We just witnessed what happens when fire fighters don’t have access to water to fight these fires. Safe to assume LA will now fix those issues?
SoCal fires
- Thread starter lawpoke87
- Start date
You just witnessed what happens when wildfires combine with 60-70 mph gusts. Little to do with water availability. More water might have helped some houses / areas, but wouldn't have drastically changed the outcome.
Pretty sad when Al Jazeera has better reporting than whatever news outlet you get your news from...
Why did the fire hydrants run dry?
The rescue efforts in Palisades were hindered by low pressure in the water supply at elevated areas.Los Angeles receives its water supply from 114 tanks in total, all of which were fully filled before the fires. However, the three water tanks in the elevated Palisades were unable to be refilled due to high demand.
On the morning of January 8, Janisse Quinones, the chief executive of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told reporters that water tanks in Palisades had been depleted.
“We pushed the system to the extreme,” she said, adding that “four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”
The fire started in the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood at 10:30am (18:30 GMT) on Tuesday, according to Cal Fire. Two of the one million-gallon tanks, located at an elevation in the Palisades, ran out late on Tuesday.
By 3am (11:00 GMT) on Wednesday, the third tank had also run out, Quinones said. Water reserves were located at a lower elevation, which made it difficult to refill the high-elevation tanks.
P.S. Do conservatives all get talking points circulated the day these things happen? You sound exactly like Elon who enjoys lying and misinforming constantly.
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Ironically, you know what would have helped in this situation and alleviated energy problems for California at the same time?
Pumped hydro energy storage. You could have used the upper reservoir for firefighting. There's no way Hollywood stars would allow that land to be used for that though.
Pumped hydro energy storage. You could have used the upper reservoir for firefighting. There's no way Hollywood stars would allow that land to be used for that though.
When the LA Fire Chief says city officials failed the fire fighters and people of LA I tend to believe her. Hate it for the people who lost everything . Hopefully those people will lose their jobs over this failure.
I’m also saddened by how many of these fires were intentionally set. What’s a matter with people today?
The fire chief is understandably upset about budget cuts and staff reductions, which she has a right to be.... but this was not a condition which a single municipal fire department was going to fight alone anyway.
The LA Water & Power Department are the ones responsible for filling hydrants. What it looks like is they did the best they could, but ultimately it's very hard to pump water to certain elevations in enough quantity in a short period of time to satisfy demand (with existing infrastructure)
Meanwhile... Republicans plan on withholding aid at a federal level.... NEVER AGAIN WILL I ALLOW ANY OF YOU TO BITCH AND MOAN ABOUT A DEMOCRAT WITHOLDING AID TO A REPUBLICAN STATE'S HURRICANE, FLOOD, FIRE, ICE STORM VICTIM ETC....
Interesting article in the LA Times argues brush and kindle isn’t the real culprit but housing density and building codes. House density certainly played an issue in not being able to get water to those higher elevations.
It does seem dumb to rebuild all these mega homes in areas where the topography makes it virtually impossible to defend against fires like we just witnessed. Especially with public funds and with the knowledge that people will likely to continue to intentionally set these fires in such areas.
www.latimes.com
It does seem dumb to rebuild all these mega homes in areas where the topography makes it virtually impossible to defend against fires like we just witnessed. Especially with public funds and with the knowledge that people will likely to continue to intentionally set these fires in such areas.
Inconvenient truths about the fires burning in Los Angeles from two fire experts
For years, renowned fire experts Jack Cohen and Stephen Pyne have tried to shift the conversation on fire prevention strategies. This week’s destruction, they say, could have been minimized.
www.latimes.com
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Read that article a day or two ago. Agreed that the topography and the building codes don't help.Interesting article in the LA Times argues brush and kindle isn’t the real culprit but housing density and building codes. House density certainly played an issue in not being able to get water to those higher elevations.
It does seem dumb to rebuild all these mega homes in areas where the topography makes it virtually impossible to defend against fires like we just witnessed. Especially with public funds and with the knowledge that people will likely to continue to intentionally set these fires in such areas.
Inconvenient truths about the fires burning in Los Angeles from two fire experts
For years, renowned fire experts Jack Cohen and Stephen Pyne have tried to shift the conversation on fire prevention strategies. This week’s destruction, they say, could have been minimized.
My advice to folks? Move Middle to Eastern Montana. Kind of barren, but mountains nearby. No real floods. Manageable fire districts. No hurricanes. No Tornadoes. Few Ice Storms. Blizzards are manageable. The only thing those people "worry" about is Yellowstone exploding.
