For God's sake, can we stop this nonsense?
People gobsmacked by empty fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades have wondered, why not just stick a hose in the ocean? Well, salt water can be very damaging to equipment (including firefighting machinery) and all sorts of other things as well, so the Pacific's bounty can only be used against conflagrations sparingly. But desalinated water sure could have come in handy this week.
How many coastal desalination plants are there between Santa Barbara and San Diego counties? Zero.
The problem isn't—and never has been—lack of water. The problem is pumping water up the hillside, where Pacific Palisades is. Seawater, whether desalinated or not, would be of no help.
The desire to prove that everyone else is incompetent is stupid bar stool talk. Smart people need to knock it off. The real story here is simple, even if no one wants to hear it: LA's system of water cisterns was built to manage a disaster, but not the worst possible disaster ever. Nobody does that because it would cost a fortune.
For example: California codes require buildings to withstand roughly a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Quick: is that enough for Los Angeles? The Newport-Inglewood fault runs about ten miles from City Hall and can produce a magnitude 7.5 quake—but only every few hundred years. The San Andreas fault can produce earthquakes above magnitude 8.0, but never gets closer than 50 miles to LA.
So is 7.0 a high enough standard? Increasing it to 7.5—three times bigger—would be enormously expensive. And it's a pretty unlikely event in LA.¹ Should we do it anyway? You need to answer now, not after a worst-case event happens. It isn't easy.
Unprecedented disasters will always strain resources to the breaking point. There might be incompetence or ordinary mistakes involved, but usually not. The Pacific Palisades fire, whipped up by 60 mph winds, destroyed the entire neighborhood in a day. Nothing would have stopped it. LA firefighters were like a squirt gun in the face of something like that. In terms of the immediate response, there's no one to blame and no incompetence at play. Everyone needs to quit looking for politically convenient scapegoats.²
¹Though more likely in San Francisco, which sits right on top of the San Andreas fault.
²More than likely, we'll eventually know what caused the Palisades fire. A downed power line? A spark from some kind of machinery? A kid and a magnifying glass? When we figure it out, we'll be able to blame someone for starting the fire. But that's all.
Kevin, you're a good programmer. Give us a Block button, OR let us vote people off the island and you block their IP.
I'm guessing that everything about the format here is due to WordPress, like lack of some kind of thumbs up or up/down function, or lack of some way to alert to various violations or block people (from you seeing their comments, not in general). Disqus generally has all those things. Probably doesn't stop moderation though.
I don't know why a blog would use one format over another. Talking Points Memo made up their own, and it took months to make it work right. And it still has some weirdnesses, and puts replies to comments at the bottom of the comments instead of where they belong.
The one good thing about this format is that replies don't appear somewhere fifty comments below the one commented on. I've been bitching about the rest now and then to no avail.
I think Kevin blocked that Spades guy a while back. I wrote him an email begging him to get rid of the guy. Maybe we should email Kevin with posters names who need to not be here.
Was Kevin indeed ever a programmer? I thought he was product marketing.
Kevin is that good. He's programmed you unknow that he is indeed a world class programmer. 😄😄
The WSJ edit page regularly complains about firefighter salaries in LA being too high.
But now the problem is not enough resources being devoted to firefighting.
A good measure of whether these guys are serious, or if their philosophy is just: any weapon to hand.
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but seems to me that this post is Kevin's both-siderism on display. To me that's disconcerting.
Why, he complains, won't the unfounded criticism stop? No attribution beyond someone from the GOP coalition, in Reason, the libertarian outlet. And Kevin's post is addressed to his readers, mostly liberal. Hey, why won't the liberals shut up?
Seems to me that almost all the criticism of California governance, particularly of the governor and mayor, is lying and all from the right, although no doubt the report on the "down" reservoir in the NY Times needs further debate. The center is mostly silent, although the Times also has an article that LA was prepared for a disaster, just not the multiple disasters like this one. So maybe the blue state isn't so dumb after all.
And what from the left? Just pointing out that climate change is drastically increasing the severity and frequency of disasters, costing people their homes. Surely that's correct, no? I seem to have just got over reading about coastal homes lost to inundation and, just last year, other California wild fires.
Newsom apparently thinks there were problems.
https://x.com/GavinNewsom/status/1877823208273178995?t=p6c37ASFKHS-wYFSSRR4VQ&s=19
Disasters happen, no matter who is in charge. And there will be more of them because a) populations continue to expand into fire-prone and flood-prone areas, and b) global warming is apparently making both fires and floods, and maybe major storms, more common.
If you want to get into political blame, the question is, would things have been better if Republicans were in charge?
As Kevin explains, the only way to prevent huge fires like this, if it's possible at all, would be to expend huge amounts of money to have water resources far in excess of normal demand, or even demand in case of a major fire (not a super one). There would also have to be expenditures for fire personnel and equipment.
Would a Republican state or city government spend this much money? How could taxes be cut if budgets have to be balanced and all this preparation has to be paid for? To Republicans government is the enemy - if there is a fire and government-employed firefighters show up, don't believe they are here to help. Evidently the invisible hand of the free market is supposed take care of things, not government.
Of course the "liberal" media have accepted the Republican framing of this, as they are in habit of doing. Rather than discussing what needs to be done in the future and who would best do it, they take the Republican accusations of personal or party blame seriously. This is just irresponsible.
I think there is a place where a debate can be had about which resources might have been made available ahead of time and if the risk analysis underlying the present policy was still realistic. The proper place for those things are after action reports and investigations--not to find culprits (nobody wanted to burn down the city!) but to find improvements.
The fire fighters and their leaders deserve high praise for the way they operated. To get nearly everybody out of a burning town with a limited number of exit roads is no mean feat. If you look at historical examples of burning cities (Rome under Nero, London, San Francisco after the earthquake) the death tolls are horrifying.
Speaking of California and earthquakes, I trust all my fellow citizens of the state have their week’s worth of supplies in a comparatively survivable location.
If there is no (one to) blame, then is Newsom being a dupe, or just performing by calling for an investigation into the water situation? Find transitively via https://sfist.com/2025/01/10/day-around-the-bay-32-inquiry-fire-newsom/
Maybe in this case, neither. In the wake of a major disaster, it’s neither performative nor being a dupe to investigate the situation to see what if any policy changes might be in order.
Yet Kevin insisting the water situation didn't matter...
Yet we know it didn't.
That doesn't mean we can't learn how much it would have taken, or how to position resources, or how we missed opportunities to drop retardant, or how each neighborhood fared based upon tree cover and maintenance...
The article says the announcement was about the water/water pressure:
Nothing about retardant or tree cover.
WaPo has a couple of stories in part blaming Federal policies for “decades of fire suppression”, allowing growth of fuel. From what I know of the area, I thought the main fuel problem in the hills is fast-growing (and fast-drying) shrubs and grasses. Also, would prescribed burns in close proximity to built-up areas decrease or increase risks? I’m skeptical that any jurisdiction would want to take the chance that a prescribed burn gets out of control.
While living in MA for 30 years I read a couple of interesting articles about cooperative fire fighting and policing. One of the problems is that not many towns, cities, or counties can afford to pay for the people and resources to put out a maximum disaster on their own.
So there was an elaborate communications network and protocol to link up equipment and people across towns and counties. If a major fire (for example) broke out, and strained the resources of one town, adjacent towns and cities would send units to help, and further outlying areas would go on alert to prepare to provide coverage for the areas sending their people and equipment to handle the emergency the next town over.