Comment by wakawaka28
1 day ago
The fire problem can be managed by burning or removing some of the dead wood, and building adequate water storage. Apparently California has been neglecting those two problems for decades.
1 day ago
The fire problem can be managed by burning or removing some of the dead wood, and building adequate water storage. Apparently California has been neglecting those two problems for decades.
The problem is the houses.
In lots of pictures from LA, there are green trees right beside burned out houses. The video in this NYT article is a great example: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/15/us/los-angeles-wildf...
One of the biggest problems are vents in the eves. Typically these vents have a single screen with a coarse mesh. Embers from fires easily pass through these vents, land on a surface, and start a fire.
Replacing the one coarse mesh with two or more layers of fine mesh significantly reduces the odds of an ember getting into the house.
This is a trivial improvement that dramatically increases survivability.
The real problem is the FIRE. The houses could be made fire-resistant, but making houses to be fire-resistant is going to be more expensive than managing the forests to reduce wildfires and storing more water. I don't believe that a tiny screen is going to make this huge difference you think it is. These fires are HOT and don't just catch houses on fire with little embers. They are hot enough to set wood and plastic on fire from a pretty good distance away. Green trees don't easily burn because of their high water content. Trees have evolved to survive fires as well.
It could also be helped by not building houses out of cardboard.
The amount of walls in Europe that you could punch a wall into is low enough that you shouldnt try.
And give many of Europe's house's a small rattle and they would fall down.
I'm in Christchurch, 6.2 Earthquake in 2011 and wooden framed houses dealt with it pretty good - they flex - lots of the houses survived and are still used.
Just about anything old and bricky was a deathtrap (fortunately many were unoccupied because condemned after nearby 2010 Earthquake).
We had some earthquakes before, I was on the 10th level, you could feel the house "flex" in a way. Nothing happened and it's been standing there since Soviet Union or longer (obviously with maintenance).
We don't get many earthquakes here though, we do get storm but it doesn't cause power outage at all.
And considering most of Europe is basically low risk territory, it makes sense?
Afaik, only Turkey and a small part of the Balkans is considered earthquake territory. And there's no fracking in Europe to induce minor manmade earthquakes either.
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> And give many of Europe's house's a small rattle and they would fall down.
In areas where we don't have earthquakes, yeah, what's the problem?
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Frankly, this is just an ignorant take. Put Twitter/Elon Musk down for a bit. The Palisades Fire was not a forest fire. Please dispel your myths and learn what 60-80 mph winds, sometimes 100 mph gusts, can do.
While having above ground power lines
While having unmanaged accumulated flammable brush
While having an empty reservoir under repair
While having the public water source unable to maintain water pressure for multiple hydrant usage
While having too few fire fighters dispatched in the area anyway
While having houses made out of wood
is it an ignorant take when the houses not made out of wood with their own watersource were able to withstand 100mph wind gusts and firestorm? it really really makes everyone else look ignorant
All of those are a result of American's favorite hobby though, not maintaining infrastructure, because ooh no taxes. LA has not raised enough revenue for decades it seems. The amount of pot holes in even the most expensive neighborhoods was already to damn high.
At some point the US really needs to do bit of cultural reform so they can start paying for all that low density development and the costs associated with it. So stuff can actually be maintained.
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Peak internet right here. I’m out
Frankly, everyone has been warning about the risk for years. The fire started as a forest fire (whether it was arson or not), and was anticipated by insurance companies who dropped policies on thousands of people in the months leading up to this. The winds are a big problem of course, but if there were not so many acres of kindling around the city along with insufficient water reservoirs, then a fire like this could not spread as easily as it did. I will give you that the fire could have still happened and been bad either way, but insurance people who literally study this stuff for a living and have skin in the game knew it was likely to get out of control well in advance.