Wildfire ‘24

[I Skied Bandini Mountain]

Yeah, houses would need to be dark, heavy fortresses of masonry and stone. Not exactly what you want in a climate that allows for spaces to be open to nature year round, with lots of glass and sliding walls blurring the line between inside and out.

That's not true.

[dunfree]

Yeah, houses would need to be dark, heavy fortresses of masonry and stone. Not exactly what you want in a climate that allows for spaces to be open to nature year round, with lots of glass and sliding walls blurring the line between inside and out.

there’s a whole bunch of architecture between adobe and case study #8

[MultiVerse]

Shout out to Mexico & Canada. Canadian pilots & planes are helping douse the flames. And hundreds of Mexican firefighters & soldiers from the Mexican Army showed up in Southern California to assist with the ongoing Wildfires in Los Angeles County. More are on the way

[Conundrum]

They’re going to be deported when they’re done right?

[MultiVerse]

Heh, in 2005 thousands of Mexican Marines encamped in America to help with Katrina rescue efforts. They served a couple hundred thousand meals, distributed a couple hundred thousand tons of supplies, and helped with various recovery efforts. When the mission was over they conducted a military ceremony packed up and went home

[ötzi]

Well, most of them.

[Rock Knocker]

Yeah, houses would need to be dark, heavy fortresses of masonry and stone. Not exactly what you want in a climate that allows for spaces to be open to nature year round, with lots of glass and sliding walls blurring the line between inside and out.

Metal stud with fire rated ply sheathing topped with yellow 5/8 gyp and cement board siding. Ditto for the soffits, eves and roof sheathing. Roofed with metal.

Metal shutters at the ready

No gutters

[bodywhomper]

There’s some critical fallacies in that NPS statement about prescribed burning. It hints at, but does not address, the elephant in the room, that chaparral, whether its young growth or very old stand, will burn and burn intensely.

There is some acknowledgement in some of the more recent literature (and much older literature) that for thousands of years, there was less chaparral and more grasslands in SoCal than existing condition because past human activity inhibited its growth. Apparently, a big difference between then and now is that the grasses that come back in chaparral areas now are nonnative….

Queue the California grasslands botanist subject matter expert to bring up the general questions: “what are the ‘native’ grasses of California? What epoch are you considering?”….

[Meadow Skipper]

We have to change our thinking.
https://www.latimes.com/california/s...changing-times

Respected by fire agencies across the country, Cohen and Pyne have found their straight-talk admonitions often disregarded or dismissed. Sensitive to losses and suffering, both said they are motivated by the belief that magnitude of destruction this week in Los Angeles and Altadena is not a foregone conclusion.

[Meconium]

You can have the perfect storm but, adversaries just need to light a match.

[Meconium]

China, Russia, domestic, whatever. Bad people can destroy a lot depending on the weather.

[Meconium]

Why keep growing? Fuck the contractors and developers.

[Meadow Skipper]

China, Russia, domestic, whatever. Bad people can destroy a lot depending on the weather.

Weather, location, annd timing are everything. During WWII Japan sent incindeary balloons over the US west coast designed to start fires, but it didn’t work because the weather conditions weren’t right for a conflagration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb

[byates1]

Listened to an economic breakdown of the situation today sounds insane. Noone will get full value. None to half at best. Yeesh

[Viva]

This is a pretty k00l video taken before the fire, about a year ago.

Allows a good appreciation for the terrain as well as how packed the neighborhoods are (were).

At 2:58, I can see the street I lived on, just beyond the Palisades.

Also visible are the Riviera and Brentwood country clubs, Will Rodger's State Park (polo field), the high school
I attended (can't miss the football stadium and baseball field), and a few of the canyons I used to run

[old goat]

A lot of ignorant BS in the national papers, and a lot of ignorant blaming going around. Why care that the mayor was out of town--other than nobody to have a Giuliani moment. There are probably some small town mayors that are paid or volunteer firefighters but I don't believe that's the case in LA.

[Cono Este]

The reservoir being close since last February, with no signs of any repairs going on, that’s why.

It’s right about now people are thinking about their 10k a month in property tax, no water in the hydrants, crazy people living in the streets starting brush fires, insurance carriers driven out of the state after clearly stating wild fire risk in the pallisades for non renewal after the state slowed or capped rate increases. and that if this was arson,,no one is safe.


Total, systematic fail. All these nutty politicians are done, pit a fork in Newsom as well.

[MagnificentUnicorn]

Cono, you’re showing your ignorance and stupidity again. Half of what you posted is untrue.

The main reason for this disaster is that the Santa Monica mountains and Malibu/Pacific Palisades coastline were allowed to be developed in the first place. These fires have been happening since development started and before. This kind of loss is unavoidable if people want to live in the area, it will happen again. It has nothing to do with politics.


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[Meadow Skipper]

Cono is wrong on just about every point.

[gravitylover]

Again

[warthog]

So this whole incident has given us here in Tampa Bay a bit of PTSD. Watching this happen and knowing the horrible truth for these people is heartbreaking. We feel lucky to just have had to deal with water. Here is a little breakdown of my life since Sept 27th. Sorry for the brain dump, but it should make sense by the end, hopefully.

Hurricane Helene (Milton didn't do much other than tree and a little roof damage)- We only had 1" or so of water in the house. We lost all flooring (beautiful white oak real hardwood) and 2 ft of every wall in the house. Most of the garage was toast with 26" of water throughout. Lost a safe (contents were salvageable but a mess to deal with), 2 vehicles (1 a company car- the other a 2015 QX that was starting to cost us a bit of $$ anyway). The rest of the garage contents were dried out, sprayed down with salt-away, and most stuff was able to be saved. Certain items worked for a while, but then died. I just replaced our variable speed pool pump yesterday. It was starting to be way too loud since the bearings were quickly going out. Other than that stuff, we got super lucky.

