 33% chance of a fire within the next 30 years. Going south toward Pasadena it gets lower. At the southern parts of the evacuation zone I'm seeing it mostly range from "minimal" to numbers under 1%. "Minimal" is the category for the places with the least risk, and is described as "Unlikely to be in a wildfire in the next 30 years".

In the warning zone south of that, which looks like to goes south to the 210, so far all I've found is "Minimal".

> The National Guard - along with thousands of firefighters (many of them prisoners working for $10 a day or less) - have been deployed to help tackle the conflagration.

I hope their compensation is a little more than $10 a day! By the looks of the fire, those guys/gals are heros.

Worse, upon release, none of them will be able to gain employment as a firefighter; you need a clean record for that.

Nonviolent prisoners who have served as firefighters during their incarceration can have their records expunged since a 2021 law (and it’s retroactive): https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/facility-locator/conservation-camps/...

This was a big deal after the Camp and Complex fires because of some viral articles that drew well justified outrage among Californians so they went a step above and just allowed them to expunge their records completely (so that they can get hired everywhere else too, they don’t have to become fire fighters).

There are some stipulations like the sentence they served must be at most 8 years, but they’re not all banned from continuing their work.

Well good, since professional and volunteer firefighters are the most common arsonists. People with violent criminal records should not be in those fields at all.

Do you have a source for that claim? On the face, it seems pretty outrageous.

Yes .

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fires-set-by-firefig...

I'm honestly surprised at the downvotes. I thought this was common knowledge.

Your article cites 100 annual firefighter convictions for arson in North America. For your claim to be true, that means fewer than 200 arson convictions annually in all of Canada, US, and Mexico. It says firefighter arson is common, but does not appear to claim that they are the most common offender.

That seems really really low!

It's a matter of proportion. If someone wants to be a firefighter they are also that much more likely to want to be an arsonist.

Also, arson convictions are extremely rare. Most arsons are unsolved.

You can imagine how much more likely it is to be unsolved if the person investigating is also setting the fires

From the source link it's hard to tell if these prisoners are even working voluntarily. Prisoners can be enslaved under the 13th amendment.

They are volunteering and usually get time reduced for doing so.

I'm still uneasy about it. They're in a vulnerable position and the alternative is unpleasant because of the same people offering the "opportunity". The pay is only legal because they're prisoners. If it was a fair wage I'd be more comfortable although still uneasy.

Almost everyone in California felt uneasy about it after the 2018-2020 fires. In 2021 the governor signed a retroactive law that allowed nonviolent offenders serving less than 8 years to expunge their records if they served as firefighters while incarcerated. I’d prefer they get paid at least minimum wage anyway, but they’re better off than most other prisoners because the expungement means their background checks can come back clean for any job, not just firefighting.

California voters had a question before them in this election of whether or not to ban the practice of slavery, and they voted to keep practicing slavery.

It's not slavery. The inmate firefighters are paid below minimum wage but it's completely voluntary. They can quit any time and go sit in state prison if they prefer. We can argue about whether they should be paid more, but let's not trivialize real slavery by misusing the term.

In general when you're a "prisoner with a job," that's slavery, even if there's some pittance of a wage involved. They're paid $10 a day, let's not pretend this is a fair wage for a fair day's work. This is a form of economic warfare against the working class, who shouldn't have to compete against prison labor.

They also get reduced time. Considering the program is extremely sought after, I think it should continue in light of the fact that its literally what they prefer compared to not doing anything

I don't have a problem with the program, or any prison labor program, as long as it's paying at or above market wages.

We sanction Chinese companies for using prison labor in their products because it's ethically wrong. We shouldn't be engaging in the same practice we sanction other countries for.

Depending on slave labor from prisoners also creates a conflict of interests for society because it creates incentives to imprison people rather than prevent crime. It should never be a smart financial move to imprison your citizens.

It's very literally slavery. You don't have to deny it because the practice is legal in the United States. As you say, they can do this work or they can sit in state prison. I don't have to squint to see how that's a threat. These prisoners didn't volunteer to be in prison. If you gave them the choice of fighting fires or going free I doubt many would pick the $10.00 a day firefighting gig.

They're being provided with a full life while the rest of us pay for it. If, at market rate, their earnings make up for the expense the state pays for them, I'd be willing to let them earn it, but I doubt any are earning that much.

A full life…in prison?

Yeah, but the amendment was to get rid of slavery. And it failed.

The problem with running prisons like a business is that they scale so well.

It's one of the most sought after opportunities in prison. And the state can't afford to pay them fully. Considering they want to do it, and the state already pays a huge amount to house prisoners, its not that insane

> It's one of the most sought after opportunities in prison.

"In prison" is doing a lot of work there.

> And the state can't afford to pay them fully.

Then the state can't afford to be on fire. An externality that isn't accounted for.

> Considering they want to do it, and the state already pays a huge amount to house prisoners, its not that insane.

I'm really shocked to hear someone just casually say slavery in the United States in 2025 isn't insane. I mean it's legal so maybe I am the crazy one but I'm personally troubled that this practice is going on. I don't even like that my state uses prison labor for license plates and that's not life threatening.

yeah, I expect there are some foundational differences in world view at play.

IMO, its not slavery because it is 100% optional. It is a restricted privilege that prisoners actively seek and compete for.

It is sought after because it is an improvement over the alternative. I'm honestly unsure how this can be framed as a negative.

> yeah, I expect there are some foundational differences in world view at play.

Agree. I find it fascinating that perspectives can be so different.

> It it is sought after because it is an improvement over the alternative.

Yep, no objection from me.

> I'm honestly unsure how this can be framed as a negative.

To me it's the part where prison is apparently even worse than risking your life fighting fires for free.

The incentives here are perverse. The worse prison conditions are the more "appealing" still-awful conditions become. Access to free labor creates an incentive for the state to create more of that labor. Rehabilitation becomes a threat to the practitioners.

I think the biggest difference is that you believe there is a choice and I don't think that choice is meaningful.

I don't have much skin in this argument but I'll offer one more perspective. Some people enjoy work and some people enjoy risk taking. I have a feeling that are some people in prison that like being badass and the hero and this job seems like an excellent opportunity. Your point that they would rather fight fire than be in prison strikes you as they must really hate prison when some people are just wired differently and may want the risk. Maybe they're just bored in prison.

Yeah to me this sounds like letting slaves pick their bunks. It’s technically autonomy but not in any meaningful way. It’s certainly not a free person choosing their living arrangements.

I guess if you don’t consider prison labor to be slavery then it might be palatable but I just can’t draw that distinction. Especially given the history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_St...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Codes_(United_States)

I don't think anyone says prisoners having a choice means they're not prisoners or they are free from jail.

Nobody is claiming picking bunks means they're not a prisoner. It's still a free choice among bunks

Yes, exactly! And the presence of a choice in labor doesn’t change the fact that they’re slaves.

What's your definition of slave? Are you saying that they are slaves no matter what? What would make them not slaves?

Are you opposed to all punishments of any sort?

> What's your definition of slave?

A person who is forced to do work.

> Are you saying that they are slaves no matter what?

They are slaves as long as they are forced to work.

