RIP. Greenville, Berry Creek, Big Creek, Paradise California

[Stealth_Chopper]

Will your state let your hometown burn to the ground?

 

[The fingers]

Recall.

 

[nicobie]

Most of the fires were started or are on federal owned land.

trump wanted the leaves raked.

 

[neptronix]

This isn't about Trump. :|

As someone who grew up in California, it is sad for me to see the effects of poor management of the state out there. If the government doesn't come up with a way to stop the fires early before they get out of control, a sizeable portion of the state's ecosystem could collapse.

Both the BLM and the west coast governments need to come up with better ideas instead of redirecting blame.

I am personally tired of getting choked out by California's fires despite moving 1000 miles away from it. It's worse than the smog my state produces.

 

[Hillhater]

We have had it down here also..lives and property lost big time .!
But this is just nature doing its thing, balancing the books of fuel vs fire risk.
Sometimes we humans have caused the fuel build up ( snuffing out smaller fires, & “protecting” parklands ) . ...sometimes Nature just lets things go too long.
But there always have been fires, and there will always be more in the future....unless you can figure out a way to stop trees , grass, and shrubs etc growing ?
We live with Nature ..and she sets the rules ..Fire, flood, drought, earthquake, Tornado’s etc etc.

 

[neptronix]

We have pretty good drone technology and satellites hovering every inch of the earth. You'd think it'd be easy to catch a fire quickly with tools like those.

It would greatly reduce the amount of resources we spend fighting fires when they're big, to squash them when they are small.

Nature does need to clear things out every once and a while, so we do have to let some burns happen.

 

[Hillhater]

Spotting fires is possible in many ways.... its the stopping them that is the problem.
Fires that start in remote locations, rough, steep, inaccessible terrain, etc..are impossible to reach and extinguish completely.
Even some easily accessible fires can be uncontrollable, if the ground fuel load is high, no matter what resources are available.
Anyone who has been within a 100m of a full blown major forrest fire will tell you you are at the mercy of the wind and weather, or an ocean shore, to halt its progress. Fire breaks, rivers , and lakes, are not effective if the wind is strong.

 

[Voltron]

Having people intentionally setting fires around the Dixie fire and adding to it sure isn't helping. One person was caught actually setting one upwind of some firefighters, trying to cut them off...

 

[Hillhater]

You can control or even eliminate some of the sources of ignition.. arson, campfires, cigarretts , powerline failures, etc etc
..But you can never control ALL of them such as lightening which is one of the most frequent forrest fire starter.
Add to that the other essentials for a fire to burn,..
..oxygen (air) impossible to eliminate..
... and fuel (eg, dry timber) which is also difficult to eliminate....BUT is the only factor we humans can have any impact on to control the extent of a fire.
IE, management of forrest floor fuel loads is the only tool we have to prevent these fires getting out of control .
Otherwise, the safest solution is to simply no live in an area where a fire could trap and destroy you.

 

[neptronix]

Having people intentionally setting fires around the Dixie fire and adding to it sure isn't helping. One person was caught actually setting one upwind of some firefighters, trying to cut them off...

Yeah i read that. I hope those guys are facing life sentences. That's a sick thing to do.

 

[Hillhater]

....I hope those guys are facing life sentences.

Interesting to see what does happen to them.
Similar events down here tended to fizzel with a few fines, community service sentences, warnings, etc and generally forgotten by the MSM since it didnt support their main story which was always.... “global warming”,.”.global warming” !

 

[neptronix]

Well i would agree that global warming is a factor but then there's also:

1) Assholes
2) Idiots
3) Large swaths of mostly unsupervised land which may or may not contain items #1 and #2
4) The increasing extraction of any potential source of useable water, which gradually dries a place out by interrupting the cycle of water.

But so far, assholes are the #1 cause of how these fires got started, with idiots coming in at a close second. many decades of statistics support this assertion. The news would rather talk about fear and blame than solutions for the future to prevent this though..

 

[Stealth_Chopper]

Fire?
&
Maybe the worst winter since . . .?