We’re all probably F’d if Yellowstone explodes. They just get it over with a little sooner
Build Back Better/infrastructure bills:
too many social programs,
not enough on Structure
some of that money could have, should have been spent on Fire Prevention projects .
Agree.
I say this as someone who is a big supporter of prescribed fires and has had to evacuate my home in the past because of wildfires. And someone whose town has previously burned with over 300 homes lost:
Prescribed burns are under a microscope lately and for good reason. There have been several large fires that got out of control recently that started as prescribed burns, including the one that burned 300 homes in my town. We need to do them, but the general public is rightfully wary. Not sure what the answer is, but it is also true for this situation that prescribed burns in what amounts to a suburban area were not likely to ever happen anyways. The urban-wilderness interface is always going to be problematic, and it's also beyond reason to expect the state to have a good handle on non-native brush buildup in these same areas due to private property rights and the sheer scale of the issue.
As for water management and fire fighting budgets... These are things which make nice soundbites for political blame and maybe they made some difference. But it is extremely unlikely that these fires would have been stopped anyways. Best case scenario is buying a little more time for evacuations. That's not nothing, but nobody should be under any illusions that the size and scope of these fires is exclusively due to mismanagement. A municipal water supply was not designed for fighting 1000 house fires simultaneously. It kind of can't be. Fire hydrants went dry because of course they did. It's deigned for putting out a house fire, or even a neighborhood. It's not designed for putting out a 38,000 acre wildfire that is burning 100 neighborhoods simultaneously.
Leads me to the question….knowing the history of wildfires in these areas, why does the city allow houses to be built in such a density knowing they don’t have the infrastructure in place to protect those homes from a Santa Ana wind fire event? I’m specifically talking about those elevated areas they were unable to pump water too.
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Exactly. They know exactly what their fire management capacity is and they’ve waived it. Repeatedly. It’s almost like politics influenced science*
You are asking why the city allows people to build in fire prone areas? I mean, you could ask the same question for cities along the Gulf Coast during hurricanes.
Ultimately, expecting the city fire infrastructure to rescue you from a situation like this is pretty foolhardy, and anyone building or buying there ought to know that. Heck people have been complaining about insurance prices and insurance companies dropping them in some of these areas for years. It is not some sort of shocking political failure that this happened. It's been expected. The market demanded these areas be developed and so, little by little over several over decades, they were. The insurance markets certainly knew the risks, and people knew (or should have known) that it was a serious risk, but they bought there anyways. Caveat emptor.
It's a terrible tragedy and my heart goes out to all affected. They took a known risk and lost, but that doesn't mean I don't empathize with them or that I think anyone deserved it. Same if your house gets hit by a hurricane on the Florida coast.
It’s slightly different in Florida. First, post Andrew, the Florida Building Code was amended so new construction must be able to withstand a CAT 4 and be survivable for a CAT 5. Most buildings built after the 1994 and 2008 updates to the Code withstand the storm. It’s why you see pictures of 20 homes destroyed and one relatively untouched. Most damage happens from flooding, not hurricanes. And each homeowners is required by law to sign a disclosure regarding their flood rating and evacuation rating at closing. Every one who buys knows what’s coming. For the first time ever, buyers are starting to self select areas outside the flood zones. Before, it was gambling. They didn’t think they would live long enough to get taken out and bought wherever the property might appreciate fastest for their heirs.
Unlike California, Florida understands that hurricanes are a part of life. Homeowners have the right to insurance of last resort subsidized by the state. It’s the highest publicly available rate, but you can be insured no matter what. Compare with California where tens of thousands of home may be bare because they were dropped due to risk. Florida has skyrocketing insurance rates right now after several major storms due in part to this force placed insurance model where single moms on food stamps pay higher premiums in the swamps of Orlando to help insure billionaires oceanfront seventh homes aka bankruptcy protections. The public is pushing back.
In short, folks know and are given fair warning. It takes a single online one page form to get a building permit to rebuild in Florida. You can start building within a day and most do, if they can find the labor.
The law presumes that you can and will rebuild in conformity with the code and it’s up to the government to come inspect what you’ve done.
Compare that with California with red tape and materials restrictions. They are already warning that it may be up to two years before the government has the capacity to tell residents what they can build and where.
I see these two as a bit different.
1) Building a house on the coast doesn’t increase the possibility that your neighbors house is damaged or destroyed by a hurricane.
