The fire problem can be managed by burning or removing some of the dead wood, and building adequate water storage. Apparently California has been neglecting those two problems for decades.
In lots of pictures from LA, there are green trees right beside burned out houses. The video in this NYT article is a great example: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/15/us/los-angeles-wildf...
One of the biggest problems are vents in the eves. Typically these vents have a single screen with a coarse mesh. Embers from fires easily pass through these vents, land on a surface, and start a fire.
Replacing the one coarse mesh with two or more layers of fine mesh significantly reduces the odds of an ember getting into the house.
This is a trivial improvement that dramatically increases survivability.
Notice that you said "Green trees don't easily burn." Coastal California has two seasons: green and brown. Brown is in the summer. Green is in the winer. Normally it rains in LA during December and January. It didn't rain this year, so brown continued.
Most of the fires aren't in what you'd think of as forests. It's chaparral. Low scrub, bushes, and grasses. It is mostly what you'd refer to as underbrush. The only way to "thin it out" would be to remove all the vegetation. This environment has evolved to periodically burn.
> Trees have evolved to survive fires as well.
Trees have two broad strategies for surviving fires. One is to resist fire. The quintessential example is a redwood. The other is to burn and regrow faster than anything else. The quintessential example is a blue gum. Eucalypts evolved to literally explode when they burn. The environment in The Palisades is much closer to the second than the first.
This environment is, by its nature, an environment that burns. Yes, we've needed to allow more frequent burning. Environmentalists have been arguing this for decades. The difficulties with these conversations in the US is the Republican party's actual definition of "thinning the underbrush" doesn't mean controlled burns. It means clearcutting forests.
> These fires are HOT and don't just catch houses on fire with little embers.
Yes, in fact they do spread by embers. This is why the fires jump several streets at a time. The wind blows embers, and those embers ignite further buildings before the fire front even reaches them. This is one reason why it is so hard to set up fire breaks during a high winds.
> The houses could be made fire-resistant, but making houses to be fire-resistant is going to be more expensive
Here's an example things that you can do to increase the fire survivability of your home: https://flash.org/mitigation/protect-your-eaves-soffits-vent...
> and storing more water
LA had plenty of water. It didn't have enough water pressure.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/08/los-angeles-...
The amount of walls in Europe that you could punch a wall into is low enough that you shouldnt try.
I'm in Christchurch, 6.2 Earthquake in 2011 and wooden framed houses dealt with it pretty good - they flex - lots of the houses survived and are still used.
Just about anything old and bricky was a deathtrap (fortunately many were unoccupied because condemned after nearby 2010 Earthquake).
In areas where we don't have earthquakes, yeah, what's the problem?
Afaik, only Turkey and a small part of the Balkans is considered earthquake territory. And there's no fracking in Europe to induce minor manmade earthquakes either.
Despite being hit by earthquakes more often than other parts of Europe, usually only buildings and houses not built up to standard or old ones crumble, other buildings just shake and that's it. Of course, I do not know the exact risk of earthquakes in California and their intensity, but it's definitely possible to build earthquake resistant brick buildings
We don't get many earthquakes here though, we do get storm but it doesn't cause power outage at all.
While having unmanaged accumulated flammable brush
While having an empty reservoir under repair
While having the public water source unable to maintain water pressure for multiple hydrant usage
While having too few fire fighters dispatched in the area anyway
While having houses made out of wood
is it an ignorant take when the houses not made out of wood with their own watersource were able to withstand 100mph wind gusts and firestorm? it really really makes everyone else look ignorant
At some point the US really needs to do bit of cultural reform so they can start paying for all that low density development and the costs associated with it. So stuff can actually be maintained.
The City of LA has a lower per capita tax revenue than most large Texan and southern cities, largely due to property tax caps.