Los Angeles Fires: Serious Talk
I am seeing a lot of very stupid comments from the people who tend to post stupid comments.
This requires serious discussion and not political bs.
That said, I am going to give some background about the fires in Los Angeles. I live in the area and many things are being misconstrued.
First, and most importantly, the biggest issue was the erratic wind and wind speeds on night one (Wednesday night). There were wind gusts of 80 to 100 mph, and the wind was swirling at times, making firefighting nearly impossible as the fire was being quickly moved in many different directions.
The winds made it impossible to use much more effective fire equipment, like water-dropping aircraft. For those who doubt the impact of the winds and the lack of water-dropping aircraft, I refer you to the fire in Hollywood last night. If the conditions were the same as Wednesday night, we would have likely lost many amazing landmarks, including the Hollywood Bowl, but because water-dropping aircraft could be used and the winds were not as strong, the damage was not as great as it was for areas hit the night before.
This is why the winds — the force and erratic nature — were the top cause of the problems.
Now for other things:
I have heard people talk about cleaning up trees, etc. I am not sure if you saw this, but these fires spread through very urban parts of the city. Normal cleaning would have done very little to mitigate the issues. In some areas, it might have helped a little, but …
The next biggest issue is the lack of rainfall. We had two years of heavy rain, and we have not had rain since late spring or early summer. It has been months since we had measurable rainfall.
EVERYTHING IS DRY.
EVERYTHING.
Homes. Yards. Buildings.
Everything.
When an ember hits, things burn because everything is so dry. This is also why so many homes, even with roofs that are not supposed to burn, went up so quickly and how and why the fires made their way into some very urban areas.
There are preventative measures that are taken, and some areas have more vegetation than others, but simply, everything is like tinder now. With the strong winds blowing embers all over the place and everything bone dry, there were going to be big problems.
I should also say that these were not the normal Santa Ana winds that tend to be much stronger near the mountain passes and that tend to slow a bit as they move eastward. These Santa Ana winds hit peak velocity in the suburbs of the northern parts of LA.
Again the winds played the largest part with the dryness of EVERYTHING making it easier for things to catch fire when the winds spread the embers everywhere. (I should also add that these winds are also very dry — so they dry things out even more.)
I am seeing stuff about lack of water. There have been spot shortage of water but to make this a major point is to miss the larger factors. Water was an issue in some situations — not as much as some people would have you think. And frankly at the point where things were happening on Wednesday/early Thursday, water hoses were not going to significantly impact much. You don’t put out essentially a forest fire with raging winds with hoses. We needed water dropping air-craft to put a dent in it but the winds prevented their use.
So for those saying that Trump was right about getting water from Canada, please stop embarrassing yourself. Water from Canada would have done nothing because — wait for it — it could not be dropped or delivered to the fire because of the winds. As some pointed out, we are next to an ocean, and we also have local lakes, but none of that matters if you can not use aircraft, which is why the biggest issue was the wind (and not incompetence as some tried to imply).
And, no, the mayor being away did not have an impact. Emergency services respond regardless of the mayor, and the LA mayor is not responsible for some of the areas affected. But I understand that it makes you feel good to blame someone for this. I suspect some get a bigger tingly feeling since she is a black woman.
In short I am seeing people trying to blame everything that happened on a couple fire hoses that did not work or had low pressure, or the mayor being away or whatever.
The bottom line is that the extreme wind conditions coupled with extreme dryness (made worse by the dry winds) are what triggered the magnitude of the damage.
On Wednesday night, we could have had a 1000 fire fighters in Pacific Palisades and a lot of what happened would still have happened. The winds prevented the use of the most effective fire fighting measures. Anything else was likely futile in the big scheme of things.
The only thing that could have stopped these fires is if the fires never started. We don’t know what caused these fires yet, but we need to look there for prevention and see what we can do there.
It would be nice if people decided to be better at times like this, but apparently, this is too much to ask of some.
