The fires in California

[herpastcanchangethefuture]

Is anyone else watching in disbelief? It just so awful to see so many people lose their home and I keep thinking about all the animals who would have been terrified and trapped too. I was watching the news on it last night and people were saying their insurance companies had recently revoked their insurance so they won’t be covered.

It’s just awful.

You don't seem to be able to grasp the distinction between how fires start and far and fast they spread

Yikes. Huge numbers of people do not regularly lose their homes simultaneously in some of the biggest fires ever. We all know that the vast, vast majority of people who live in LA are not famous nor millionaires.

Trump the well known fire expert has now weighed in with his Presidential opinion

Oh thank God for that. Presumably the best, biggest, most bigly, stablest, most genius Presidential opinion known to man?

All that hot air from Trump would only fan the flames even more. Surprised his bestie Elon hasn't joined in.

Oh Elon has joined in, it's the 'woke' DEI hiring policies of the fire fighters apparently....God help us and save us from this incoming government.

Thank god for what, withour trump I wouldn’t even know what fire is

The idea that all these celebrities are swimming in money is absolutely ridiculous. There will be many of whom where all their money is tied up in the house.

You don't seem to grasp that poor forest management is responsible for how quickly fires spread.

There are, of course, those pesky 100 mile per hour winds and the fact that it's not fire season, to account for. But I guess those are just inconvenient details?

I find it curious why you are so keen to deny that climate change had any part in this?

All the forest management in the world won't do much when strong hot winds carry hot embers for miles and when chronic lack of rain is becoming the norm. The choice is getting rid of all forest/scrubland within a few kilometres of housing (surprisingly expensive, creates other problems) or building fire safe neighbourhoods (also expensive, creates other problems) or improving fire detection and fire fighting resources (expensive, not enough on its own).

Is anyone here in LA? I was just wondering…what has happened to everyone who has lost their homes or been evacuated? Obviously some people will stay with friends but there must be thousands of people who have nowhere to go. I haven’t seen much about that, apart from a picture of a racetrack on the outskirts of LA and supplies being handed out. Are people sleeping outside there? It’s almost impossible (and beyond heartbreaking) to imagine having just the clothes you’re wearing and nothing else.

Because this wouldn't have happened if a mad man with a flamethrower hadn't started multiple fires. I also don't accept climate change is a man made phenomena.

You need to go and work for the fire investigations in LA as they don't know how the fires started yet.

@Porcuporpoise Clearly the wind speed is a major problem. However lack of firebreaks and cleared areas are something that’s been a problem. No prevention is cheap but destruction and rebuilding costs more.

Firebreaks are a nice idea but when a burning ember can be carried for hundreds of metres they'd have to be big ones. Making big firebreak is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, the terrain outside LA is very difficult, particularly the canyons that funnel the wind (and fire) towards the city. They are steep sided and rocky. You cant cut them mechanically and its not easy to manually cut them either. If you do manage to cut them (or burn them or graze them) then you need regrowth to hold the soils together, otherwise when the rains hit (it does rain sometime and it can be heavy) you'll get landslides. And the only vegetation that does well in that sort of climate and that sort of terrain are all plants that have high levels of flammable compounds in their vegetation (these help them survive drought conditions). So it's not like you can replace the native flammable vegetation with grass or something like that.

So yes with very large municipal budgets more could be done to protect the city, especially if the rebuilding is done using more fire proof materials and with greater controls around permitted vegetation around housing. But it won't be foolproof and it really, really won't be cheap.

@lljkk you sound so unpleasant and really rather ghastly

They have arrested someone... so...

'chronic lack of rain is becoming the norm'

That is just a false statement.

Accumulated Annual Precipitation in California, 1895 - Present
Average Precipitation in California by Year

Northern California has had a lot of rain. Not true of southern California.

"Los Angeles usually gets several inches of rain by now, halfway into the rainy season, but it’s only recorded a fifth of an inch downtown since July, its second driest period in almost 150 years of record-keeping. The rest of Southern California is just as bone-dry.
At the same time, much of the northern third of the state has weathered nearly two months of storms, flooding and even tornadoes. Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco, has received more rain than nearly any other city in California — nearly two times its average rainfall to date. At the city’s airport, almost 7 inches fell on Nov. 20 alone, an all-time daily record."

calmatters.org/environment/water/2025/01/california-rain-drought-north-south/

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-04/southern-california-officially-enters-drought-as-forecast-remains-bone-dry

The weather is variable. If you look at precipitation rates in California from 1890s to present day per year you will see that.

'Drought is intrinsic to the natural climate of California.[6] Across the Californian region, paleoclimate records dating back more than 1,000 years show more significant dry periods compared to the latest century. Ancient data reveals two mega-droughts that endured for well over a century, one lasting 220 years and one for 140 years. The 20th century was fraught with numerous droughts, yet this era could be considered relatively "wet" compared against an expansive 3,500 year history. In recent times, droughts lasting five to 10 years have raised concern, but are not anomalous. Rather, decade long droughts are an ordinary feature of the state's innate climate. Based on scientific evidence, dry spells as severe as the mega-droughts detected from the distant past are likely to recur, even in absence of anthropogenic climate change.'

The NY Times discusses this issue. Some excerpts below

Why did so many wildfires break out at about the same time?
Forecasters warned for days before the first fires erupted last week that fire danger would be very high. They cautioned that wind gusts could reach 50 to 80 miles an hour, and even 100 m.p.h. or more in some places in the mountains. And vegetation built up over two consecutive wet winters had turned to tinder after months of drought this year. The combination of high winds, dry air and ample fuel combined to make a critical fire-weather event likely in Southern California.
Late fall and early winter tend to be when catastrophic fires are most likely to break out in California. Cooler weather coincides with the arrival of Santa Ana winds, the strong, dry gusts that blow southwest from Nevada and Utah into Southern California and are linked to the region’s most devastating fires.
The deadliest and most destructive fire in California’s recent history, which destroyed the town of Paradise in the foothills of the Sierras, broke out in mid-November 2018.

Excerpt about the Palisades fire:
Investigators have made it clear that it could take time to reach firm conclusions about the cause of the fire.
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is taking the lead, took more than a year to report conclusions about the Maui fire.
“We are looking at every angle,” Dominic Choi, the assistant Los Angeles police chief, said on Monday about the fires burning across the region. He said that arson had not been ruled out for any of them. In the case of the Palisades fire, he added, “there has been no definitive determination that it is arson.”
For now, the entire area around the investigation site is eerily empty. The neighborhoods near the trail are evacuated and dozens of houses were leveled; — the only signs of life there are a few fire trucks and an occasional police patrol.
Further down the hillsides, toward the ocean, there is utter devastation. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened, their subdivisions now just a grid of ash.

All of that fluff aside 14 people have now been arrested on suspicion of arson and more are being investigated. There are multiple videos of people starting fires in California on X if you wish to see the evidence for yourself.