LA wildfires disinformation reveals limits of fact-checking
weaponizedspaces.substack.com
weaponizedspaces.substack.com
Example: "Why were you late to work today?" "The freeway was all backed up due to a crash". That might be factually correct, while overlooking the fact that the person overslept and had no chance of making it on time even in normal traffic.
People paint all sorts of pictures using facts, but stuck together in deceptive ways. Out of context quotes is a really common thing too.
In this episode, Sal Mercogliano—a maritime historian at Campbell University (@campbelledu) and former merchant mariner — discusses the use of seawater and how it can be utilized to fight the wildfires in southern California."
"Here’s why firefighters can’t use ocean water to put out the deadly LA wildfires" https://thetab.com/2025/01/09/heres-why-firefighters-cant-us...
"Can firefighters use ocean water to douse wildfire blazes?" https://www.kxan.com/news/national-news/can-firefighters-use...
"Why Doesn’t Los Angeles Use Seawater in Its Fire Hydrants?" https://x.com/amuse/status/1877390791695282570
In one part he reads some of "the source" material linked and then continues by saying, "Let's talk about what's completely wrong about that statement."
2) Fire trucks and municipal water supplies aren't designed to fight wildfires, never mind wildfires through an urban setting
4) Throwing salt water on the ground and making it drier is generally not a good idea.
He's a firefighter besides being a maritime expert, with experience fighting fires at sea and on land, and besides his experience and credentials what he's saying seems like plain common sense.
Lots of down votes… here’s the video I was referring to. I wasn’t there, I’m not affected so it’s obviously not first hand observations on my part:
Pacific Palisades and Altadena (at the time I looked) had about 8,200 acres burned (not including the wildlands).
Assume 30% of that is actual structures, then assume only 10% of those structures are on fire at any one time. Assume there are no 60 - 100mph winds blowing embers miles ahead of the fire lighting more fires.
Even then, you'd expect to need ~375,000 gallons per minute to suppress it.
The entire area is pressurized by 3 water tanks that each hold 1 million gallons, so that'd be exhausted and the system depressurized within 10 minutes. It stayed pressurized for longer than that because in practice it's pretty much impossible to produce 375kgpm of flow out of fire hydrants (you'd need several hundred simultaneously).
Example: a grease fire starts in my kitchen and burns down my house. I don't need the water required to stop a full bore house fire to put out the grease fire in my kitchen and save my house.
The hydrants ran out of water very quickly, because the reservour feeding them was taken out of commission because there was a tear in its cover. It's been offline since last February. The cover is only needed to prevent evaporation. They could have had water in it, which very well may have been enough to stop the full spread of the fire.
This is gross negligence.
Hour 0 at detection by an automated system: 10 acres
Hour 1: 200 acres
Hour 4: 1260 acres
The first few hours were in the wildlands which are difficult to access, don't have fire hydrants every 500 feet, and aircraft were grounded due to 60 to 100mph winds
No, the fire hydrants did not run out of water because the Santa Ynez reservoir is down for repair. They ran out of water because the system depressurized.
The fundamental issue is extremely dry vegetation and extreme wind. The dry fuel is caused by increasingly violent oscillations between extreme wet seasons (causes lots of growth) and extreme dry seasons (causes dryness).
This is exactly the "hydroclimate whiplash" predicted by climate models: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/california-extreme-climat...
Yes, it is gross negligence, but at a much more massive scale than you're suggesting.
But, come on!
The hydrants, which are fed from smallish tanks, which are fed from the reservoir, did not run out of water because the reservoir was offline?
What magic pixie dust was going to feed those hydrants with the reservoir empty? They could pump water up to those tanks, but we already know that just isn't going to work at any kind of scale. It's barely adequate to meet normal domestic water needs.
I guess we should just throw up our hands and not hold people accountable for basic maintenance of basic systems, or taking systems completely offline to do ancilliary repairs to things like a covering tarp. Or making massive cuts at the state and local level to fire prevention and fighting efforts.
It has been fact checked.
