In reply to VolvoHeretic :
The stuff I saw people complaining about was apparently a few months ago the LA Mayor pulled almost $20 million in funding from the LAFD.
In reply to VolvoHeretic :
The stuff I saw people complaining about was apparently a few months ago the LA Mayor pulled almost $20 million in funding from the LAFD.
z31maniac said:In reply to VolvoHeretic :
The stuff I saw people complaining about was apparently a few months ago the LA Mayor pulled almost $20 million in funding from the LAFD.
While that sounds like a lot and certainly doesn't look good right now, it's apparently only a 2% cut in the LAFD total budget so I kinda doubt it's actually relevant to what's going on at the moment.
VolvoHeretic said:I read that the fire departments ran out of water at the fire hydrants and everyone online was bitching about how that could happen. I also saw several photos of burnt up homes and every one showed some interior water line spraying water. Just think of how much water you would loose with every house's 1" main water line discharging water.
This is a mountainous area -- the beaches are at sea level (obviously), and just a few miles inland can be 500-1000 feet of elevation. The hydrants that ran out were the ones at higher elevations that were fed by three specific storage tanks (with those presumably being located at even higher elevations). The hydrants at lower elevations are apparently still working fine.
VolvoHeretic said:In reply to aircooled :
Those houses are so packed in there that even if the yards where concrete, the fire just jumps from house to house to house in that kind of wind.
I read that the fire departments ran out of water at the fire hydrants and everyone online was bitching about how that could happen. I also saw several photos of burnt up homes and every one showed some interior water line spraying water. Just think of how much water you would loose with every house's 1" main water line discharging water.
It sickens me how some people are using this as a political football. Yes, the governor sucks, but no governor in the world would have the cojones to push for the infrastructure improvements necessary to increase water flows by the 4x it takes to fight this thing effectively.
codrus (Forum Supporter) said:z31maniac said:In reply to VolvoHeretic :
The stuff I saw people complaining about was apparently a few months ago the LA Mayor pulled almost $20 million in funding from the LAFD.
While that sounds like a lot and certainly doesn't look good right now, it's apparently only a 2% cut in the LAFD total budget so I kinda doubt it's actually relevant to what's going on at the moment.
I agree on the size of the cuts, but like you said. It certainly doesn't look good.
You need about a three percent increase just to keep up with inflation so this was effectively a five percent cut.
What I thought was wild is that there were strings of beach front homes in Malibu that went up. A whole line of them along Topanga Beach in Tuna Canyon.
You know it's bad when not even the sea breeze can knock down embers enough to keep houses from going up like kindling.
Just WOW...
Starts out with the Santa Anna wind damage to her shop then she cruises through a flatened neighborhood. Sobering.
My thoughts are with the affected.
Insurance companies are pulling out of CA because of recent legislation that limits what they can charge. Their rates are based on historical data on what it costs to rebuild Vs. the projected costs that they would prefer to use. It's becoming a big problem, the delta is so great that companies are deciding to reduce to stop business in the state. They are working on legislation to reverse that. We also indirectly pay for fire insurance when we pay our power bill. There is a charge that goes into a fund that reimburses insurance companies for some of the losses due to wild fires. I believe the fund is at around $13 billion right now.
As others mentioned, fires are nothing new. We just have a lot more people building in fire prone areas now, and at higher densities. As the building sprawls into more and more fire prone areas, the amount of land that needs to be maintained and protected grows, and the boarder that needs to be defended gets longer and longer. I do think that the impact of the weather is overplayed. It's California. It has wet years, it has dry years. I've been through the cycle enough times to recognize that the only thing predictable about it is the unpredictability. What is predictable is that whenever there is a fire, the weather is blamed- too dry, that's the problem. Too wet- stuff grew too much, that caused the problem.
pheller said:What I thought was wild is that there were strings of beach front homes in Malibu that went up. A whole line of them along Topanga Beach in Tuna Canyon.
You know it's bad when not even the sea breeze can knock down embers enough to keep houses from going up like kindling.
The Santa Ana winds flow from inland to the coast. In some areas they were gusting as high as 100 mph.
Yeah, during certain weather conditions, the customary conditions can reverse, bigtime. The Santa Ana winds are both strong and super-low humidity, since they come off of the desert. Conversely, the heaviest rain that I ever experienced was also in Southern California, but it only lasted 20 minutes or so - sunny, followed by a wall of rain out of the east, followed by sunny again.
z31maniac said:pheller said:What I thought was wild is that there were strings of beach front homes in Malibu that went up. A whole line of them along Topanga Beach in Tuna Canyon.
You know it's bad when not even the sea breeze can knock down embers enough to keep houses from going up like kindling.The Santa Ana winds flow from inland to the coast. In some areas they were gusting as high as 100 mph.
Derp! I didn't know that.
