← Back to context

Comment by kristjansson

17 hours ago

1. Santa Ynez may have helped, however (a) you're still limited by the flow rate of the main to withdraw from the reservoir, but more critically (b) the situation was already well out of hand before any hyrdants ran dry and (c) Eaton had so such issues with hydrants, but a substantially similar outcome.

2. 'defunded' -> about a 2% reduction. Also it's not 100 fire engines, 100 appartus, which covers ambulance, command cars, etc, and it's not clear what exactly is waiting for maintainence.

3. The Mayor doesn't drive fire engines. LAFD and LACoFD prepositioned according to their models, per the chief.

4. most of the LA fire wasn't forest, but chaparral, which is lower, scruby-er, brushy-er terrain. It tends to burn on a 30-50 year cycle, but burning too much more often destroys the ecoology entirely. Indeninous practice and some research[1] suggest small patch-burning; others (NPS) avoid prescribed burns in chaparral in favor of natural fire and structure defense. So it's not clear that there's an unambiguously better management practice than "its gonna burn sometime" combined with aggressive brush clearance and defense around structures.

re: 2/3 Los Angeles (City mostly, but also County) clearly need a bigger fire department, with more people, stations, and equipment. But the specific complaints are ticky-tacky at best, and (AFAIK) no one asserts that a differnt pre-deployment, or a few more engines in service would have changed anything but the margins. I will say LAFD letting their first shift go off-duty as scheduled while LACoFD kept their shift on is an unfortunate unforced error.

re: 4 USFS (and maybe Cal Fire too? not sure). did halt prescribed burns in October 24 in the face of opposition on liability and air quality grounds. Hopefully the LA fires drive people to reconsider their resistance to prescribed burns, and creates the necessary risk-bearing structures for Cal Fire and USFS to actually perform them.

[1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr05...

3 comments

kristjansson

Reply
gibsonf1  17 hours ago

Not sure why you would want to make excuses for management incompetence.

Do you agree that if Santa Ynez reservoir had been full as it should have been, that there would have been no issues with fire hydrant water flowing for the Palisades?

Also, do you agree that in the case of private providing of water during the fire, that an entire mall was saved because of that? [1]

Do you agree that a mayor who promised during the election that she would not travel out of country, that then does travel out of country after extreme fire warnings, is not ideal?

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14280517/Palisades-...

Water is quite important for fire fighting. Why spin this, the facts are just too clear this time.

Even if you support the entire governmental structure involved ideologically, do you really want to trust them with your life at this point?

  • kristjansson  16 hours ago

    > mayor

    I don't care about Bass. She has no role to play in an emergency besides telling the LAFD chief 'go fight the fire with all available resources' LAFD wasn't even the largest fire department responding, and we haven't heard a peep about LACoFD or the county supervisors.

    > If the reservoir had been full

    >> you're still limited by the flow rate of the main to withdraw from the reservoir

    >> the situation was already well out of hand before any hyrdants ran dry.

    To expand for your benefit, they were 6-8 hours into the firefight before the hydrants became an issue and ~15-17 hours in before the tanks were fully exhausted.

    >> Eaton had so such issues with hydrants, but a substantially similar outcome.

    So no, I don't think water supplies supply made a difference at all. If you have the people, and the apparatus to dedicate to wholly one structure, you probably can save it. The actual firefighters were simultaneously fighting hundreds of house fires while a linear hurricane blew it all further and and further down the hill. They had to make the deploy the (region's worth of) resources had they could in the face of an awful situation that would have overwhelmed a state's worth of firefighters.

    > Water is quite important ... Why spin this

    Please engage with the reality of the situation instead of the simplified fantasy you've imagined in its place.

    > why you would

    Because I started seeing these talking points on night of the 7th. Certain factions were and are absolutely thrashing to attach blame anyone and anything they previously disliked. There are policy lessons to take from this disaster. LACoFD and LAFD need to be bigger, we need much more brush clearance, we need fewer NIMBYs to complain about the smoke from prescribed burns, ... the list goes on. But these real, essential changes are not shaped like 'one simple trick to stop the LA fires' or a getting gotchas all the woke dem pols.