Comment by gibsonf1
13 days 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?
> 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.
Hmm, you think the mayor defunding the fire department had no role to play in this?
Don't you find it curious that the mall to fully survive the fire without damage had private fire fighters with water? [1] Doesn't this imply that had the FD had water they could have prevented damage?
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14280517/Palisades-...
> the mall
>> 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
> had the FD had water
>> 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.
To elaborate further for you, that means a huge portion of the damage took place before hydrants were an issue. Furthermore once there was an issue, the professional firefighters had the same exact same sort of mobile water tankers supplying them as the private company you mentioned. No professional firefighter has indicated that more water availability would have materially changed the situation.
> defunded
>> about a 2% reduction [YoY].
>> Los Angeles (City mostly, but also County) clearly need a bigger fire department, with more people, stations, and equipment.
Elaborating, in general I think Crowley and Park are completely correct, that LAFD staffing should have kept better pace with population growth. That's a much broader and more diffuse problem though - that of the FD being able to keep up with their day-to-day mission.
However, even if LAFD had kept pace, and therefore was 50% bigger than it is currently, that doesn't substantially increase the response. LAFD is already not the largest FD in the area, and the mutual aid system pulled in LACoFD and many surrounding FDs. A 50% larger LAFD increases the size of the response by <<50%. In the morning after the Eaton fire, one of the commanders outlined the problem thus: a typical structure fire needs multiple engines for multiple hours. Fighting every concurrently structure fire would have demanded thousands of engines - in his estimation more engines than exist in the state, nevermind in Los Angeles and neighboring counties.
So on the specific point: of course -2%YoY funding shifts the margin slightly, and Crowley is right to complain that every dollar will shift the margins of the department's capability, and of the day-to-day mission will feel the shift in margins. But no counterfactual policy choice short of "we spend the next 3 years' revenue on fire engines, and put them outside every home in the city" shifts the margin enough to make a difference to disaster of the scale experienced. So no, one responding FD cutting its budget by 2% played ~no role in the outcome.
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If you're not just trolling, or here to push whatever view you currently hold, please take a few minutes to understand what actually happened in these fires, and the realities of the situation on the ground. Stop looking for gotchas and start looking for solutions.