Water intrusion wasn't high enough to affect electrical. We got the water out fairly quickly, and we got mitigation crews in a day later, thankfully. You have about 72 hours to get the wet shit out before the black mold starts to take hold. Luckily, our cabinets in the kitchen and bathrooms were very high quality and didn't show any bit of damage from the water. I popped a few 3" hole saw holes in the bases and sprayed and dried them out. Good as new. We were able to save everything structurally except the floors and walls. We have been living here ever since. Our contractor can start on our house in March. We feel very lucky about all of this after seeing what neighbors and friends are going through.

Many more people had over 2 ft of water in the house. This affects electrical. 3-4 ft (might as well go to 4 ft- it is a full sheet of sheetrock) of drywall needs to be removed. Wiring needs to be replaced up to the junction in the attic. Sewer systems back up dumping fecal matter in your house (they don't mention this part in the news much). Everything in the house needs to be removed and sanitized. Cabinets, sinks, toilets, etc- all gone. Those people can't live there. They also can't find anyone to fix it. Again, we were lucky.

Getting paid by insurance is a whole other issue. We hired a public adjuster to fight for us. We just got paid last week. Full ride for structure and contents minus the mitigation charges and the public adjuster fee of 10%. Others are still waiting, or still fighting. They may need to hire a lawyer and lose 40% of it to that. Others had no flood insurance. They are stuck. We also had roof damage from the BOGO storms we got through here, Helene and Milton. That claim has yet to be settled, and is with our homeowners, not flood. We will hopefully find out on that claim by end of February. This is round three after they have tried to lowball and we fought. 3 separate inspections. We just fight till we get what we want. Most don't. I am sure they will drop us once they pay, but they will pay and I will have a new stone coated metal roof, so fuck them.

The other wrinkle to this has been FEMA. Because we live in a flood plain, the federal government can tell you how to rebuild. They use these disasters as a way to get everyone up to code in these areas. Since flood is federally subsidized, they can keep you from rebuilding. I have seen comments above about how the rich will rebuild, and developers will move in. Well that is what is happening here. Imagine your house gets flooded, insurance pays out, and you can rebuild and get back to your life. FEMA comes in and tells you that since THEY deem your repairs to exceed 50% of the value of the structure, you cannot rebuild. You have 3 options- raise the structure 2 ft over the current 100 year flood line (subject to change due to remapping by FEMA), knock the whole thing down and start over per current code for floodplain, sell as is for land value and let someone else (BlackRock) knock it down and start over. 3rd option is what is happening, A LOT.

So my point of all of this is, imagine now that your house is just gone. Everything you owned, gone. I can't even begin to imagine the hopelessness those poor people feel, same with the folks in NC, many of whom didn't even have flood policies. Insurance only pays so much. Flood policies are pretty standard- a certain $$ amount for structure, and another smaller $$ amount for contents. I know from experience that it is not enough to cover much of a substantial rebuild and replacement of lost items, never mind complete loss of everything. I hope a lot of these people had homeowners protection for fire, but it is sounding like a lot of those policies have been cancelled over the years. What do those people do, sell the land? Like was said above. Someone will buy it, and that area will become a fireproof fortress of the 1%. How is this handled by the county too? Obviously any structure that is a total loss will be rebuilt to current fire code, but what about those that are partially damaged? That is the big problem here, a house is only partially damaged, but FEMA demands they rebuild. Will that happen out there? Because fire damage isn't federally subsidized, does FEMA have any say?

Sorry for the rambling, but this has been my life since Sept 27th and this one got me thinking about the differences and similarities between our area and LA. Hard to say I can totally relate with them, because I can't. I just know what it feels like (slightly) and my heart goes out to them.

[Trackhead]

We live on planet earth, sometimes we can’t control everything (earthquakes, viruses, wild fires, volcanic eruptions). Politics might play a minor role, but ultimately we’re part of the universe and we’re going to get smoked by it at times.

Someone’s gotta take the blame (it’s what we do, right?), and it seems Mr. Slick and the Mayor are the obvious fall “guys”.

[MagnificentUnicorn]

I hear all these people blaming Newsom, the mayor and fire chief, DEI etc etc. These people are so stupid.


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[Bunion 2020]

The Santa Anas” Joan Didion

“ There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.

I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather".

My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake. "On nights like that," Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, "every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen." That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom. The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel.

There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about "nervousness," about "depression." In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable.

In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn. A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that. Easterners commonly complain that there is no "weather" at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire.

At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines. The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains. Just to watch the front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place. The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4. On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour. In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale; oil derricks were toppled and people ordered off the downtown streets to avoid injury from flying objects.

On November 22 the fire in the San Gabriels was out of control. On November 24 six people were killed in automobile accidents, and by the end of the week the Los Angeles Times was keeping a box score of traffic deaths. On November 26 a prominent Pasadena attorney, depressed about money, shot and killed his wife, their two sons and himself. On November 27 a South Gate divorcée, twenty-two, was murdered and thrown from a moving car. On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour. On the first day of December four people died violently, and on the third the wind began to break. It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires.

For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

Idiot thinks an urban fire hydrant system is capable of supplying water when the fire is a wildland firestorm driven by 80 mph winds through an urban setting in the middle of a record drought. What a dumb fuck.

[Trackhead]

I hear all these people blaming Newsom, the mayor and fire chief, DEI etc etc. These people are so stupid.


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Blame humanity for building indefensible structures….live on a river, it might flood, live on the coast, here comes a tsunami, live in the Midwest, here comes a tornado.