2) Cities have dramatically changed building standards in an effort that any new construction can withstand hurricanes. To my knowledge the homes being constructed in Southern California still catch on fire and help spread said fires to neighboring homes.
3) Both cases involve wealthy people (for the most part) building in areas due to the scenic surroundings.
1) For the most part true, though there are exceptions to this due to storm surge in certain canal front properties that are approved nonetheless.
2) See above.
3) Amen, except select parts of the Big Bend area of the Gulf Coast.
You both are going to find someone to fault on this issue, and blame the other party. You are following your party's lead and looking for a scapegoat. I was saying all this stuff that Clong is agreeing with me on, and you just ignored it. I bashed your repairs on the water supply with the fact that it wasn't even fire season, and the issue that fire season is now annual/doesn't stop all season. No comment back, just let that slip under the rug. (One specific instance among several, as an example of arguments dismissed without much thought.) I just quit posting because nothing I said was going to be listened to. I don't particularly care for a forum that is concerned with how you present your arguments, rather than the content of your arguments. I thought we had bright and fairly unbiased minds that could see the content, rather than be biased with how it was presented. Rant section concluded.
Of course they build against advice. It's ocean front. They are always going to push codes, and policies if the property is that desirable. If there was a viable reason for lakes not to be built on in Oklahoma, the codes would get pushed aside also. It's human nature to build around water. Human nature will always push building codes and everything else. It is not a Democrat thing otherwise they wouldn't be flouting similar issues in Florida as HuffyCane pointed out. It's human nature to build where Hurricanes are a real threat as well. The world is attracted to proximity to Ocean fronts.(and lakes) Not just Democratically controlled Cali or Republican controlled Florida.
We've just recently realized the fullness of the risks that are inherent there,(in the last 15-20 years) especially with Climate Change coming into the forefront of our existence. Now we have to realize how to combat that, if it is at all possible. Telling people not to build in Florida and California would bring about a gaza type situation. You can't just say hey, you can't build there anymore. We have to see if there is any way to work around this issue with changes in how we build, and where we build in those areas. We have to try and design a way to battle fires that is different.
Essentially, we have to see if we can find a way to coexist with the problem not solve the problem. Because just like climate change, (as Lawpoke has argued) we have passed the point of no return on stopping it from happening. People are already entrenched in this place they own property. We won't convince them past civil disobedience, to sacrifice their money for the property they had a home on. We must find ways to coexist with it.
We should really take this as an opportunity to move forward in a better way. We should comprise a federal and state government bipartisan panel of highly talented civil engineers, city planners, and scientists on how to rebuild LA in a better way. This could and should be an example for future building and planning purposes in the states, and even across the world. We also should look at other events and rebuilds to see if there was any examples in rebuilding methods that could be applied to this incident.(like earthquakes and tsunamis concerning the rebuilds in Indonesia, Japan, Turkey, etc.) They should look to see if there was least some little thing was applicable from those rebuilds.
We know that won't happen. Trump couldn't even conceive of acting in this way. To him it just provides a way to get all of his other bully issues approved by California politicians or not provide the federal assistance that the Californian Americans deserve, just like the Floridian Americans deserve after Hurricanes.
Several issues will come to bear. Climate change, city codes, the Santa Ana winds, bad decisions by elected officials, budget cuts at the wrong time for reasonable incoming income purposes, budget cuts for the wrong things are partial causes. Things like them finally getting that water source fixed at the wrong moment, and just generally bad luck amongst a sequence of events. I'm sure that all of these played at least a small part in this incident and how it was handled. It really bothers me that either party jumps on the other one so quickly to lay blame, instead of waiting till the emergency has been contained, and waiting till the investigation about the incident has at least been started, or even better, waiting till the investigation is finished.
The lynch mob begins 24 hours after the fire has begun. Lynch mobs have never been a good idea. Everybody jumps to way too many conclusions without having verifiable truth about what the situation is. The media can accept a large part of the blame on this, but social media(the public) can claim a huge part of the blame as well.
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I don’t understand the comment “it wasn’t even fire season”. January falls in the middle of fire season.
If Newsome can call for an investigation as to why there wasn’t water available to fight this fire then I’m not sure why we can’t discuss it. I’m also not sure when the head fire official in the city lays blame we can’t discuss. I’m fairly positive she’s not a Pub. I’m not sure what the answer is going forward. Many of these fires are now being intentionally set. We can blame the wind speed to some degree on climate change but the initiation of many of these fires lays squarely on people with bad intentions. Hard to fix that .
Question….this is a message board. Speculate is what we do. Why are you so sensitive in this specific case? Especially considering the comments from the Fire Chief.
