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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Some useful interviews with experts in fire management. The finger-pointing on this thread is truly pathetic. We need a major overhaul in how we think about natural disaster response, and changes won't happen overnight.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/01/los-angeles-palisades-eaton/681269/

[quote]California, and Southern California in particular, has some of the most well-equipped firefighting forces in the world, which have had to think more about fire than perhaps any other in the United States. On his YouTube livestream discussing the fires, the climate scientist Daniel Swain compared the combined fleet of vehicles, aircraft, and personnel to the army of a small nation. If these firefighters couldn’t quickly get this fire contained, likely no one could. This week’s series of fires is testing the upper limits of the profession’s capacity to fight wind-driven fires under dry conditions, Swain said, and rather than call these firefighters incompetent, it’s better to wonder how “all of this has unfolded despite that.”

The reality is that in conditions like these, once a few houses caught fire in the Pacific Palisades, even the best firefighting could likely do little to keep the blaze from spreading, Michael Wara, a former member of California’s wildfire commission who now directs a climate-and-energy-policy program at Stanford, told me. “Firefighting is not going to be effective in the context we saw a few days ago,” when winds were highest, he said. “You could put a fire truck in every driveway and it would not matter.” He recounted that he was once offered a job at UCLA, but when the university took him to look at potential places to live in the Pacific Palisades, he immediately saw hazards. “It had terrible evacuation routes, but also the street layout was aligned with the Santa Ana winds so that the houses would burn down like dominoes,” he said. “The houses themselves were built very, very close together, so that the radiant heat from one house would ignite the house next door.”[/quote][/quote]

Not one person said one negative thing about the firefighters. The issue of lack of resources was pointed BY the firefighters!!![/quote]
The point is the SoCal fire department is one of the best equipped in the world. The magnitude of the challenge is simply extreme.[/quote]

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