Life-threatening' windstorm fans fires in Southern Calaifornia as blazes burn in Los Angeles

It's been posted a gazillion times on this thread.

To start with:

• clearing brush
• having enough water
• possibly better surveillance and response systems
• not firing hundreds of firefighters because of a dumbass vaccine mandate
• having firefighters physically capable of doing the job
• not cutting budgets for firefighting
• not canceling fire hydrant inspections
• not prioritizing DEI over ability and merit

etc. etc. etc.

 

That's how much the people in North Carolina got.

 

related

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-01-09-la-apocalypse-was-entirely-predictable/

The L.A. Apocalypse Was Entirely Predictable
The hills above my hometown regularly catch fire, and developers regularly build there nonetheless.
BY HAROLD MEYERSON
JANUARY 9, 2025

It is a truth almost universally denied that the apocalyptic fires engulfing Los Angeles—my hometown—are merely a magnified version of the normal.

Donald Trump blames Gavin Newsom, because that’s Trump’s knee-jerk (or just plain jerk) response to any California misfortune. In a similar display of politically targeted bile, Rick Caruso, the Bloomberg-esque Republican turned Democrat who lost the most recent L.A. mayoral election to mainstream Democrat Karen Bass, blames Bass. Any day now, Wall Street Journal editorialists will blame the New Deal and some Latin Mass Catholics will blame Pope Francis.

If there’s one person whose analysis we should take seriously, it’s the late Mike Davis. In 1998, Davis followed up City of Quartz—his critically successful dissection of Los Angeles—with Ecology of Fear, which looked more specifically at the apocalypses that were and are a constant feature of L.A. life. (I edited a number of such Davis articles at the L.A. Weekly during the ’90s.) In the decade since he’d written City of Quartz, Los Angeles had experienced the Rodney King riots, the Northridge earthquake, recurrent fires and floods in the hills surrounding the city, and the decimation of the area’s middle class with the huge post–Cold War downsizing of the region’s largest employers, the Pentagon-funded aerospace companies. Plunging himself into obscure archives, traversing L.A.’s tinder-dry hills and firetrap tenements, Davis chronicled and explained Los Angeles’s unending physical and social combustibility with the zeal and scholarship of a peer-reviewed Cassandra.

Chapter Three of Ecology of Fear is entitled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” It begins by noting that L.A.’s pre-European residents, the Chumash and Tongva Indians, annually set small fires in the hills of Pacific Palisades and Malibu to clear out the brush that would explode if left in place. Mike notes that Richard Henry Dana wrote in his seafaring classic Two Years Before the Mast that when he first sailed up the California coast in 1826, he saw a fire engulfing Topanga Canyon. Mike then documents the 13 fires that had burned at least 10,000 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains just west of the Palisades between 1930 and 1996. Mike makes a compelling case that the dry hills surrounding Los Angeles, running from Pasadena in the east to Malibu in the west, will regularly ignite when the Santa Ana winds blow, and that building houses in those hills all but guarantees that many of those houses will burn, particularly when those winds soar above 50 miles per hour.

I can personally attest to what happens in those hills when the Santa Anas descend. In 1961, when I was in fifth grade at Kenter Canyon School, we—all the students, teachers, and staff—were abruptly evacuated when a fire that had been burning in Bel Air leaped the still-under-construction 405 and began racing across the hills of Brentwood. Classmates lost their homes, and the fire came within 300 yards of my family’s. We returned to our home the following day, and my memory of the next two weeks is that we were living in an ashtray. Nearly 500 homes were destroyed in that fire, which held the L.A. home destruction record—until this week.

Two days ago, Kenter Canyon School was evacuated yet again, as was the junior high (that’s what they used to call middle schools) I attended (Paul Revere). My high school, Palisades, was partly consumed by the blaze, as were the shops and homes where my buddies and I had hung out in the mid-1960s. The Safeway market is gone, as, I presume, is its marquee-style sign that we climbed onto in the midnight hours preceding the next day’s 1968 July 4th parade to solder the letters usually displayed on the sign to highlight the items on sale into an anti–Vietnam War slogan. (As the sign towered over the Palisades American Legion post, one of our slogans was “The American Legion is a hotbed of senility.”)

