Palisades Fire - Los Angeles

[Anonymous]

The footage and stories are heartbreaking. I am so sorry to all who are affected. And I wish everyone else would stop making their pain worse.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:These homes start at $2.5M and go up rapidly from there. I bet most of these folks were self-insured.

This represents a huge, extremely wealthy chunk of the Los Angeles county tax base. Lots of families with young kids. It's as if a wild fire completely destroyed CCMD and adjacent neighborhoods in upper NW DC.

This disaster will upend Los Angeles's budget - lots of costs to clean up but also lots of these people will move away. It will only be partially rebuilt, likely with multi-family housing. The entire area will be rebuilt much differently.

No. They will remain single family homes. People rebuild. There’s no way pacific palisades, Malibu or anywhere near the Ocean front will be anything less than multimillion dollar property. This will not affect anything. These people love their lifestyle and paradise there.

If anything, the mildly rich will be replaced by the very rich.

Exactly. My family was never uber rich but comfortable upper middle class and wouldn’t be able to start over in the same place. Many neighbors were regular jobs like electricians and teachers who bought in the 70s, 80s, paid off home and continued on. They will never be able to rebuild and live in the same communities. It’s sad.

My friend in Palisades lost his home. It was a multimillion dollar home but that was his main asset. He doesn't have millions squirreled away to rebuild. A lot of people end up in the position that they could never afford to buy their own home even 5 years later with the way real estate prices increase. I don't know what these people will do, there are millions of them.

Same in FL. People just won’t come back or will sell at a loss.

What about insurance, won't it be covered? Or is there an exclusion because it's in a fire zone.

Insurance can also be kind of a trap in this situation - you can rebuild but if you can't re-insure you also can't sell because nobody will buy from you. That's probably not going to happen in Pacific Palisades, but it's possible. This is the case in some parts of Houston with flooding.

California Insurance oversight refused to let insurers raise rates, so the insurers did not renew plans after expiration.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is a scary fire in a dense area, but I understand Getty Villa is not on fire. Some trees on the property caught, is all.

Perhaps they should have taken down the overgrowth of trees?

They did. They had recently done fire prevention landscaping and thus the place didn't catch on fire.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The footage and stories are heartbreaking. I am so sorry to all who are affected. And I wish everyone else would stop making their pain worse.

It is horrible. We have rented a house there a few times and it looks like it is gone, or at least it is in the area the fire spread to. It breaks my heart because i loved this house I rented so much. I can't imagine what the owner is going through.

[Anonymous]

I mean, these fires didn’t magically happen. Someone dropped a cigarette somewhere or was grilling or burning something somewhere. Yes, the winds carried the embers across a dry area, but the fires started thanks to a human.

When they rebuild, they’ll need to enact fireproof legislation impacting structures, vegetation, smoking, etc. Density is an obvious culprit along with the weather (winds and drought). They can’t control the weather, so they need to attempt to better control the other variables.

[Anonymous]

Wind is fuel for fire so this situation really is the direct result of everything that could go wrong did. It's not really preventable - not this scale of fire. And anything could have caused it even a piece of broken glass that sparked and with winds spread it.

That said, when people choose to live in a historically blazing fires kind of area like next to beautiful forests, canyons, etc, you know one day this will happen. It's just tempting fate. Same as living in Asheville. You have to look at the entire picture, history, current global climate situation and put it all together.

Humans always want ti be in a beautiful place but that doesn't mean it's the right place for humans to be. But we humans def have a prob in that there's just too many people on this earth.

I think some of it is climate change, some just natural occurrence, some bad luck and it was a matter of time. The DMV is prob one of the safer places but there's no place truly safe. Statistically, from the context of safety zone given natural disasters, it ranks pretty high. Living on the beach in N Carolina? Pretty low. It's just common sense when you get down to it.

It's sad what's happened but it will happen again and again. You can't actually stop nature from being nature.

[Anonymous]

So when the right is politicizing this and claiming that the Dems in charge cut the LAFD budget...they are lying.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/wildfire-threatens-karen-bass-extended-honeymoon-00197228

Bass also took heat from far-left activists online, who accused the mayor of cutting the fire department’s budget in order to pay for a costly new contract with the city’s police. Also weighing in against her was Patrick Soon-Shiong, the politically idiosyncratic owner of the Los Angeles Times, who echoed the attack, posting on X that “the Mayor cut LA Fire Department’s budget by $23M.”

That assertion is wrong. The city was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted, so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund until that deal was finalized in November. In fact, the city’s fire budget increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget cycle, according to Blumenfield’s office, although overall concerns about the department’s staffing level have persisted for a number of years.