> What would make them not slaves?

Not being forced to work.

> Are you opposed to all punishments of any sort?

I have no idea where you got this impression. If you need it spelled out then no, I am not opposed to all forms of punishment.

It sounds like you'd consider volunteers as slaves then.

Volunteers aren’t forced to work so no, they aren’t slaves.

> To me it's the part where prison is apparently even worse than risking your life fighting fires for free.

Makes perfect sense to me, even if the prison was a five-star hotel. The human mind is hard-wired to want to explore and get out. Universally, one of the most difficult parts of being in prison is being forced to stay within the prison walls. The fact that these walls exist is a necessary compromise between keeping society safe and the natural rights of those imprisoned. Any opportunity to get outside the walls will of course be desirable.

> The human mind is hard-wired to want to explore and get out.

We also have a self preservation instinct.

True, but it doesn't trigger when you hear about the fire in the abstract. It triggers only once you are face-to-face with the smoke and wall of fire.

Right, this is the loophole in the human psyche that California is exploiting in their slaves.

how so?

The desire to escape is strong in prison when the decision to fight fires is made. The self preservation instinct doesn’t kick in until the danger becomes real at which point it is too late.

This difference in perception is what prison labor exploits in prisoners.

I thought the core of your concern, then I think it's addressed by the lack of regret in reality. Do you have any data on prisoner firefighter retention and turnover? My understanding is that these people ought to fight fire after fire and stay in the program.

Wouldn't prisoners come back from the firefighting, regret having made the decision, and tell other prisoners that they were afraid for their lives and they shouldn't volunteer; that they wouldn't be volunteering again? Wouldn't this persuade people not to volunteer, and it wouldn't be seen as desirable?

Your argument is a fine hypothesis, but I think it falls apart in the data.

Again with the negative spin. That isn't the alternative they face, not at all.

It's the benefit of promised freedom early that is in play. Not that prison is unendurable (many endure it). It's that freedom is preferable. The entire point of prison after all.

> To me it's the part where prison is apparently even worse than risking your life fighting fires for free.

Given the recurring history of California prisons being found (systematically, not just in cases involving special mistreatment of individual prisoners) in violation of the 8th Amendment and the way that has been the main driver of California prison reform over the years, that's not a minor issue.

You can’t give someone only two options, one less bad, then claim there was a free choice made.

Yes, getting into prison after you committed a crime and were condemned for it, is usually not a free choice.

Totally agree. Once you are in prison, choosing to work or not is a free choice.

> Once you are in prison, choosing to work or not is a free choice.

It is literally not in California (though which work, within bounds that differ by prisoner, may be), and California this year defeated a ballot proposition which would have made your claim true.

The free choice is to whether commit or not the crime that puts you in prison. After that, until you pay your debt to society, the free choices are over.

Thirteenth Amendment, Section 1:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, EXCEPT as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

In the context of firefighting, my understanding it is entirely voluntary and selective as well

Sure you can. That is every choice in life.

When you're put in prison, your "freedom is taken". We use that language for a reason. It's what happens, it's intentional, and I used to think everyone understood what it meant. Choices in prison are not the same as "every choice in life".

I don't disagree with what you said, but I don't think that supports the conclusion above.

Trade-offs are different in all sorts of situations. All choices in life have consequence. The fact that one is better than the other does not negate anything or create slavery

So nothing can be slavery if there's any choice at all? By that logic slavery can never exist, because any slave can chose not to work and be killed, kill themselves, run, etc.

At some point you have to draw a line and say, there is choice, but there's not enough choice to say it's not slavery.

Sure. I think for the case of firefighting, where there is no punishment or consequences whatsoever, it is an easy call.

> IMO, its not slavery because it is 100% optional.

It is slavery because the State requires prisoners to work for the benefit of the State (though there are some choices of what form of work), punishes them additionally for not working, economically exploits that work, and has (through all four branches of government, including the people exercising their power to legislate directly) worked to maintain that condition, and in many cases the prison firefighters have been explicitly cited as the reason it is important to maintain that system and maintain prison populations to feed it.

Had voters passed, and the State acted in accord with, this years proposition banning involuntary servitude, it might be possible to make the argument that prison firefighters were no longer slave labor, but that didn't happen.

Where is the requirement to work and how does it punish them additionally?

Sentencing is provided completely independent of labor and 99% of prisoners are ineligible or unable to firefight.

>firefighters have been explicitly cited as the reason it is important to maintain that system and maintain prison populations to feed it.

Cited by a proponent of maintaining prison populations, or cited as allegations against such a system?

>Had voters passed, and the State acted in accord with, this years proposition banning involuntary servitude, it might be possible to make the argument that prison firefighters were no longer slave labor, but that didn't happen.

What a strange take. Why would the passage of a proposition redefine the reality of the situation?

> What a strange take. Why would the passage of a proposition redefine the reality of the situation?

If the proposition was passed, and the State acted in accord with it (as I stated before, not just the passage, but the action), then the labor would not be coerced, because the mechanisms by which it is currently coerced would be prohibited.

That was the whole point of the amendment, banning California continuing to exploit the penal servitude exception to the 13th Amendment ban on slavery and involuntary servitude.

But prisoner firefighting isn't an involuntary work assignment covered by prop 6, it is a volunteer work assignment program of the type prop 6 allows.

> Where is the requirement to work and how does it punish them additionally?

Forced prison labor is legal in California. This means if a prisoner refuses to work they can be punished for that refusal. This could be with solitary confinement or revoking or removing good behavior benefits.

> Sentencing is provided completely independent of labor and 99% of prisoners are ineligible or unable to firefight.

Firefight maybe but 40% of California’s prisoners work. A choice in what type of labor doesn’t change the fact that this is slavery.

Slave labor is the labor of a slave. Removing the labor does not remove the slavery.

How do you distinguish incarceration from slavery?

> Slave labor is the labor of a slave. Removing the labor does not remove the slavery.

What is happening in California is indentured servitude. I consider that to be a form of slavery. The labor is precisely what makes it slavery.

> How do you distinguish incarceration from slavery?

The compulsory uncompensated labor.

If prisoners received a fair wage and work was optional then I would have no objection. But they don’t receive a fair wage and working is not optional. Thus the prisoners are enslaved.

I think I would be OK with demonetizing all prisoner labor and stipulating that any particularly risky work must be voluntary.

I dont think it is unreasonable to expect non-voluntary labor to be included as part of a normal sentence. Ideally this non-voluntary work would be limited to supporting prison operations (e.g. cooking, cleaning, upkeep, ect). This work offsets the substantial costs of their incarceration to society and is part of the punishment.

I think it is also reasonable to offer fully voluntary service outside of the prison if it benefits society at large. I think it is reasonable to view this as accelerated restitution to society for their crimes, and reward it with earlier release and additional benefits.

I think the main area where we might agree is preventing the prison (or state) from selling their labor for the benefit of a 3rd party.

Overall, I would like to see the expansion of productive prison labor where possible to provide social benefit (for example cleaning up litter, ect.)

"Work for us or we'll keep you locked up for 3 years longer than if you did" isn't really volunteering - more like extortion.