In the more than half-century since the ’60s, that Safeway had been somewhat eclipsed by the very high-end Gelson’s Market, whose post-’60s arrival signaled the increasingly upscale character of the Palisades. None of the houses that first caught fire there this week were around in the ’60s; they were part of some very posh developments that extended far deeper into the Palisades hills than any developments had previously. A place so glorious—with sea breezes that mitigated the summer heat and views that stretched to downtown L.A. on one side and distant islands on the other—became an abode disproportionately for the truly wealthy, and the incentives for developers to put mansions on those hills rose accordingly.

Mike Davis told us what would happen to those homes and, when the winds reached their apogee, as predictably they would, to the shops and homes and apartments on the flatlands, too. The Chumash and early-19th-century seagoers knew what would happen. Only we denied it.

Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.

​

 

They have cleared brush, homes are required to have it cleared. There is a lot of misinformation going around apparently.

 

There have been mansions that have been lost here, but there's so much more than that. Businesses, or restaurants and stores in addition to homes that had food go bad because of loss of power.

 

which itself comes out of the 1990s administrative law cases where the USFWS prevented people from clearing "habitat" around their houses that was home to a threatened species of kangaroo rat. Folks who complied lost their homes; one man actually took an ag disc to his yard and plowed it up, thereby saving his home.

Don't recall if USFWS took that guy to court or not after those fires, but that single instance led to a significant reorganization of fire prevention policies and allowed homeowners a bit more discretion in trying to create firebreaks around their residences. I did not know that residents are now required to do so.

 

Resident regulations differ from area to area and the risk and insurance requirements. It's called defensive space.

https://www.fire.ca.gov/dspace

 

I'm certainly not going to change your mind, but if you're correct then why wasn't the system operational and who was in charge of keeping the system operational? Mismanagement at its finest.

 

Nope, I'm just saying there was terrible mismanagement. You're obviously disagreeing with me. I wonder what the people of LA County who lost their homes think about the LA County/LA Mayor handling of this situation? I bet they have very different thoughts than you do.

I cant wait for the rebuilding period when it takes 3 years to get permits to rebuild, like Adam Carola said on his podcast. That should be a real sh!tshow.

 

LMAO, or you could be wrong.

No, I forgot you're never wrong and everybody else are liars. SMH

 

Absolutely,
I was trying to get a pulse on the boards level of sympathy for the rich in Cali as opposed to the country folk in Carolina. Not many Shead a tear when the CEO of United health care was gunned down. I was wondering if it is the same type of feeling since they are the rich and beautiful.

 

Let it burn, let it burn, let it burn.

 

I don't know if anyone even thinking about $750. People are actually worrying about where to evacuate, moving pets, not having access to internet for safety precautions, where to donate food and water, child care for working parents whose children are home from school, getting generators, portable chargers for mobile devices, etc.

Of everyone, I've talked to, everyone I've heard talking, etc. There is nobody worried about $750. I'm sure later, some people will worry about getting any support they can including $750. That will cover the food that has spoiled in my home, and maybe the gas from trips helping move people and their belongings.

It is odd that you are upset that victims of these fires might get some money which won't begin to cover their losses.

 

The people that I know that have lost their homes are currently worried about bigger issues. They also have asked many of the questions about what could have been done differently and if people should be held accountable.

One person I know lost his home in the Eaton Fire and his sibling lost his home in the Palisades fire. Others have had to evacuate and are living four families in homes of friends and families. People here are reaching out and helping and working together. Mistakes have been made. They will absolutely go over what can and should be changed. It will also include if people or departments need to be held accountable.

But anger blame isn't what they are focusing on at the moment. People have other more pressing needs.

 

Not me, I hated what happened to the CEO and I feel for those rich many of them have lost things that cant be replaced. What I hate is that the rest of us are going to have to help pay them to rebuild and much of the issues are caused by mismanagement. I mean, why should I have to pay for a bunch of California liberals taking care of a fish nobody eats, instead of focusing on what it takes to amass the resources to take care of their constituents.

 

750 bucks gets your pickup truck fueled up maybe 3 times in Cali.

 

I'm not upset, I'm just pointing out how badly things are being run and the potential double standards.