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Comment by mrangle | Hacker News Reader

>"which even a Calabasan could suffer sudden and catastrophic environmental injustice."

What a crazy tactic to switch blame from the City of LA's total failure, to prevent and stop the fire, to the environment.

Everyone knows that California is dry. Everyone knows that everything West of the Mississippi is dry. For how long? Much longer than industry has existed.

I'd consider it to be a failure of environmental advocacy to be so ham-fisted so as to drive people away from policy support because you can't fight the impulse to abuse the issue to absolve the guilty.

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Neither the City of LA nor any city in the world has a municipal water supply equipped to combat an urban wildfire. Embers were blown miles ahead of the fire front onto new rooftops.

Using guidelines from the National Fire Academy to suppress housefires, they would've needed to simultaneously deploy 10 or 12 thousand industrial-zone (not residential-zone) fire hydrants. Not only do those not exist, but there would've been no way to pressurize them simultaneously.

At only hour 4 of the fire (1200 acres, assume 5% are structures), they already would've had to deploy 1800 industrial-zone fire hydrants to suppress it. Again using NFA's flow rate guidelines. The Santa Ynez Reservoir, had it been full, would've been emptied in about an hour assuming it could maintain pressure (which it couldn't).

Wildfires are fundamentally fought with firebreaks and aircraft, both of which are extremely challenging in high-wind urban environments. They are contained until they burn out their fuel. They are not ever combatted with municipal water supplies.

Can you state specifically what were obviously avoidable failures?

> Can you state specifically what were obviously avoidable failures?

Strategically removing/reducing fire-prone vegetation in the hills surrounding LA?

You've got to be kidding. Have you ever even gone hiking in those hills? Much of the terrain doesn't allow for heavy equipment use. The areas where the wildfires spread fastest are so rough and steep that even doing it by manual labor is extremely challenging. The state and local governments simply don't have that many workers (or goats), or the budget to pay for the work. The scale of the problem is immense.

> Much of the terrain doesn't allow for heavy equipment use

Do the areas that are reachable. After all, somehow roads manage to get constructed.

> or the budget

Well, the budget for the devastation from the fires will be orders of magnitude more.

Fences can also be constructed that will stop flaming debris from being pushed across the ground.

You're not making any sense. Even with roads, the terrain above and below the roads is largely inaccessible. If you haven't personally traveled through those areas then you might not be able to visualize the difficulty.

As for fences, what a stupid and pointless idea. The wildfires spread largely by embers blown up in the air, not by flaming debris being pushed across the ground. And what exactly are you going to build the fences out of?

In the vicinity of San Francisco, in the 80s, there was a big fire in a rural area, where every house but one burned to the ground. The one was untouched. One feature it had was a low masonry wall about 20 feet away from the house. The firemen quoted in the newspaper said that wall was instrumental in keeping rolling, burning debris away from the house.

Fires aren't always accompanied by high velocity winds. Lower velocity winds will pile up the embers behind various obstacles, like a low wall.

Masonry walls also are an obstacle for the wind, which will slow down near the ground, and behind the wall it will be still, which will result in debris falling to the ground.

The wall can also be made of chicken wire. It would be appropriate to experiment with various forms of inexpensive fencing like chicken wire.

As for hills, it isn't necessary to denude them completely of vegetation. Just the parts that are easily accessed, and alongside the roads.

I seriously doubt experienced wildfire firefighters would agree with your assessment that it's completely hopeless.

The specific risk in the specific area we're talking about is indeed extremely dry, extremely high speed wind.

If you take away the wind, we wouldn't even be talking about this problem.

One can also do controlled burns on cold, humid and windless days.

These aren't done more commonly in the LA area due to intense public opposition. It turns out people don't like inhaling smoke year round. Cities in general struggle to do things their citizens don't want them to do and it's not clear to me that this is a bad thing or something you can really blame the city for.

When I lived in Pasadena in the 70s, there were fires now and then, with smoke and ashes falling like snow. It was just part of life in that area.

The way to present it to the citizens is, do you want to smell smoke now and then, or have your house burn down? Like what happened a few months ago?

Or you can do the controlled burns when the wind is blowing away from the city.

Sure, and here's what has changed between then and now:

1. A much longer and drier dry season

2. A much larger urban-wilderness interface

3. A much more organized public apparatus to combat environmental hazards (even in cases like this which require tradeoffs against more severe future risks)

The reason this is such a challenging problem today is not because everyone living in 2025 is a moron or morally corrupt and the people in the 70s were not.

Interestingly hills used to be considered a horrible place to build and poor shanty towns were constructed up the hill with the nicer parts of town in the valley. People didn't want to climb up the hill every day, you had problems with access to water and supplies. The ground was prone to shifting. You also had high winds and yeah, in fire prone areas, fire goes uphill.

What changed? Automobiles, reinforced concrete, retention walls, lift pumps, subsidized road construction.. People in LA with money now want their homes perched up a hill with inaccessible terrain covered in brush below it (that ensures nobody will build on their view!).

Same with oceanside land by the way. If you go to the shore of the bay of Biscay in France, for instance, the "seaside" villages are built not on the beach, but a few hundred yards inland. Building right on a sandy storm-swept shoreline would have seemed ludicrous when those towns were being constructed.

California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts (replacing thousands of years of work by indigenous people with fire suppression), and also unprecedented climate change.

Should they do more? Of course. With what resources?

I recently learned 82% of California fire fighters are unpaid volunteers. That doesn’t include the prison labor.

The entire government has its priorities completely wrong, especially at the federal level. Blaming the city of LA makes very little sense.

Blaming environmentalists for consistently sounding the alarm over this stuff for 50+ years and then being ignored also doesn’t make sense.

One thing that does make sense: Look at the writings of the people that blocked wind and nuclear power in the 1980’s, and solar / batteries in the 1990s.

They explicitly said they knew their actions would burn the planet down, and it didn’t matter to them. Now they’ve dismantling our democracy, eliminating emergency response groups like FEMA, and retasking the national guard (California’s last line of fire defense) as an illegal police force.

> California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts

Including building in the chaparral hills in the first place. Sane policy would be to forbid new construction where fires have ravaged in the past or at least deny insurance, because it's like building in a floodplain. The problem is that the same area is suffering from systemic under-construction of housing.

Your comment is quite disconnected from reality. Blaming the city of LA makes a lot of sense. The mayor Karen Bass was completely ineffectual. And even before she was elected the city had failed to properly upgrade their fire fighting infrastructure or building codes.

Most volunteer fire fighters act as reserves in more rural areas and are only called up for major incidents. The city of LA and surrounding cities like Calabasas don't rely heavily on volunteers.

Climate change might be a minor factor in the intensity of the 2025 Southern California wildfires but those have been happening periodically for millennia. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) will sometimes dump a lot of rain on Southern California for several years at a stretch causing extensive brush growth, then shift north for several years allowing everything to dry out. At that point any little spark will ignite a raging wildfire, especially when the Santa Ana winds are blowing. This is not "forest" that can be actively managed, it's chaparral in rough hilly terrain. It's simply impossible to clear much of the brush or conduct controlled burns. The only effective measures are building fire-resistant structures with defensible space around them — or simply not building in those areas at all.

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