Everybody faces this dilemma: work for the job or face worse consequences. You can spin it negative if you like. What alternative is there to this? Not let anybody reduce their sentence with public service, to serve some armchair philosopher's notion of what's 'extortion'?

Kind of like a lot of people want to ban congressional stock trading, to serve some armchair philosopher's notion of what's 'fair'?

Flip it around and it's not. The base case is the full time.

Taking the option away doesn't help anyone.

> Taking the option away doesn't help anyone.

Except firefighters, prisoners, and society.

I think having the option helps firefighters, helps prisoners, and helps society.

Everyone is better off.

Firefighters get additional support combating a huge problem, prisoners get shorter sentences, in society gets better fire prevention leading to fewer lives and Land Lost

Professional firefighters have to compete with prisoners for pay depressing firefighting wages.

Prisoners have to do dangerous work and suffer long term health consequences for no compensation. Reduced sentences don’t count because the base sentence can be set to whatever the state requires to meet slave labor demands.

Society loses because slave labor artificially reduces the cost of natural disasters. If slave labor is required to make an area safe for habitation then I submit that is not a safe place for habitation.

The ends do not justify the means.

I think the means are ethical, as well as the ends.

At the end of the day, I dont think each of the things you said are true. I dont think there is wage competition, I dont think the state is setting sentences based on labor demands, and I dont think there is an impact to locations of habitation.

Then that is the basis of our disagreement. I can’t consider the practice ethical given my understanding of economics, human nature, and history.

These two Wikipedia pages show examples of why I don’t think this practice is ethical.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_St...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Codes_(United_States)

As stated elsewhere, I think penal labor is just and moral in concept.

However, I do agree that the moral hazards are too great around combining it with for-profit prisons and corporations.

I think the one area where I would find private employment acceptable is work release programs at market rate, provided the pay goes to the prisoners instead of the state. I think these programs should be expanded, and could help with child support, victim restitution, and stability upon release.

The stated base case is never the base case. This is an economic fact. When the government says employers have to pay 10% of your wages as payroll tax, employers pay you 10% less. When Amazon says free shipping unless your order is under a certain amount, they raise prices on everything else. When your bank gives you 3% cashback on your credit card, every merchant pays a 5% credit card interchange fee and raises their prices 5% to pay for that. And when we parole people at half their prison sentence, the sentence is twice what we think they deserve.

There was a ballot proposition to increase imprisoned firefighter compensation in November but it failed 47/53

I see there are three separate fires several km apart. How do they start so synchronously?

They didn't.

Palisades started Tuesday morning in someone's backyard. The Eaton fire started last evening near one of the campgrounds. The Hearst fire started late last night around 10pm (suspected cause was a vehicle fire from an accident that spread to the side of the road).

Hey there, do you have a source for the backyard? I'm not questioning it. I'd like to know the origin and what actually occurred in that yard to cause it.

One source is the news stations here in LA, eg https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california-wildfires/pali...

Following up on this: - No source given for the Lidia fire that started in the Angeles National Forest this afternoon.

- A specific house address was given on-air for the Sunset Fire in the Hollywood Hills that started this evening at around 5:40pm. The ABC7 copter crew had actually spotted the fire within the first minute or two of it forming (while they were trying to get in position to cover the Palisades fire after refueling), and (ABC and NBC) broadcast the first hour of the fire's growth (and provided live updates on new flare-ups). They may well have saved Hollywood from burning down.

Another followup:

There were several more fires that started on Thursday. Due to the unusual nature of these fires, authorities suspect arson. A person of interest was arrested for one of these fires after being observed trying to start a fire.

The conditions that make one fire likely make others likely too...

Extreme dryness, high wind, failing electrical infrastructure, overburdened emergency response.

Also embers can easily be blown miles away to ignite another "new" fire.

There's always a slight chance of arsonists.

Every few years in Australia we get a story of arsonists setting fires. Sometimes they're firefighters, too.

> There's always a slight chance of arsonists.

Actually, that was my first natural reaction. (Though I do live in the neighborhood of Russia, here probability of foul play is much higher up the list)

> Sometimes they're firefighters, too.

That is messed up.

> That is messed up.

A "visit" or two are often all that is necessary to convince folks to pay protection money to gangs. Protectors always have a perverse incentive to remind people what they need protection from.

One shouldn't rush to accuse though.

From "The Milagro Beanfield War", https://archive.org/details/milagrobeanfield0000nich_o3a0/pa...

> With that, Shorty said, “Say, Ladd, why don’t you have Floyd and Carl here set a forest fire?”

> “Hey, just a minute!” Carl Abeyta stiffened self-righteously and stifled an urge to lunge across the room at Shorty. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

> “Setting a fire,” Shorty said calmly. “Christ, that’s one of the few ways those men down there have earned a living around here. I know of a dozen guys from town, the past twenty years, who've gone up and set the trees on fire. For crissakes, man, it’s—what is the pay now? Two-fifty an hour around the clock? Three dollars? And the Forest Service—God bless Smokey the Bear!—packs in potatoes and all the fresh-killed beef you can eat. You want to get this town’s mind off that beanfield, light the forest and hire all the heavies to put it out. And keep lighting little fires here and there—”

Whenever the media announces "extremely high chance of fire" in Australia, there is always at least one fire started. I think maybe we would be better off leaving it off the news.

Some fires are started by glass bottles causing the dry grass underneath to lit up, and then the wind takes care of the rest. But that's really, really rare.

It's most often someone doing something really stupid.

Tell people they can't come out of their house and they go stir crazy to go out... Tell people it's an absolute fire ban and the situation is extremely critical and it only takes 1 nut bag out of the entire population... The odds are high.

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%?

https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents.html

Not particularly snappy, but feature-packed. You can see evacuation zones, look at live cameras, see which parts have already burned to the ground, see which parts are in danger.

I saw a sibling comment posted a link to a map, but I wanted to provide you some context. As you can see on those maps, these fires are quite big in terms of land area/acreage. The thing it's important to understand about Los Angeles, though, is that there's a "mountain" range that runs east/west literally right through the city itself (mountain in quotes because as it bisects the city the mountains aren't very tall). Where it bisects the city itself you may recognize the names of some of the areas with houses plastered all over the "mountain:" Hollywood Hills, Beverly Hills, Bel Air. As you get east and west of the city, though, those mountains get a bit taller and way less populated. The Palisades fire, the first one that started, is the literal western/northwestern end of the city of LA. Its northern border is, albeit low elevation in mountain terms, mountainous and is more or less the definition of urban/wildland interface. That's part of the reason the fire spread so quickly, though in this case not even the primary reason. The other major fire is not in the city of LA, but just north of the city of Pasadena, which is east of Los Angeles. But the geography/topography is nearly identical (down to a similar east/west mountain range, but with much taller mountains). A majority of the area that's burning out of control there is largely mountainous with very little habitation (if anyone who lost a home there reads this, I don't mean to diminish how much damage has occurred in Altadena; I'm just pointing out that the massive land area of the fire is not representative of the impact on inhabited areas).

Thank you so much for this detailed comment!

Very insightful and helpful for me to get the right context.

