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Comment by axlee | Hacker News Reader

Note: while this is a 2019 article, the Getty Center has not burned during the 2025 Palisades fire.

The Getty Villa was far more threatened by the Palisades Fire than the center.

The fire is still burning, is only partially contained, has gotten close to the Center, and the winds are forecast to pick up again tomorrow. So there's still a chance it will be at risk.

Now, they've had days to prepare for this, and apparently have plenty of contingencies in place, but this is still relevant the fire could get there.

No, but it's been inside the evacuation area for a while:

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0876669,-118.5930521,12z/dat...

It's also relevant because the Getty Center has been rather smug about how awesome their fire protection is.

> It's also relevant because the Getty Center has been rather smug about how awesome their fire protection is.

I think your "smug" comment is unwarranted. They put a ton of solid engineering thought, money and planning into protecting the center from fire. Nothing is 100% but I think their confidence is warranted.

Related, the Getty Villa right in the middle of the Palisades also put a lot of thought, planning and money into fire prevention, and despite being directly in the path of the Palisades firestorm, no structures on the Villa burned

They are being really smug, talking about designs and systems that mean nothing when you've got temperatures outside the building hot enough to melt aluminum engine blocks, infrared radiation intense enough to set fire to things hundreds of feet away - as well as very low oxygen and very high CO/CO2 levels along with dozens of different toxic gasses - all of which HEPA filtration won't do squat about.

A "stone facade" doesn't stop +1200 degree temperatures, especially when everything on the outside will undergo incredible thermal expansion and at the least open up gaps. Steel expands about 1-2% for just an increase to 100 degrees C. 300C means about 3-4% expansion. And then there's the huge expanses of windows which will shatter or pop out - and even if they don't, the intense IR radiation will by and large go through them.

People don't realize just how insanely hot wildfires get. Go look at the pictures of neighborhoods that have burnt- they're leveled with the exception of some chimneys, steel girders for houses that have them (most these days don't, builders have been using wood-composite beams) iron fences, car bodies. Everything else is burned or melted.

There isn't a building in the world that will stop the megawatts of heat energy per square meter wildfires can generate in IR radiation.

>They are being really smug...

Just out of sheer curiosity, I would be tremendously curious to understand what kind of personal/professional background/experience you have that would qualify you to certify their emergency systems as functionally ineffective and their messaging "smug".

Yes, wildfires get incredibly hot. But the fires essentially always travel by embers or direct contact with fire - your comments about IR radiation seem to imply that IR alone will cause ignition, which is rarely if ever the case.

Here is a story about a bunch of people who survived the Camp fire in Paradise, CA, surrounded by the raging inferno, by staying in the middle of a parking lot: https://www.firehouse.com/operations-training/wildland/news/...

It is rarely the case, indeed.

However, in incidents like e.g. the Fort McMurray fire (Alberta, 2016), this is precisely what happens. One property with a heavy fuel load fanned by strong winds (i.e. plentiful O2 supply) gets hot enough that it causes ignition in a neighboring exposure.

In Ft. McMurray, there were documented cases of an entire 4+ bedroom house being reduced to ash in roughly 5 minutes. The heat generated by that process is easily sufficient to cause ignition in buildings <typical suburban layout> apart.

Even in that case I'm sure a huge part of the heat transfer is convection, especially with the high winds.

Comment I was replying to was talking about IR igniting things by shining through windows, which I believe is mostly bullshit.

Stone doesn't burn, and neither does concrete. Glass melts. Steel evidently didn't burn at the temperatures these fires got to. So it makes sense that a building made of concrete and steel with stone facades and fiberglass insulation would survive the fire, especially after clearing out and hydrating the surrounding landscape so it wouldn't have the density or flammability of a forest. The Getty Center may have gotten lucky, but they might have also earned their "luck" through investment and planning.

Never have I seen a better case of projection on HN. You come off as so fucking smug yourself.

Everyone with a fire-hardened house should be feeling good. If all Pacific Palisades houses were fire-hardened, the fire would have burned vegetation but few houses.

Even modest fire hardening would help. If a wood-frame house burns, it is a danger to all nearby houses. Hardening reduces the chain reaction potential.

There's just not enough talk about this. This is the actual failure of government, not focusing enough on surviving fires

How is it a failure of government? The people of these areas reasonably have not wanted spend large amounts of their money to prevent unusual disasters like this one. Do you spend that in your community?

the cost would be enormous. it’s in an earthquake zone and it needs to withstand that. there’s already way too few houses for people at a reasonable cost. they’ve already evacuated and only a handful of lives have been lost to the people that stayed behind. it’s not normal santa ana winds it’s the hardest winds i’ve seen here in decades... probably 100 years or more. people are the important thing here.

How effective is fire-hardening in these conditions? And how much would it cost? And finally, does anyone know how fire-hardened structures have actually performed?

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