If Newsome can call for an investigation as to why there wasn’t water available to fight this fire then I’m not sure why we can’t discuss it. I’m also not sure when the head fire official in the city lays blame we can’t discuss. I’m fairly positive she’s not a Pub. I’m not sure what the answer is going forward. Many of these fires are now being intentionally set. We can blame the wind speed to some degree on climate change but the initiation of many of these fires lays squarely on people with bad intentions. Hard to fix that .
Question….this is a message board. Speculate is what we do. Why are you so sensitive in this specific case? Especially considering the comments from the Fire Chief.
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Fire season was formerly considered May-Oct. Now it is considered year round in California since droughts have been so prevalent over the past several years. That was the point I was making, with annual fire season in Cali, when do you fix that water source in the Palisades. Did you read that article? Wasn't ever even talked about. But that was just an example of many of the points being dismissed. There was always another issue brought up to push the discussion onwards when a point was made to contradict.
Either way, there are no easy answers. And blaming the prevalent party in the state is not going to solve it.
I'm not being sensitive on this issue, most of the points I was making weren't really being addressed, and then Clong comes on and agrees with me on several of those issues, and those issues are addressed. I didn't appreciate my points being summarily dismissed or not even spoken of, and it all being blamed on Democratic officials, when they were not the only problems in this situation. Why even make a point if it is going to be ignored, at the expense of blaming the Democrats. If this was in Texas or Florida, the problem wouldn't be the Republicans, even if there were similar issues.
I'm also assuming that this problem with the water source in the Palisades is not something that can be fixed during the rainy season. The rainy season in Cali was considered to exist as long as Oct-April, but is now much slimmer. I doubt that the palisades source can be fixed in March and April, alone. Which is consistently being narrowed to the months one can count on as the rainy season in California.
Wasn’t my intent to bring politics in the discussion. I don’t recall ever mentioning party affiliation. I certainly never blamed either political party for this disaster. I assume the mayor is a Dem (didn’t check) but I have no idea as to the other city officials. Like I stated, when the Fire Chief comes out and blames the city, I believe it’s fair game to follow her lead. She knows far more about the situation with water, resources, etc…than anyone on this board.
I don't know from what source it gets filled during normal times, but it can be filled after it has been emptied, on command. Probably from the source they emptied it into.
Last little bit about the Palisades reservoir, a seal had broken and it was corrupting the water supplies quality of water. Meaning it was not as useful a source for drinking the water. And this is not the only recent repair on the source. If it had been full(read this in three different sources) it might have helped with the water pressure problem, but pressure problems would have still existed. If they had decided to fill it because the Santa Ana winds came up after it was put down for repair, but before the fires were started, they would not have been able to refill it even close to the time for the fires. So, it would not even have been full, and even that would not have resolved the pressure problems.
I have researched this a little further to prove a point. A singular focus on one issue as a problem, does not delve into the myriad of issues surrounding its repair. An article of that nature leaves one with an incomplete picture that does not give the reasons justifying it being down at the time, in comparison to the reasons not justifying it being out of commission. There were many reasons justifying it being down at the time. The articles on it, just like all the rest of the other 'hit' articles didn't delve into justifications for and against whatever point they were making.
I didn't hardly see an in depth article addressing what all the cuts were for in the fire dept, and items they left uncut or with a lesser cut, because that wouldn't make a pithy hit article. And that's what people want, somebody to blame. What they need is articles providing a for and against, that lets the reader make the decision. But journalists feel they have to make that decision for us most of the time. When they do provide both sides, they sometimes leave out facts that go against their opinion. Leave it to the reader which facts they want to ignore. The journalist can make his view evident with all the facts there. If they can't then go find another profession.
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Also, in articles where they are separating the seasons, the ones I saw separated them into rainy season(up to Oct-April) and dry season,(May through October) The appropriate term would actually be precipitation season(including rain, hail, sleet, snow, etc)
Sounds right. I assume most of those reservoirs get filled during the late spring and summer via snow melt from the Sierras. California has been fortunate the last few years with above average snow in those ranges
This is where it hurts losing all of these local journalists for the Tulsa World/Detroit Free Press/Cleveland Plains Dealer, etc. We allow monoliths like Fox & CNN. The freedom of journalists is broken down when it becomes a narrower, and narrower Oligopoly with Monopolistic tendencies of what news they put out. Then even the AP gets narrowed down. Less and less journalists are part of this dissipation in trust of the press. The majority of them all work for the monoliths.
