Why Los Angeles was unprepared for this fire(washingtonpost.com)
washingtonpost.com
Why Los Angeles was unprepared for this fire
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/01/11/la-fires-unprepared-palisades-altadena-california/
6 comments
Poor water management and the CE to NEPA that the Sierra Club and others won against the state back in 2007 pretty much made this an inevitability.
> Poor water management […]
More water is helpful, but only up to a point:
> “I’ll be clear: We could have had much more water. With those wind gusts, we were not stopping that fire,” Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin said.
> When winds are as strong as they were Tuesday and Wednesday — reaching 100 mph on mountaintops and surpassing 60 mph along the coast — firefighters are severely limited in their tactics, experts said. They make it too dangerous and all but impossible to establish any fire perimeter. They blow flames as tall as 200 feet horizontally and send balls of red-hot embers flying at speeds that can carry them a mile or two away, where they start what are known as spot fires.
[…]
> The lack of firefighting by air was a critical deficiency that persisted from Tuesday night through early Wednesday, fire officials said, and one that has allowed other devastating Southern California fires to spread in the past, including the Woolsey Fire, which burned across a footprint just to the west of the Palisades Fire in 2018.
> “Without helicopters, this kind of a brush fire, we cannot stop it on the ground,” said Margaret Stewart, an LAFD spokeswoman.
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20...
More water is helpful, but only up to a point:
> “I’ll be clear: We could have had much more water. With those wind gusts, we were not stopping that fire,” Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin said.
> When winds are as strong as they were Tuesday and Wednesday — reaching 100 mph on mountaintops and surpassing 60 mph along the coast — firefighters are severely limited in their tactics, experts said. They make it too dangerous and all but impossible to establish any fire perimeter. They blow flames as tall as 200 feet horizontally and send balls of red-hot embers flying at speeds that can carry them a mile or two away, where they start what are known as spot fires.
[…]
> The lack of firefighting by air was a critical deficiency that persisted from Tuesday night through early Wednesday, fire officials said, and one that has allowed other devastating Southern California fires to spread in the past, including the Woolsey Fire, which burned across a footprint just to the west of the Palisades Fire in 2018.
> “Without helicopters, this kind of a brush fire, we cannot stop it on the ground,” said Margaret Stewart, an LAFD spokeswoman.
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20...
I refuse to give email addresses to the Washington Post in order to read news articles, and I believe this type of practice from them is disgusting.
If the article didn't mention it, I'm sure the Resnick's are sleeping just fine while the entire state burns down.
If the article didn't mention it, I'm sure the Resnick's are sleeping just fine while the entire state burns down.
Utter incompetence from the middle right to the top simple as that.
> Vegetation clearing warnings ignored: […]
> Water runs short: […] “There’s no urban water system engineered and constructed to combat wildfire,” said Michael McNutt, a spokesman for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which serves 75,000 people in northwest Los Angeles County. The system was intended to supply water to homes and businesses, he said, and to help fire crews defend a large structure or several homes, not multiple neighborhoods at once. […]