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 are gusty and dry winds coming from the desert, so I assume these fires spread from some manmade source.

> Does this suggest even bigger fires are to be expected in the summer this year when it is actually hot?

I would assume so, yes. Some insurers have been pulling out of CA in 2024.

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 ?)

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

They rarely happen in winter (in modern times at least) because it usually rains starting in late fall. But there's been zero measurable precipitation since, I think, May 2024. It's that issue combined with the extreme winds this week that made the conditions on the ground ripe for this type of fire. Note that the winds themselves are somewhat typical (they're called Santa Ana winds and they happen every year like clockwork), but the severity of the winds this week was extreme. Don't think there have been winds as severe in decades. It was a somewhat predictable cocktail and all of these ingredients aided the severity. No moisture + high winds = high fire risk. High winds = embers easily carried forward igniting additional fires. High winds = grounded firefighting planes and helicopters.

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.

Prayers go out to Snapchat, Riot, Naughty Dog, TigerConnect (nee TigerText) and other West LA / Santa Monica companies whose staff may live in the Palisades , Topanga & Malibu. I remember .XYZ & Headspace are also in the neighborhood.

Any other Silicon Beach companies that I missed?

I frequently go past TigerText. I assumed they were related to TigerDirect!

Tigertext (now -Connect) is a healthcare provider-side messaging company. they started out as ephemeral messaging and pivoted to healthcare.

Google, Oracle, many many others.

I live in the area and have never seen a fire move this rapidly. The high winds were a major culprit.

they're down in Playa vista though right?

Google has an office in Venice in addition to another office in Playa Vista.

> With the fires still largely unconfined, and no sign of letup from the winds spreading the blazes, the loss of JPL is looking increasingly likely.

This is unsourced conjecture. If JPL actually burned, it would be a tragedy, but there's nothing to suggest that a massive, fenced, landscaped facility with a fire station literally at its gate [1] is in any real danger.

[1]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/B1F9ULKFrs7KvQa7A

We can look to the experience of Los Alamos National Labs during the Cerro Grande fire in 2000 to provide perspective.

Climate change is watching photos of disasters start at a great distance from you, but year after year they get closer and closer until you are there, taking the picture yourself.

Now they are saying another fire broke out near hollywood hills. If winds don't stop how much worse can this get?

Sixth fire: A new brush fire called the Sunset Fire broke out in the Hollywood Hills near Runyon Canyon Wednesday evening. A mandatory evacuation order is in place for Laurel Canyon Boulevard (on the west) to Mulholland Drive (on the north) to 101 Freeway (on the east) down to Hollywood Boulevard (on the south).

> how much worse can this get?

We have a climate change denier going into office, so we're going to find out.

https://app.watchduty.org/i/40388

Altadena fire

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 actually putting out an aggressive fire. Perhaps someone who knows the state of the art can correct me.

However, I feel like there are some startup opportunities here, either for endpoint structure defense or firefighting equipment. There is a real need that will likely continue to grow over time.

Some things that came to mind: - Easily deployable, compressed CO2 canisters coordinated to smother fires from crossing strategic lines e.g. at a fire road on a ridge - More effective use of high powered drones for firefighting delivery - Use of special explosives or projectiles in remote / inaccessible terrain *yes, this comes with major caveats - Has materials science advanced to the point where we can launch reusable tarps on fires to smother them?

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.

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

Running critical services is a whole different thing than developing technology to sell to fire departments (which is already what happens, albeit with less innovation than I'd like to see).

We should stop believing tech can and will solve every single of our problems.

Between climate change, poor forest maintenance, poor infrastructure maintenance, building in risk areas, &c. it's all a matter of time. We're not gods and we will never be, we should have learned to live with our environment, not against it.

Or perhaps build in a way that can survive a fire if you want to live in a bush fire prone area…? Maybe don’t plant eucalyptus on the yard, etc.

Why not both?

Plenty of well defended houses burned down this week -- don't underestimate just how fireproof your house needs to be to withstand something like this. And littering everything with fire retardants comes with a whole different set of health and environmental problems.

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.

CO2 is a major hazard, but of all the ideas listed and that I've read elsewhere, it does seem to have the most potential when the hazards are managed. That and tarps (instead of throwing them on the fire, perhaps laying them down to create strategic barriers to the spread of the fire).

But it's undoubtedly a very hard engineering challenge. Some of the photos of the fire show the flames dwarfing the planes used to drop retardant.

There is no potential with CO2.

Have you worked out how much CO2 would be needed? How to prevent mixing with air? How it will be stored and deployed? How many people might die should there be a container breach?

The first two seem mind-boggling.

"Strategic barriers to the spread of the fire" are called firebreaks. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak points out:

> ... it is still sometimes possible for fire to spread across a seemingly impenetrable divide. For example, during the Cedar Fire of 2003, strong Santa Ana winds had blown enough burning embers across a 10-lane section of Interstate 15 to ignite the vegetation on the other side.[3] During the 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park, hot embers managed to cross the Lewis Canyon, a natural canyon up to a mile wide and 600 feet (180 m) deep.

Have you any thought for how large these tarps will need to be? 10 lanes is 120 feet.

Fire crews already make firebreaks by using machines to clear out vegetation. They'll need a machine to lay out this enormous tarp.

And where there isn't a road (which is its own firebreak), it will be hard to get any machine.

CO2 is already used in many fire extinguishers, especially in industrial settings for class B and C fires. And we trust the average person with huge containers of explosive propane.

More is possible than you think, but obviously it comes with a lot of caveats because of the danger potential. But as a professional firefighting tool, "no potential" is a pessimistic take IMO.

Fire roads are often used as firebreaks, and in SoCal many follow the ridges of mountains. This is really the ideal case for CO2 that I envision, as the cold CO2 released from a compressed container will flow downhill into an evacuated area and smother the fire attempting to cross the ridge. Curious if you believe the current state of the art cannot be improved upon.

The tarps would have to be huge and ideally quite thin, hence why I wondered if modern materials science was up to the task. An advantage is that they could preserve foliage while still creating a firebreak, but again, mostly a materials science question. Probably infeasible, but just spitballing.

You have no clue what you are talking about.

For one, industrial settings are usually enclosed, and those extinguishers are for point sources. https://docs.johnsoncontrols.com/specialhazards/api/khub/doc... says 100 lbs of high pressure CO2, plus the take, weighs 331 lbs. If I did my PV=nRT right, that's about 25 cubic meters of CO2. Enough for a good sized room. Not enough for a good-sized tree.

For volume, people install suppressant systems, like the old-school halon systems.

And again, you've got strong winds mixing the CO2 with air. It doesn't just sit there.

Regarding propane containers, propane tanks are very safe. It is hard to make them explode. https://www.levco.io/blog/2022/march/can-a-propane-tank-expl... say house propane tank explosions are rare (I assume that's what you mean by "huge container"), and generally require being in continuous flame, as when the house is on fire, causing a Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion.

> and smother the fire attempting to cross the ridge

If 'hot embers managed to cross the Lewis Canyon, a natural canyon up to a mile wide and 600 feet (180 m) deep' then why do you think a small valley full of CO2 is enough?

