Another note about the Pacific Palisades fire. You may have seen pictures of roads choked with cars and wondered why there wasn't better evacuation planning. Maybe there should have been, but here's what the Palisades looks like:
There just aren't very many ways out. Aside from tiny Bowdoin St., there's Sunset Boulevard running through the middle and Pacific Coast Highway to the south. That's pretty much it. In the event of a massive evacuation, there just aren't many options for moving a lot of people to safety.
But it's worth noting that, despite some apparent mistakes, they got everyone out. Not a single person died during the evacuation.
We've had even worse situations in Australia, albeit not with the appalling loss of property at Pacific Palisades. The fires in Gippsland five years ago cut the only road into Mallacoota, trapping thousands of people who could only seek shelter on the foreshore while the town burned. At 9 am it was pitch black. Their ordeal went on for days before the military could get ships and choppers to evacuate them all.
There are countless other coastal towns serviced by a single road out to the coast from the main highway, through a forest. The same thing could potentially happen again one day. I live in one of them.
The Lahaina fire was also a wind-driven fire with a single road in/out, and the fire pushed down from the hillside straight to the ocean. Except, there was no evacuation order in Lahaina until the fires were already in Lahaina town. And despite the network of emergency sirens, they were never used.
When sirens are on fire, how do you gather to them?
You don't want to send the wrong message.
I'm not sure what you mean. They are used in conjunction to let people to know to tune in to emergency broadcasts on TV, radio, and wireless phone services. Without them, most people had no idea there was an emergency even though an emergency was issued.
Tsunami coming? Sirens first sound then the emergency broadcast is made.
Kevin's map shows Los Liones Canyon which had a lovely trail that was consumed by fire. NBC had a map showing the burn area. I wanted to spread word so went to X, found a benign post on Los Liones (LosAngeles_Scan) and went to post a map. Noticed the replies:
1 sympathetic
1 link to straightforward reporter
and these:
Have blacks and browns started looting yet?
Deport the illegals who did this
So when are we gonna get told this is most likely a terrorist attack?
every mexican has blood on their hands for this
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No way X survives as a general audience platform.
I get that MAGA/X trolls flock to political posts and big event stuff involving public officials (e.g. Newsom), but a status report about a small trail? Boy, they are desperate for attention, aren't they?
It's not just X, same thing happens on Next Door. I really don't think this is the work of humans, but bots (probably Russian, but who knows). Disruption has proven very effective.
It it's bots, they've been infesting local media since it had comments. And they're getting bolder and dumber.
I think the bots are teaching the humans. We are herd animals, when we see other members of the herd on the move, we follow without much thought.
Definitely we need more ways out.
Also, it was a left turn to get upwind.
Looking at the map, I noticed this SRF lake shrine and searched for its website. Hilarious.
I looked very hard for something hilarious in the SRF Lake Shrine website, but I didn't find it. I am reluctant to mock folks who don't share my beliefs, unless I am pretty sure they are incorrect, rather than just different.
Justin's a ghoul. His schtick is to call tragedy hilarious and/or recommend whenever the other side prevails that it's pointless to fight back and thus instead we should let them prevail even more.
Building additional roads, particularly through "undeveloped" areas, will be politically difficult. Protecting the natural habitat, migration pathways, sites of endangered plants and animals, and that kind of thing.
Of course, if large parts of the areas that need to be protected end up destroyed by the current fires, there might be less resistance to some carefully planned road building. The same is less likely in housing subdivisions destroyed by fire: after all, those folks still own the property.
Post remediation is impossible. New developments site approval must require adequate escape roads. Developers will fight that tooth and nail.
The little community I live in was developed 50 years ago. It is about 6 miles long at the edge of the American River Canyon. It is at the edge of the mixed grassland, oak and pine. Go up 1000 feet and the pines are the major trees and go down 1000 feet and the oak and grasses dominate.
The street system has 3 access roads out but they all dump into the same major road that every up hill community will use to escape. The interior roads have multiple dead end and looping streets. There are many similar communities on the west slope of the Sierras.