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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/getty-villa-threatened-pal...
Looks like 3 independent fires?
There's been a huge amount of wind throughout So Cal today and yesterday that is driving the rapid spread of these fires.
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.
Edit: seems like 5 now. Another one near Hollywood
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...
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 don’t have wildfires. (EDIT: They do!)
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.
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...
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.
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.
Part of climate change is that this man-induced change is making previously hospitable areas much less so.
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.
Fire is oxygen plus fuel. We entirely know how to manage it.
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.
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.
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.
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...
"such structural destruction[3][4]" should be [4] and [5] instead, apologies.
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”.
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/...
On the other hand, you better hope your AC works in the summer.
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.
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).
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.
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".
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.
> 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...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-08/shocking...
This shows Altadena, just east of JPL, and Malibu (separate fires, of course).
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/06-closer-s...
Presumably it's measuring heat or something vaguely relevant but I don't trust my immediate visceral reaction to it.
This is the worst fire I’ve seen in SoCal since the Valley fire.
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.
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.
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.
Both of these produce lots of smoke. Neither can be doused by drones.
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.
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.
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.
Identification only by drone. Then the dousing is done by conventional means, but dispatched locally.
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.
They're the real world "ignore friction, air resistance, &c." of kids physics exercises books.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
With dry conditions and high winds, that is an extremely slow response to an uncontrolled fire...
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.
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.
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 hope everyone gets to safety.
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/los-angeles-fires-m...
Edit: Changing a word, "gutted" -> "cut"
City budget documents show the department’s more than $800 million budget decreased by around $17 million compared to the previous budget cycle.
"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.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources_Against_...
"...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....
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 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?
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california-wildfires/la-w...
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-09/californ...
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.
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.
It's not like suburbs aren't sitting on financial bombs either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://cao.lacity.gov/budget/summary/2024-25%20Budget%20Sum...
Page 6 shows a water flow from revenues to expenditures.
And why is there apparently no water in the fire hydrants? Something about the reservoir not being refilled appropriately?
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.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.
Unfortunately we have a news article reporting a tweet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The forest management issues are valid but apply more to other parts of the state.
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.
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
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.
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.
[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.
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.
> 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.
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
There’s hope that this series of events will cause them to reevaluate but prescribed burns wouldn’t have helped in the Palisades anyway.
Do you have some reason to believe more planes is the best allocation of resources?
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/08/26/c-130-hercules-is-now-figh...
“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-...
[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."
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But it's not just hurting the firefighter market, lots of people just have issues with using prisoners as slaves.
I think the first step is people educating themselves even marginally on the topic of discussion before proposing policy changes.
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...
These fires have spread quickly and it is true that fire fighters are spread thin.
I'm glad to see all the aircraft are working the fires and hopefully they'll make some good progress before night.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/politico-uncovers-more...
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?
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...
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.
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.
This one is pretty good
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).
- 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.
Extreme dryness, high wind, failing electrical infrastructure, overburdened emergency response.
Also embers can easily be blown miles away to ignite another "new" fire.
Every few years in Australia we get a story of arsonists setting fires. Sometimes they're firefighters, too.
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.
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.
> 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—”
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.
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...
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..
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Any other Silicon Beach companies that I missed?
I live in the area and have never seen a fire move this rapidly. The high winds were a major culprit.
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.
Why not?
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...
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 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.
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.
SoCal, NorCal, Seattle - Earthquakes
SoCal, NorCal - Fires
Midwestern States - Tornadoes
North Easy - Blizzards
South Easy - Hurricanes
Which part do you suggest everyone move to?
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
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.
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.
No goat equivalent in the Americas ?
Population density too low ?
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.
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://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;@-118.57,3...
[1] https://www.weather.gov/wrh/timeseries?site=KSMO
[2] https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/world-record-low-humidity-...
Altadena fire
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.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/wildfire-threatens-...
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.
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?
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.
Wasn't that Ted Cruz, the senator? During the blizzard?
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.
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?
She cut the fire department budget by $20 million. Equipment, supplies, and salaries were cut.
She put in place a DEI obsessed fire chief, who reallocated millions they were already short on to set up a DEI office and bureaucracy.
EDIT: here's the memo to the mayor
https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2024/24-1600_rpt_bfc_12...
I live in a very mid-size city for my province and our mayor goes on international trips on city business maybe once a year. The fact itself is not out of the ordinary.
She cut the fire department budget by $20 million. Equipment, supplies,
and salaries were cut.
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.
DEI obsessed fire chief…DEI office and bureaucracy.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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
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.
Please leave politics out of this discussion, it's immature.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry for your loss.
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.
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.
I hope their compensation is a little more than $10 a day! By the looks of the fire, those guys/gals are heros.
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.
"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.
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.
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 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...
Nobody is claiming picking bunks means they're not a prisoner. It's still a free choice among bunks
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.
We also have a self preservation instinct.
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.
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.
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.
Trade-offs are different in all sorts of situations. Call choices in life have consequence. The fact that one is better than the other does not negate anything
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.
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?
Taking the option away doesn't help anyone.
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.
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).
We have a climate change denier going into office, so we're going to find out.
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.
Used to go to that place all the time, friend was working when it happened.
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/25/1010382535/gavin-newsom-misle...
That is absolutely incorrect, the Los Angeles National Forest is currently on fire. I live here.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
But… if you build a brick wall and keep your yard fire proof, you have a shot.
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?
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.
(See also : epidemics ?)
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.
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%?
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.
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.
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.