Valleys aren't basins. CO2 will quickly exit the valley.

> Curious if you believe the current state of the art cannot be improved upon.

Unlike you, I have no reason to doubt that the state of the art has been ever-improving since the 1960s.

> I wondered if modern materials science was up to the task

If 120 feet of asphalt isn't enough, I don't see why a thin tarp placed on top of signs, trees, bushes, cars, power poles, etc, and with nothing to weigh it down against 80+ mph winds, should be any better.

FWIW, emergency fire shelters exist (for "shake and bake" burnovers). They weigh a few of pounds, for one person. They last for tens of seconds to a minute or so, depending on the fire intensity. https://www.firehouse.com/home/news/11280543/fire-shelters-l... says "The current price of a federally approved fire shelter is nearly $335." That gives you some idea for what the state of materials tech is, and tells me you didn't do much research.

You say you are spitballing, but you started by saying that after research you were 'underwhelmed by the lack of advancements in actually putting out an aggressive fire'.

It sounds more like you are spitting on the last 50 years of firefighters due to personal belief that your ideas are somehow gems in the rough.

this has to be parody. what?!

I genuinely don't understand what happened to HN. When did curiosity, hypothetical discussion, and an interest in solving problems with technology become a source of derision and insecurity? Are you on the right forum?

There's a disaster going on today, this very hour, and your suggestions are absurdly impractical.

There's a time for "just spitballing here", or "divergent thought, no bad ideas". And you can probably find some folks today who want to think about this tragedy in that frame of mind.

But. There's a disaster going on today, this very hour, and your suggestions are absurdly impractical.

I did not downvote you, but I suspect the others who did are conveying a distaste for such abstract thought about this extremely visceral ongoing disaster.

Can someone explain what efforts will be made to rebuild if any? How could they rebuild knowing this can just happen again next year? It’s not like hurricanes where buildings can be made to withstand category 5 storms.

Buildings can be built to higher levels of wildfire resistance.

The fire spreads because burning embers are blown downwind, settling and starting new spot fires. If they get blown into a house, the house burns. You don't need to make a house fireproof to stop wildfires, but just resistant to a shower of burning embers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvbNOPSYyss

Ok so they will rebuild

Even at a remove of decades from when I worked at JPL, this makes me very sad.

For those in need of support or who want to donate, there are some resources at https://fireaid.info/

Map: https://app.watchduty.org/i/40335

Realistically -- how likely is this to go into the city? What is likely to stop it, if not water (given they're running short)?

One can imagine an IR monitoring (satellite or high flying drones like Reaper, one drone can see an IR source like a tank from 100km, so it would take just a few drones to monitor the the whole state for fires) with [almost] automated immediate dispatching of the fleet of drones (not small quadcopters, more like WWII size bombers) once the fire is detected. Would be much cheaper than having multi-billion dollar fires every year (these LA fires have already hit $50B as of today).

https://wifire.ucsd.edu/firis-in-depth

they use manned planes for monitoring - very costly and not scalable. And there is no "water-bombing" drone fleet. The manned "water-bombers" are extremely expensive, there is only small number of them and they actually carry pretty small amount of water as they are mostly helicopters or retrofitted passenger planes.

Knowing how things actually work in reality can help guide the imagination.

The problem is not that the water bombers are retrofitted, the problem is that water is heavy, so you're up against the physics of flight. An aircraft loaded to its max weight with water (or water-like material like retardant) is going to look empty, visually. 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.

A drone is up against the same physical constraints - water is heavy, and you need a lot of it to have a material impact on a fire, even one you've caught early.

>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.

I think I (and maybe others) understood 'drone' to mean something closer to quad-copters. Sounds like you're actually proposing something closer to water-filled cruise missiles? Which actually seems like a compelling idea. I'd guess there are some questions around how to make the vehicle recoverable/reusable, or else how to avoid causing more fire than you're putting out when the vehicle splatters against terrain, and even more questions around operating the things (autonomously vs. remotely, launch/recovery, ...).

But I do love the image of a satellite spotting a quarter-acre IR hotspot and firing a dozen USFS Tomahawks filled with with retardant to nip it in the bud.

That would really give red flag warnings more teeth. "We said no campfires" kablam

Smokey would have a different tone too. "Only you, plus our array of guided missiles, can prevent forest fires."

this, this is exactly what I want. flick a cigarette off ACH, get a rainstorm delivered to the top of your head at 600mph.

>I think I (and maybe others) understood 'drone' to mean something closer to quad-copters. Sounds like you're actually proposing something closer to water-filled cruise missiles?

as i said in original post - "not small quadcopters, more like WWII size bombers". I use V1 as a close and real existing example of a drone wrt. size and simplicity/cheapness of construction. Though i think 2x-4x of that size would be more suitable and convenient.

>how to make the vehicle recoverable/reusable

just regular software for a plane type drone. The drone comes, drops the water and returns. Can do it GPS/inertial, AI targeted or remote controlled (like say put a Starlink on it how Ukrainians do it sometimes).

>else how to avoid causing more fire than you're putting out when the vehicle splatters against terrain

while normally the drone would return back, accidental crashes of course unavoidable. You don't have to carry much fuel as the drones can be spread around the state on say a 200km grid. The fuel tank can be made with automatic foam generator or something like this triggered if/when the drone goes down crashing.

> just

the most dangerous word in software engineering

it works fine for Ukraine sending drones to the targets 1000 km away (commercial large drones bought from China). And their task is more complex like for example they have to care about flying low to avoid air-defense for example, etc.

> it would take just a few drones per the whole state

What are you basing this on? Being able to see something once you know it’s there is a different problem from detecting it in the first place.

there is no issue in detecting. You sweep the area. The IR sources like a tank - pops up like Xmas tree even on relatively cheap IR from 10km (there is a lot of footage from Ukraine war for example). A house fire would easily pop-up even from tens of km. A acre size fire - it would pop-up even on coarse grain IR from space.

> house fire would easily pop-up even from tens of km. A acre size fire - it would pop-up even on coarse grain IR from space

Both of these produce lots of smoke. Neither can be doused by drones.

>Both of these produce lots of smoke.

i suggest you view a bunch of real IR footage.

> Neither can be doused by drones.

I'm pretty sure 20 tons of water would douse a house fire. It would take 10 flights of an F8F Bearcat sized drone. Though the F8F is an overkill built for speed. One can carry 1-2 ton with much simpler plane today for that purpose.

An acre size fire - an acre-inch of water is 100 ton. So 10 drones 10 flights at 1 ton/drone.

> suggest you view a bunch of real IR footage

For what? I’m familiar with very sensitive IR systems. I’m struggling to see the advantage of having them on drones versus satellites, particularly if the threshold is an entire house is on fire.

>I’m struggling to see the advantage of having them on drones versus satellites

An IR camera on drone can be fine-grain controlled from the ground when needed - say zoom-in from a 100km on something detected in the sweep like even a camp-fire so you can confirm whether it is a starting wildfire or just a camp-fire - that of course requires hardware like on those pricey military drones, yet it is still a pocket change in this context. You can also much easily reroute the drone. Again, if you watch the drone war footage there is a lot of scenarios where satellite wouldn't work.