Everytime I've been in California the winds are always off the coast. I guess it makes sense that the Santa Annas are a relatively infrequent weather occurrence due to need specific conditions.
preach said:Starts out with the Santa Anna wind damage to her shop then she cruises through a flatened neighborhood. Sobering.
Also keep in mind that headlines like "Los Angeles leveled" or "the destruction of LA" are very much hyperbole. Yes, these are fires affecting a lot of people and I don't mean to diminish the impact to those affected, but LA is HUGE. Last I saw they had evacuation orders out for 100K people, in a city of either 4M or 19M depending on how you count it (LA city limits, or the LA metro area). So keep the headlines in perspective.
Not much is gonna stop this:
As a car related side note: My neighbors have had enough of the power cut (still out, but should be coming on soon) and are leaving town until the weekend. They have a kid and two cars, a full size BMW electric SUV, and a VW GTI... guess which car they took?
We are in almost zero fire danger here BTW. Also frustrating is the fact that all the power lines in my area are underground! (There are clearly above ground lines in my grid of course)
They make erector set type tornado shelters, who knew they need firestorm shelters also. I wonder what it would take to keep you alive since it's hard to outrun a firestorm. A source of clean air I assume.
Wikipedia.org: Camp Fire, Paradise, California Firestorm 2018
Wikipedia.org: Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii FireStorm 2023
Bing.com: Search: Above Ground Tornado Shelter
I'm wondering since all of these structure's doors opens out, how do you exit when your car or house is leaning up against the door? I would think that you would want an in-swing door and use a couple of wood cross beams spanning over the door and held in place to the steel door frame with heavy brackets.
I just watched some of this video and it shows just how nuts these fires are. I expected scorched Earth, wall of fire sweeping through neighborhoods kind of damage, like Santa Rosa or Paradice. This, at least in this area, is top down houses burning from embers, not getting caught in a wall of fire. That explains the beachfront homes. It makes sense, but it's weird to see otherwise green neighborhoods with burning houses. It looks like a bunch of individual house fires rather than a wild fire.
aircooled said:We are in almost zero fire danger here BTW. Also frustrating is the fact that all the power lines in my area are underground! (There are clearly above ground lines in my grid of course)
The power lines that are a fire risk aren't generally the neighborhood ones, they're the long distance, high-voltage transmission lines that bring it to the neighborhood.
In reply to Boost_Crazy :
I would think that with what looks like only about 12' of separation between those houses in that Palisades Area photo, the house next to a fully engulfed house would spontaneously combust.
In reply to VolvoHeretic :
Many of the ones in the video above are much more spread out. The damage is also patchwork in some areas with houses burned to the ground with untouched houses around them. Some neighborhoods were leveled, but I was surprised how many houses were their own islands of destruction,
In reply to Boost_Crazy :
Thanks for the clarification. We just watch the videos.
I thought this was interesting. It is fully dark here now, and this is the air activity currently going on. I did not realize there where that many night capable helicopters. The Palisades are off the lower right of the pic where you can see they are still doing clean up in the hills. The middle left is the newer Kenneth fire that they are very much trying to keep out of the Las Virgenes canyon, which runs back down to Malibu (a popular path for fires!). You can also see helicopters filling up in the upper left and dipping into the reservoir in the lower right. The higher altitude (yellow) helicopters are news helicopters.
Winds are light (5 mph ish) from the north north east at this point generally.
My house was very close to the Oakland Hills Firestorm. When the fire hit I was a few hundred miles away. Meanwhile our neighborhood was voluntarily evacuated. Practically the only one who stayed was an elderly German woman, who, it turned out, put out several fires started from embers that blew in. One of those unsung heros, of which there are thousands, no doubt.
I had no idea we had so many LA folks on here!
We have been without power for a little over a day. It came back on tonight but just now the winds are picking up again so I'm not holding my breathe.
We have a fire almost every year it seems but I can't think of a time one has swept through a neighborhood like that. It's usually just the odd house in the hills here and there. Crazy
I think the Palisades area was pretty much just dumb luck. A fire in just the right spot with the maximum of winds. Add in dense housing construction up into a tight area without enough water pressure reserves and it's not that hard to conceive. We have certainly had winds like this before, and dry winters so they are nothing new.
Heck, the big fire a few years ago that blasted down into Malibu and burnt a lot of it is nothing new either. I distinctly remember seeing the huge plume of smoke from the other side of the valley of a fire that followed that exact path in the early 90's!
Of course, that canyons is not very densely built up, and even Malibu is not that dense in most spots. The Palisades is an entirely different situation housing wise. More similar the the fire in Sanoma a few years ago, which was caused by a power line.
Ther is always the a-hole component also. A number of even the large fires, have historically been purposely set (a am very suspicious that the one being shown being attacked is such a case)
I STILL do not have power and I am no where near any of these damn fires! And it's not remotely windy! Something stupid is going on!
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