Having more water is better than having less, but just because you have the reserves (or an ocean) does not mean your distribution can handle the volumes needed:
> Water runs short: […] “There’s no urban water system engineered and constructed to combat wildfire,” said Michael McNutt, a spokesman for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which serves 75,000 people in northwest Los Angeles County. The system was intended to supply water to homes and businesses, he said, and to help fire crews defend a large structure or several homes, not multiple neighborhoods at once. […]
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20...
> The firefighter clarified, "Well, we were flowing an amount of water that the system couldn’t … it was overbearing, just because of how much water these firefighters were utilizing."
* https://www.tmz.com/2025/01/13/california-governor-gavin-new...
* https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1878661950021960013
Another problem is that most folks do not (know to) shut off their main water connection when you evacuate: this is because if your how burns down all your pipes are now open and start spewing out water. And if the neighbourhood burns down all the houses start spewing water. So there's gallons/litres of water being sucked out of the system dropping pressure that taking up capacity that could be used for fire hydrants.
Further, even if you had water and distribution, it may not be possible to have crews battling the fires due to other factors:
> “I’ll be clear: We could have had much more water. With those wind gusts, we were not stopping that fire,” Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin said.
> When winds are as strong as they were Tuesday and Wednesday — reaching 100 mph on mountaintops and surpassing 60 mph along the coast — firefighters are severely limited in their tactics, experts said. They make it too dangerous and all but impossible to establish any fire perimeter. They blow flames as tall as 200 feet horizontally and send balls of red-hot embers flying at speeds that can carry them a mile or two away, where they start what are known as spot fires.
[…]
> The lack of firefighting by air was a critical deficiency that persisted from Tuesday night through early Wednesday, fire officials said, and one that has allowed other devastating Southern California fires to spread in the past, including the Woolsey Fire, which burned across a footprint just to the west of the Palisades Fire in 2018.
> “Without helicopters, this kind of a brush fire, we cannot stop it on the ground,” said Margaret Stewart, an LAFD spokeswoman.
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20...
And by that I mean relatively few degrees, not that it's a small change in energy. It's like a warming ocean: the actual amount of additional energy boggles the mind, completely eclipses anything humans can do with all their militaries. We're talking an amount of added energy (across all the oceans and atmosphere) that can combine to do more damage than a full-on nuclear war.
And we only notice it when the chaos behaviors, the range of reachable extremes, get to points they couldn't reach before. Like how fast hurricane Otis ramped up before hitting Acapulco. How often do you see 100 mph Santa Ana winds in your daily life? You do now… when the conditions permit, and now that's just part of the reachable range that will sometimes happen, just as the explosive intensification of Hurricane Otis is just what will sometimes happen now.
This and other effects like it are new because they're an epiphenomenon of what climate change means in practice. The seemingly few degrees of 'warmer', or the predicted general changes in climate across large areas of land (like the idea of Greenland being 'warmer' and thus able to sustain more agriculture) are insignificant or even misleading, compared to the increased range of chaotic oscillation manifesting in these events.
We'll be making codes to mandate California buildings stand up to not only earthquakes, but sustained 100 mph winds along the coast. Because that'll become the norm… not constantly, but recurring, 'predictably'. Once you know what the chaotic oscillation can reach, you'll know that it'll be back… and that you may have underestimated how bad it'll get.
In which world can such pump work? Are those firetrucks embedded with gravity defying technology?
Perhaps a slight reading of how water pumps work (with even elementary physics classes) would be a nice starting point for these silly accusations.
> Water pressure in the system was lost due to unprecedented and extreme water demand to fight the wildfire without aerial support. This impacted our ability to refill the three water tanks supplying the Palisades causing the loss of suction pressure. This impacted 20 percent of the hydrants in the area, mostly in the higher elevations. As soon as LADWP identified the risk of losing water in the tanks and water pressure in the system, we immediately deployed potable water tankers to sustain support for firefighting efforts.
https://www.ladwpnews.com/pacific-palisades-fire-correcting-...
https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/carbon-beach-palisades-fir...
Whether or not the fire started there, or even if any amount of water would have helped, the idea that the fire was localized far away from the ocean isn't universally true. Much of the fire was/is far away from the ocean... some areas of that fire were right at the shore.
Well. I read this far, but I can’t say I learned new facts, new methods to personally deal with misinformation/disinformation (what’s the difference? I know what I think, but…), or feel engaged with the writer.