>> Neither can be doused by drones.

Identification only by drone. Then the dousing is done by conventional means, but dispatched locally.

Detection is not the issue, fires in populated (i.e. costly to burn) areas are dispatched very quickly. All the LA fires were on Watch Duty at 1-5 acres in size. The problem is fighting them at that size, when they're on vertiginous terrain, and winds keep conventional (i.e. manned) aircraft grounded.

Yep firefighting is almost completely useless in remote areas which is where most of these fires start before they grow and threaten residential areas. It’s when they grow out of control away from infrastructure that they become a problem.

A class 1 fire truck (the big red ones used in sub/urban areas) and class 3 wildland off road trucks carry around 500 gallons of water which is a drop in the bucket. Fire hydrants on the other hand can supply 250-750 gallons per minute.

The best they can do is try to create firebreaks using bulldozers and other off road vehicles while preemptively dousing properties with water to defend them, because they’ll usually have road access. Doesn’t do a damn when Santa Ana winds are causing 90mph gusts that throw embers for hundreds of feet.

And yet people have died, which seems unnecessary. You don't need to fight them, you often can only evacuate.

It's the classic tech cultist mentality, they imagine the world is just like their little code base and it's just a matter of tweaking a few lines to solve the problem.

They're the real world "ignore friction, air resistance, &c." of kids physics exercises books.

There's no air support to contain fire because of dangerously high wind. Asking for drones now is like a dumb person's idea of cheap science fiction.

I think they’re talking about dousing when it first lights. That isn’t “a dumb person’s idea.” But it is presently beyond our capabilities, to say nothing of the huge privacy problem it would entail.

They're talking about both detecting and dousing. Note they mention two different kinds of drones (a few monitor drones, and then a fleet of drones to deploy and douse). The monitor drones could be practical, we've demonstrated that loitering sensor drones work well in other domains.

Depending on the sensor payload (what it's looking for) and how the data is stored and used, it wouldn't really entail a huge privacy problem unless you show up on IR sensors as well as a fire.

> it wouldn't really entail a huge privacy problem unless you show up on IR sensors as well as a fire

If you’re hoping to do better than sighting a smoke column, you will absolutely have to be. We’re not at a loss of detecting entire houses burning.

To violate your privacy an IR sensor would have to be able to pick out people (98 degrees Fahrenheit, approx.) and put them on a map. Versus a sensor tuned to an actual fire which is substantially hotter and larger.

> Versus a sensor tuned to an actual fire which is substantially hotter and larger

Again, at that point you’re no longer adding value over the status quo. We don’t have a problem detecting large fires near population centres.

> To violate your privacy an IR sensor would have to be able to pick out people (98 degrees Fahrenheit, approx.) and put them on a map.

People aren't the only (or largest hotter-than-background, and maybe not hottest-human-sized) thing on your property that a privacy-violating IR sensor drone might want to detect.

> Versus a sensor tuned to an actual fire which is substantially hotter and larger.

If you want an early-detection sensor for fires, they'll be substantially hotter but not substantially larger than an adult human.

I think the point is to detect fires as early as possible, since putting them out becomes much harder the larger they get. If you can detect a fire when it's human sized, you might be able to put it out with a local drone carrying some co2 fire bombs.

It's fun/useful to think of things we can do.

It's also poor fire management practice. California has had 100 years of very aggressive fire suppression that's led to burnable areas being extra-flammable: dry brush, dead material, etc. The wildfires have been much worse the last couple decades because it's catching up to them. These extra-flammable areas burn extra hot, extra fast, and spread much, much more quickly than normal.

Managing wildfire risks mean letting a certain amount burn every year, including deliberately setting fires to create firebreaks and clearing out areas overdue for it. A fleet of drones constantly finding and stopping wildfires in their early stages would do nothing but set the stage for cataclysmic fires down the road.

The reason I said it is a dumb idea is because OP has no idea about the current weather conditions. If the conditions are right, such as tonight when the Santa Ana winds have died down, you don't need fancy drones because firefighters are capable of doing things like this- https://x.com/ArtCandee/status/1877210056493539499

read my other comment to understand why the current retrofitted water-tankers can't be used in high winds while intentionally built drones would still work in much higher winds.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42643189

> Asking for drones now

He did not. It would be worth re-reading his comment. He's pointing out that we do have technology that could help with containment: quickly identify fires, communicate their location, and dispatch some local water carriers. He's also surmising that the cost of keeping these active would be less than the cost of damages, which could very well be true.

Something like a Reaper drone, which he specifically mentions, works fine in the wind, as do the water carriers, that fly at hundreds of miles an hour, that have been actively helping this whole time.

I think this is probably all true, but probably not the future since it would require a competent state government who embraces tech.

Putting the cameras on flying platforms actually limits their functionality because the platforms have to be refueled/recharged and rotated out on a constant basis.

Water carriers fly close to the ground and make sharp turns because they need to pick up water and make targeted drops, so they are heavily affected by the wind. The water carriers weren't able to start flying until late this morning/early this afternoon due to the winds being too strong (>75+mph gusts).

Donald Trump embraced Elon Musk, we'll have to see where that takes us.

You're currently being downvoted, but I'm genuinely curious -- is continuous IR monitoring from the sky an effective way to detect wildfires earlier?

Or are small fires indistinguishable from a million other hot objects, until the point where they get large enough to detect reliably, it's already obvious to everyone on the ground from the smoke?

Yes, it is effective. We have several NASA/NOAA satellites with IR instruments on them that are used for fire detection. These are obviously much more useful for detecting fires that start in very rural areas under moderate conditions. The current crop of fires in LA are all very close to populated areas and spread fast, so satellite mapping wasn't of any use for detection. Also, California in particular has a really great fleet of IR mapping planes that give firefighters and the public much more detailed fire information than the satellite coverage, but when I lived in Oregon where they don't have a similar system, the satellite coverage was often the most up to date information on fire perimeters.

Seems like it would be logistically difficult to be able to drop a significant amount of water anywhere in, say, 15 minutes.

With dry conditions and high winds, that is an extremely slow response to an uncontrolled fire...

I'm not so sure. In nVidia's keynote, they had an example of small smoke plumes identified as potential fires. If you had a drone hovering over a particular city to monitor fires, it could potentially be an early warning system, no?

And to others that said that the winds are dangerous, do quadcopter drones (which tend to be more stable anyway) have algorithms to account for that?

>And to others that said that the winds are dangerous, do quadcopter drones (which tend to be more stable anyway) have algorithms to account for that?

while they have such algorithms, a quadcopter wouldn't able to achieve needed stability in 100mph wind. A heavy plane would do much better.

The current issue is that all those existing water-carrying planes have to go low over fire - thus wind is a problem - as they can't dive-bomb and can't be retrofitted for that. It is just different types of planes.

A dive-bomber would do much better - would deliver the water precisely from a bit higher altitude and from a much more stable, even in the strong wind, trajectory. An unmannend dive-bomber is even easier, can go for even better trajectories.

It could be for fires on normal weather days.