[Anonymous]

Some 95% of wildfires in the area are started by humans, according to David Acuna, a battalion chief at the Californian Fire Service, although officials are yet to state how they think the current fires started.

The dry weather and winds exacerbate the situation, but “a piece of glass” carried by wind didn’t start multiple fires in different areas.

The fires are so massive that they aren’t likely to be able to pinpoint the cause unless they have video footage or eyewitnesses.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I mean, these fires didn’t magically happen. Someone dropped a cigarette somewhere or was grilling or burning something somewhere. Yes, the winds carried the embers across a dry area, but the fires started thanks to a human.

When they rebuild, they’ll need to enact fireproof legislation impacting structures, vegetation, smoking, etc. Density is an obvious culprit along with the weather (winds and drought). They can’t control the weather, so they need to attempt to better control the other variables.

It could be caused by many things - a piece of glass, a back firing truck, lightning, landscaping equipment, smouldering compost. There were wildfires before humans existed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Wind is fuel for fire so this situation really is the direct result of everything that could go wrong did. It's not really preventable - not this scale of fire. And anything could have caused it even a piece of broken glass that sparked and with winds spread it.

That said, when people choose to live in a historically blazing fires kind of area like next to beautiful forests, canyons, etc, you know one day this will happen. It's just tempting fate. Same as living in Asheville. You have to look at the entire picture, history, current global climate situation and put it all together.

Humans always want ti be in a beautiful place but that doesn't mean it's the right place for humans to be. But we humans def have a prob in that there's just too many people on this earth.

I think some of it is climate change, some just natural occurrence, some bad luck and it was a matter of time. The DMV is prob one of the safer places but there's no place truly safe. Statistically, from the context of safety zone given natural disasters, it ranks pretty high. Living on the beach in N Carolina? Pretty low. It's just common sense when you get down to it.

It's sad what's happened but it will happen again and again. You can't actually stop nature from being nature.

I agree. Automatically blaming everything on "climate change!" is now akin to saying "climate change ate my homework." You can't ignore that a great deal of the climate-related problems is really due to massive population growths in areas with high climate risks. No one paid attention to hurricanes in Florida 100 years ago because so few people lived in the swamplands that was much of the state. Now coastal Florida is endless developments and communities. Same with California. We forget too easily how new human settlement is in California, barely 150 years old in a land that is millions of years old.

Against the backdrop of time, the climate is always changing, the world is always going through warming and cooling spells, though I absolutely agree human consumption of fossil fuels can exacerbate it, but it's still happening one way or another. And the impacts are worse because there are many more people to be affected. Then add to it we have modern technologies allowing people to live in high climate risk areas that they shied away from in the past (air conditioning has a lot to be blamed for). But human memory is so short, so focused on today, and in this case, ignorant that we're talking about an ancient land and ecosystem that was untouched until a hundred years ago. Which is nothing but a mere nanosecond in the age of the world.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I do think it’s related to global warming (drought + higher temps longer)
I’m very surprised they didn’t or haven’t brought in federal forest fire crews sooner. Why not bring in national guard or military to truck in water?

Seems eerily similar to what happened in Hawaii.

Yes, fires like this occurring in January is related to a hotter planet. And we should expect to see more and more incidents like this in the coming years and decades.

I posted above a link to John Vallaint's "Fire Weather" which talks about the Fort McMurray fire but also provides a lot of insight into the complexity of fires like these which are essentially wildfires occurring in urban areas. Fires like this make their own weather, and fighting them is extremely complicated. In many instances, things that seem like they make sense to seasoned firefighters can have unexpected and counterintuitive effects. And almost no one has expertise in fighting these fires. Nothing about fighting them is simple or straightforward, and they move an unimaginable speeds, changing course unpredictably.

There will surely be years and decades of analysis into what happened and what went wrong. It will probably be possible to point to pretty much anyone with a modicum of power and blame them for something. But in reality, the world's climate is changing very fast, and we are unprepared for the consequences.

California has always had a volatile climate including years long droughts. The difference is that now we’ve put millions of people in to an entire that is literally adapted to deal with frequent fires (chaparral). It is irresponsible for people to ascribe these fires to climate change. https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more-than-200-years-scientists-say/amp/

Can’t it be both?

DP but when it’s 5% climate change and 95% fires have always occured here and the extreme human presence is making the damage appear worse/exacerbating conditions that lead to extreme fires (by for example using up all of the water from rivers, aquifers, etc.) then no, it’s not “both”.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wind is fuel for fire so this situation really is the direct result of everything that could go wrong did. It's not really preventable - not this scale of fire. And anything could have caused it even a piece of broken glass that sparked and with winds spread it.

