Is there a thread about the LA fires?

[Lelophants]

I can’t see one anywhere. Scary stuff.

Maybe. But if the Gulf Stream collapses we could end up much colder, more prone to storms and flooding and not prone to wildfires. But the GS collapsing is a massive, global issue and the consequences are educated guesses at the moment.

More extreme weather. Whether that's storms, fires, hurricanes, surges, heat domes or droughts depends on where you live. No one is getting out of this easily.

My friend was escorted back to his property today as his one opportunity to salvage anything, there was nothing left, not even tje brick chimney or fireplace. They were on holiday when it happened and couldn’t get a flight back in time, so couldn’t salvage before the fire. Luckily they has very recently digitalised all of their photos, otherwise there would be about 110 years of family history lost forever.

Like volcanic activity I wonder if the smoke from this massive event will upset weather patterns for a time

That's awful.

What do you mean by tested fir emission?

@Simonjt - that’s terrible for them but thank God they had digitised the photos. A small comfort.

@justasking111 - I hadn’t thought of that and don’t know enough to have a clue. You would think it might have to some way I suppose. Mother Nature getting her own back in a way.

Theyre doing exactly the same where I live. And when the councils reject developers plans, they win at appeal anyway.

So now more houses will flood so people can live in bad quality over priced new builds built next to a motorway and river with sound levels higher than WHO advise.

The UK's population isn't going to start stabilizing and dropping until the late 2030s, though, and the need for housing is really, really acute (because in addition to population growth, you've also got more one- and two-person households, more divorce, people living longer, and natural attrition of old housing combined with decades of not building enough). So the housing has got to be built....somewhere.

I've said this before, but the UK's got to make some hard decisions on this stuff; building more densely in cities and accepting the need for more people to live in flats (preferable with leasehold reform) would avoid the need to put houses in flood/fire risk areas.

Help is being sent from very far away. Canada has sent in helicopters that can dump water.

It’s all very very horrific. My family member who’s lived there for 40+ years is currently away for an extended trip but has no idea what they’ll return to.

Is it weird that separate fires started in different places at the same time? I mean, I’m no conspiracy theorist, but is it normal? Are there any real insights into the root cause?

Or there needs to be a concerted focus on converting 4 bed properties that come onto the market into flats. Its doable, but councils don't like the parking issue. The solution to the parking issue is better public transport.

Our issue is POOR USE of the AVAILABLE housing stock rather than a lack of housing. We have enough housing. But add in second homes, single people living (or not living in the case of my neighbour!) in large 4 bedroom detatched properties.

People can't downsize because of a lack of smaller properties...

And huge planes that can. One of which was grounded by a moron with a drone in restricted airspace.

Maybe Donald should stop talking about annexing Canada while they are helping!

No, it's what you expect with this sort of fire. One may have been arson, but it has to do with large scale weather patterns. Multiple fires happen in Australian bush fires too.

I posted earlier about this -- I'm no expert and I live on the East Coast to boot, but there's been lots of coverage here about why this happened. It was a terrible confluence of events. Southern California is a fire maintained environment, that is to say, it's expected to have fires every few years and plants have evolved so that not only does the fire clear out dead vegetation, some species germinate in response to it. There were two very wet years, resulting in loads of vegetation. Then this year, it all dried up over summer as expected, but winter rains never arrived. Southern California hasn't had rain in months. (Northern California has, so if anyone posts state level figures about rain or snowpack, know that it is combining that.) There's a phenomenon in California called the Santa Anas, very hot dry winds that come from inland. They are one of the causes of wildfires. There was an exceptional set of Santa Anas this month, up to 100mph. This meant that not only did they spark fires as expected, they spread them at a ferocious rate, over land that with a massive fuel load. It all went up like a tinderbox.

Thank you @knitnerd90. I expected the spread but it just seemed a bit too much of a coincidence that the fires start miles apart on the same or near enough same days...

Super scary either way to be honest, and reminds us not to fuck with nature quite frankly, and that it's not our earth. I know that all sounds a bit hippy dippy, but I thought the same when I lived in Australia actually - in that, it's actually quite a "hostile" landscape and was not designed to be inhabited.................

Totally with you on the need for better public transport if we are going to densify - it is absolutely essential in order to fit more people into a given area, otherwise we are going to end up with total gridlock and parking chaos everywhere.

I think converting some four-bed houses in flats is fine a lot of the time, especially in suburban areas. However, I think a lot of unexceptional houses in central areas near stations (or where new public transport lines should be build) should probably be knocked down altogether and replaced with proper apartment blocks with elevators, however; we need decent sized and accessible flats, not just tiny bedsit type arrangements.

I have to disagree strongly about the idea that "We have enough housing, it's just lying empty." Much of so-called "empty housing" is just lying in probate at any given time, not long-term unoccupied. You have to have at least a certain % of empty homes in any country, because it is needed to provide the "leeway" that enables people to move house; if the number of empty homes got much lower, everyone would be stuck in really long chains every time they tried to move. And the UK has very FEW second homes - the % of the population that owns a second home in the UK is actually one of the lowest in Europe. We literally do not have enough housing.