The problem is that with these winds and humidity small fires become huge fires before anybody can react. Once they are huge fires, detection isn't the problem.

Your cost analysis is both thorough and thought-provoking.

The problem is not identifying fires. That's the easy part. As I watched the local news last night, I was able to watch (along with the anchors) the real-time growth of the Eaton fire from a tiny fire near the campgrounds into a behemoth. This morning, the local news covered the real-time development of 2 new fires (both were quickly contained).

The problem is fighting fires in steep, mountainous terrain filled with dryed out brush and trees when the winds are so strong (hurricane-strength gusts) that you can't provide any air support. The problem is that the winds were so strong last night and this morning that burning embers in the air could fly to and light structures miles away (which is how most of the current fires in Altadena started).

I hear how Californian laws make building difficult. I also hear that there is housing shortage. Will the complex and possibly convoluted build process limit the restoration of burnt communities?

For example, my understanding is that all new home construction requires solar. I assume that is about $60,000. Then the permitting process is something like $50-100,000. That is a sizable chunk of the insurance money just to meet new code.

I live thousands of miles away and I can't help but wonder what natural disaster will hit me, eventually.

Wildfires of this magnitude are not fixed by larger fire fighting forces, but by preventative measures.

It’s grown quite far actually. We have family who had to evacuate in the Hollywood Hills.

That’s a new fire as of a couple hours ago - Sunset Fire. There are 5 going on in LA at the moment.

Lots of blame to go around. But in the end, it all comes back to climate change

California has a long history of failed forest management. At what point will the voters say enough is enough? But they keep electing the same people.

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/25/1010382535/gavin-newsom-misle...

Severe drought brought on my climate change is not going to be fixed by “forest management.” There is no forest around any of these fires.

"There is no forest around any of these fires."

That is absolutely incorrect, the Los Angeles National Forest is currently on fire. I live here.

I've heard so many on twitter claim there's no forest around LA in some kind of attempt to seem smart. As someone who grew up there i am honestly kind of shocked that these are the same intelligentsia that want us to listen to their pontifications on climate change

People are blaming it on climate change, and making excuses for the state's management. When you point this out they get angry or passive aggressive like you are some kind of evil person like those evil republicans. It's unbelievable really.

We need to manage the forest! We need prescribed burns, fire roads, lookouts, etc. But we also need sensible development at the interface, stricter brush-clearance laws, emissions restrictions to attempt to mitigate climate change, etc.

But people get angry because 'forest management' has become a shorthand for the former without the latter (or in denial of the latter). It's been promulgated as an _alternative_ policy, not a _complimentary_ policy.

Who the hell cares what some climate change denying Republican says? Ca is run by democrats and they categorically refuse to do forest management..

If hearing we need to manage the forest makes you more upset at your fellow Americans rather than more concerned about the viability of your community, you are the problem.

As a policy, it shouldn't make anyone mad. The fact that there is organized and successful resistance to prescribed burns is a failure of CA politics. I hope this event eliminates at least some of that resistance.

As a message, presented on its own, it connotes a reductive sophistic denialist take. Getting to the effective policy requires an effective message. Like you and I have talked about before, the burden is on the advocate to craft a message whose whole meaning (denotation & connatation) conveys what they intend.

Some coworkers had to evacuate. One of them was woken up last night by their doorbell camera sending multiple alerts because of the high winds.

I hope everyone gets to safety.

Friend of mine had to evacuate and then watched his house burn down on the news.

is there a wildfire tracker?

https://app.watchduty.org/

This one is pretty good

Seconding watch duty. Been invaluable as I evacuated. Happily donated/paid the subscription!

https://www.fire.ca.gov/

https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents

You can also search for wildfires in Google maps, but not sure if it is the best data.

https://app.watchduty.org/i/40388

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...

People have lost their lives and many more have lost their homes.

Elon Musk has chimed-in on the matter. I don't post this flippantly. As a huge fan of Tesla and SpaceX, someone please explain to me what is happening.

https://i.redd.it/iasdlw98tzbe1.png

Apparently a fire chief wrote in her boilerplate online bio that her top priority was equity and inclusion with the fire department, so clearly firefighting wasn't her top priority, so clearly the entire disaster is her fault, and so DEI caused the wildfire.

Baltimore bridge disaster, Musk: DEI. Nothing supporting that.

Alaska Flight 1282, door blows off, Musk: DEI. Nothing supporting that.

I want an electrified future. I want a multi-planet civilization.

Read Alex Jones' text that Musk says is "true." It is objectively insane.

Why is he doing this? He is discrediting the species-level important things. He used to be the best of us, the clearest thinker. What in the heck happened?

Honestly? My wholly-unsubstantiated pet theory is that engaging with a large following on social media is as unhealthy for the followee as an intense parasocial relationship is for a follower.

That or he thinks the United Federation of Planets has to form _now_, and he's playing the part he thinks is required to get there.

I used to watch every single video regarding him.

I recall one where the interviewer asked him what was his biggest fear.

He replied something like "that I will be surrounded people who just kiss my ass and don't call me on my shit."

Man, at that point he was such a clear thinker. Truly a victim of his own success in the worst ways.

As far as my own unsubstantiated pet theory, he went publicly nuts right after the time he had to write a multi-billion dollar tax check. Humans are just not evolved for that. It should be part of tax withholdings to avoid that mental trauma.

Won't be long until Jones is saying this tragedy is all CGI. Then Musk will give him a "100%" reply.

After hurricane Andrew Florida changed their building codes to account for hurricanes. But can California do the same for wildfires? Is it even possible to construct fireproof homes? (With stone construction or whatever?)

It’s absolutely possible, at least in theory, but it’s a lot more expensive. Concrete, stucco, brick, and (some types of) cement are fire resistant. Roofs can be made of metal, clay, or (some types of) asphalt.

Not all fire-resistant materials are also earthquake-resistant.

We had roof-mounted sprinklers installed on our house in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We haven’t had to test them in anger so far, but apparently they really work.

Even without changing construction materials, you can protect houses from many forest fires by making sure there's no flammable material anywhere close to your house. That requires space, which also comes at a premium, but it may still be cheaper than having to build earthquake-resistant concrete everywhere.

A lot of lives and properties (though certainly not all) can be saved if people and cities followed recommendations like https://www.nfpa.org/en/education-and-research/wildfire/prep... but measures like that can be unpopular (because people like to have pretty homes with plants near them) or expensive (because people, cities and property developers would need to set apart "unused" land to separate houses from vegetation).

> Is it even possible to construct fireproof homes?

Of course you can. This is a solved problem. The US chooses to use lumber because it's cheap and fast. You get what you paid for.

Many poor countries use hollow red clay bricks for construction, which are fire proof. You don't need to break the bank to build a fire resistant house. It's just like with most think in the U.S., the "system" is built in a certain way to benefit certain establishments.

Lumber construction is hardly the only factor. Greece commonly uses brick/stones/cement but was hit heavily by forest fires. The things in/on/surrounding those unflammable materials can still light on fire and destroy homes. On the other hand, well-prepared lumber houses often survive forest fires in America and Australia.