That said, when people choose to live in a historically blazing fires kind of area like next to beautiful forests, canyons, etc, you know one day this will happen. It's just tempting fate. Same as living in Asheville. You have to look at the entire picture, history, current global climate situation and put it all together.

Humans always want ti be in a beautiful place but that doesn't mean it's the right place for humans to be. But we humans def have a prob in that there's just too many people on this earth.

I think some of it is climate change, some just natural occurrence, some bad luck and it was a matter of time. The DMV is prob one of the safer places but there's no place truly safe. Statistically, from the context of safety zone given natural disasters, it ranks pretty high. Living on the beach in N Carolina? Pretty low. It's just common sense when you get down to it.

It's sad what's happened but it will happen again and again. You can't actually stop nature from being nature.

I agree. Automatically blaming everything on "climate change!" is now akin to saying "climate change ate my homework." You can't ignore that a great deal of the climate-related problems is really due to massive population growths in areas with high climate risks. No one paid attention to hurricanes in Florida 100 years ago because so few people lived in the swamplands that was much of the state. Now coastal Florida is endless developments and communities. Same with California. We forget too easily how new human settlement is in California, barely 150 years old in a land that is millions of years old.

Against the backdrop of time, the climate is always changing, the world is always going through warming and cooling spells, though I absolutely agree human consumption of fossil fuels can exacerbate it, but it's still happening one way or another. And the impacts are worse because there are many more people to be affected. Then add to it we have modern technologies allowing people to live in high climate risk areas that they shied away from in the past (air conditioning has a lot to be blamed for). But human memory is so short, so focused on today, and in this case, ignorant that we're talking about an ancient land and ecosystem that was untouched until a hundred years ago. Which is nothing but a mere nanosecond in the age of the world.

Climate change is obviously real, and so is fire frequency increasing, high winds limiting possible intervention. It does not change the fact that there were too few firefighters and fire engines responding. Several local officials mentioned budget cuts being an issue, trucks out of commission waiting to be repaired, limits on overtime hampering inspections, tanks that bring water/water pressure to hydrants being low...So this is not a blameless situation. So many of these fires started tiny with embers and would have been stopped with rapid intervention.

[Anonymous]

What a tragedy. The devastation is palpable. I hope their nightmare ends soon.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Adam Brody and Leighton Meester lost their home. I guess I don't worry too much about wealthy celebrities who can always rebuild or buy elsewhere, but it must be a little traumatizing to lose your home. Hope people are being evacuated safely, and the regular folks will be able to recover from the massive financial hit.

A little? You think it would be A LITTLE traumatizing to lose your home? Obviously wealthy people will be much better able to handle the situation, but being rich doesn't make you immune to the pain of losing your belongings. Idiot.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Why aren’t fire mitigation systems installed as part of the public works systems, developments or private homes? Large water guns to create a barrier or cover a neighborhood?

I don't really understand what you have in mind - like a continuous spray? Water isn't unlimited - hydrants in some of these areas are already running dry as firefighters use them. And any active system would presumably require power and somebody to man it. Plus spraying water in 100 mpg gusts probably not effective.

I know this kind of fire is unfamiliar to east coasters, I'm not mocking. But it's much bigger and faster than you are imagining. You're basically asking why Florida doesn't have some kind of pump to keep hurricanes out.

As with hurricanes, there are new building methods that help. Burying the power lines would be a huge help, but that's expensive and CA allowed it's power utility to be privatized. This is really a story of climate change + bad infrastructure decisions.

Have you ever seen crop irrigation systems, they implement rotating water cannons to cover large swaths of land. Install some of these and only turn them on when a fire is happening and a neighborhood is in danger. It’s not a complex idea.

LOL asking someone from CA if they've seen a crop sprinkler. Uh, yes, I have.
I tried to nicely explain already, but it's clear you are not familiar with fires, the terrain, or the water or electricity situation. But sure, you solved it, good job.

Yeah, still not sure how this idea isnt better than nothing. A quick google search shows that apparently there are companies that do provide this service. Adapting it to be an integral part of a community’s infrastructure would make sense.

https://www.wildfirewater.com/

I think this area would be hard because it is all hills and houses. There isn't space to put a massive sprinkler system.

I assume planes can scoop up water from the ocean to fight the fire? I am not sure how that works.

No you can’t dump sea water all over the land because you will salt the soil and nothing will ever grow there again.

That’s actually EXACTLY what they’re doing. Dumping seawater, from helicopters, on the fire.

So you should probably stop pontificating from 3000 miles away.