Unlike brick or concrete, wood is easy to make earthquake resistant, which is very relevant in a state like California. No point in building a flame resistant building that crumbles to dust within a year when it's hit by a minor earthquake.

You can use bricks but you still need to tear everything down if the fire comes close to the building because pipes and wires can’t be made from bricks - nowadays, it’s all plastic except the copper.

But… if you build a brick wall and keep your yard fire proof, you have a shot.

It’s interesting to me how much attention these fires are getting because it affects relatively rich and tourist friendly areas. There are many, many wildfires every year across several states but most don’t even get their governor’s attention, let alone make national news. People seem shocked by what the fires can do but this is what many communities have had to deal with.

When was the last time a fire of this scale and destruction occurred but wasn't headline news?

What are the chances that the affected areas will be rebuilt with something else than single family homes? Something denser

Global warming doing it's thing.

Wildfires have always occurred, just that mansions are now in the way

It's a multifaceted problem that includes development decisions, but Climate Change plays a large role in all of this.

"Wildfires didn't occur before humans!" - the straw man who you just beat the daylights out of. Kudos!

why did no one warn us every minute of every day for the last 10 years?!

But fret not, the right wing on Twitter is taking to blaming a minuscule water diversion to protect an endangered fish for the hydrants running dry.

Not the fact that we built a sprawling megalopolis with ultra-expensive infrastructure maintenance costs... in a desert... where we use the vast majority of local water to feed cows...

10 years? An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, that's nearly two decades and Gore didn't invent climate change any more than he invented the Internet.

Time flies when you’re having fun!

It is ironic that LA is one of the oldest fossil industry originations, Pacific Palisades probably includes a lot of old LA oil money driving gas guzzling Range Rovers, and that the fire surrounds the Getty Villa of the OG Getty Oil Company.

'It will continue to happen until people realize the true root cause which is bad leadership... or continue blaming "climate change" and giving up because we're not changing how much China pollutes the air anytime soon. I would rather at least elect better leaders who have their priorities in order.

So you're saying you want leaders who address climate change. Bad leaders exacerbate climate change.

As the planet becomes hotter and drier, you will see more fires, unless you address climate change.

China makes all your stuff, including bibles, that's why there is more air pollution there. China is rapidly expanding it's renewables deployment and that will improve their air quality and resilience..

Climate change is not a variable in this scenario. Even if that's the actual cause it won't be changing anytime soon. The problem has to be dealt with anyway, and there are a lot of people saying it's due to lack of cleaning up the dry brush, not to mention taking preventative measures with water being ready to be used when it does happen.

This isn't a new problem or even a surprise. We had fires in NorCal the last few years already, and the people in charge are not afraid of losing their job, so there's no accountability until people start threatening them with a change.

Except China is working damn hard on climate initiatives.

Good, but from the CO2 stats I've seen it seems they need to work harder and it will still take a few decades, so we'll have to deal with it anyway.

Small wildfires happens all the time and in fact natural in that region. So much for wanting nature to return to its course, plenty of plants rely on the natural wildfire occurring. But we can't let that happen because we need to build fancy houses here.

Guess whats gonna happen in another 5 years? You're right, another fire. I am pre-ordering my thoughts and prayers right now. Maybe build your house in mud next time?

Its not my problem if you build your house in the literal line of fire. Climate change is still a thing but we can't blame everything on it.

From Wikipedia:

The Santa Ana winds and the accompanying raging wildfires have been a part of the ecosystem of the Los Angeles Basin for over 5,000 years, dating back to the earliest habitation of the region by the Tongva and Tataviam peoples.

Honest question in good faith: For those that use the reductionist argument of global warming / climate change for every natural disaster, what do they expect to happen if we hypothetically cut all greenhouse gas production to zero? Some kind of climate stasis Garden of Eden scenario?

Imagine a steadily bubbling surface of mixed quasi fluid materials, every thing moves, none the less a pattern of long term "stability" exists wherein various regions have behaviours fixed within local constraints.

California has "behaved" in some manner for twenty thousand years, as has the Pacific North West and the Great lake regions to the north east (in central north america).

Now that the sea+land surface layer has more energy thanks to increased insulation above various parts of the globe are bubbling along more than they have the past; wet forests that have never experienced fire are drying out in a manner previously rare and having fires not experienced in human history, drier areas with a fire cycle (California, Australia) are experiencing more intense and more frequent fire events.

> if we hypothetically cut all greenhouse gas production to zero ..

it will take a lag time for the human added insulation to disapear from the atmosphere, when a new stable equilibrium is reached the energy driving the additional bubbling seen so far to date will be gone and the former equilibrium (of dynamic stability) would resume .. for a few thousand years.

> Honest question in good faith: For those that use the reductionist argument of global warming / climate change for every natural disaster, what do they expect to happen if we hypothetically cut all greenhouse gas production to zero? Some kind of climate stasis Garden of Eden scenario?

I think it's more innocent than that and that your characterization is a strawman. Climate change is real and scary. This type of fire might not be abnormal in LA on generational timescales but it is the kind of thing we would expect to see as a consequence of climate change. So even if this type of fire would have happened anyway it is a real manifestation of a real thing people are rightly concerned about. It's also possible that climate change (and/or the politicization of climate change!) made this fire worse.

The idea of a stable ecosystem is a myth. Yes, in hundreds of thousands and millions of years the region will change dramatically. The difference between natural variability and instability is the rate of change. If left to the "natural" cycles and instability of the earth's climate, you would see gradual changes over tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years.

What people like you don't understand is that our man made climate change is 100 to 1000 times faster than anything nature has dealt (except say a meteor hitting the earth).

So yes, the climate has always been unstable over long periods, but never changed as quickly as we are changing it today. We are the meteor now.

I was wondering why JPL website was not working, I guess this answers that.

It's working fine.

https://downfor.io/ssd.jpl.nasa.gov

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/jpl.nasa.gov

The Horizons website at that domain [0] (which was on HN recently) seems to be down for me as well. FWIW, that's not "the" JPL website though, that's just one of many JPL-hosted websites.

[0] https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/

Why would this answer that?

wat

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/

Are you under the impression that their website is hosted on-premises? This ain't the early 90s

As an ex-JPLer, it would not have surprised me for this to be the case even in the early 2010s.

It looks down, yes the marketing website is fine, but the scientific tools seem to be down. It would be reasonable that they are locally hosted, like close to the sensors.

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 DSN, their website [1] is also down.)

[0] https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit.html

[1] https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/

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 continue.

> 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.

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.

That makes a lot of sense! Thanks for pointing that out.

Most of these wildfires are caused by humans. Not just because of climate change but because of people intentionally starting fires who want to watch the destruction unfold. There were fires near these exact areas where fires in homeless camps were found to be the cause. Not enough was done to enforce the law and stop street people from intentionally causing destruction and being pushing for it.

This is happening and we need to discuss solutions - https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/la-homeless-enc...

We also need to discuss clearing plants and other fuel that comes back as part of the drought / rain weather patterns we are seeing. Goats and other firefighting clearing efforts need to be discussed.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-12/surge-in...

We know the solution - just give those people homes - but we don't want to do it because building homes makes them abundant and devalues existing homes.

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