 

[Stealth_Chopper]

Weed, California, USA burned down today, conflagration?, after a lumber mill fire.
My first impression is it's not a forest or brush fire, rather from building to building as in more populated areas.
What could stop that? Maybe a homeowners generator powered house fire suppression system with well fed sprinklers?
Or nothing?

 

[Stealth_Chopper]

Will your state let your hometown burn to the ground?

May I ask if your Mayor let your home be looted and burned today ?
Wildfires in California are completely uncontrollable with the men and machines available from my observations year after year.
Millions of acres everywhere every year every 'Santa Anna Wind' and then another year goes by without clear cutting the whole landscape down to nothing because: it will burn up your house, business and kill people, animals and create pollution.
Mow it down like the huge herds of cattle and horses used to on the Ranchos while men cut lumber for fuel.

 

[Chalo]

Mow it down like the huge herds of cattle and horses used to on the Ranchos while men cut lumber for fuel.

Yeah, that's worked out really well for Haiti and Madagascar, hasn't it? Maybe move to one of those.

In coastal California, it would trade wildfires for mudslides. But hey, at least it would reduce property values and overcrowding, as self-respecting people move away.

 

[jonescg]

Every summer in Australia we have the same argument about forest management, firefighting, global warming and blame.
But a couple of points to note are that these fires are epically devastating in the dead of winter. Nobody had full fire management mode switched on because... it was winter.

Nep - I agree we have the satellite technology to remotely kill kids in Gaza - we can easily use it to extinguish fires before they become epic. We also have to start keeping aerial firefighting tools locally because the hemisphere's fire seasons are overlapping now. And make our homes more bushfire-resistant than ever before.

Fuel reduction burns have been happening in Western Australia for decades. We still get catastrophic fires that takes lives and property. Even areas that were burned the year before were able to host a disastrous fire. And they're causing further biodiversity loss. If any field of study had the most armchair experts, forest fire management has to be a contender.

 

[neptronix]

I've been seeing news on this more recent one in California.

Apparently the humidity was hovering around the 5-15% range when it broke out.
I see why people would start screaming global warming, but..
That is kinda weird.

I live in the high desert with little water around and at no point during the year does the humidity get below 20%. That part of California is right next to the ocean.

I don't understand how it could get that dry there.

Nonetheless, leave it up to government to make it worse. The reservoir normally used for firefighting was drained. Local fire fighting efforts were puny and they had to bring people in from Canada and Oregon apparently.. and way too late.

The worst part; California law doesn't allow insurers to raise prices on their own. They have to get CA Gov's approval. CA Gov denied a rate increase for these owners, so the insurance company pulled out of the area because they would lose money on the deal if they kept the rates the same. These homeowners technically couldn't insure the houses for this reason. So they're screwed.

Nep - I agree we have the satellite technology to remotely kill kids in Gaza - we can easily use it to extinguish fires before they become epic. We also have to start keeping aerial firefighting tools locally because the hemisphere's fire seasons are overlapping now. And make our homes more bushfire-resistant than ever before.

Right, since i posted that 4 years ago, we've invented AI and built it to a level where it'd be pretty good at watching a network of satellites and initiating a response very quickly, and made drones better.

The potential is there but the imagination and interest is not.

Despite the bickering in Australia's govt you mention, at least people are thinking about and implementing solutions to the problem. An imperfect implementation of fire control is better than what we saw here.

 

[neptronix]

Side note, looks like firefighting drones are already a thing:

Autonomous? not yet.

 

[jonescg]

We have a lot of housing on the rural fringe. They want the rural lifestyle but can't leave the urban amenity, so they recreate the farm in the suburbs. It's a pretty faithful recreation in that it's got the same vast fields of not much with even fewer resources to service them. The number or ratepayers per hectare is low, so councils can't fund the services needed.

If 'missing middle' medium density housing was more affordable in our cities, we simply wouldn't have this problem.

 

[marvin78]

I don't understand how it could get that dry there.

Being next to an ocean doesn't mean it's wet. If so, we wouldn't have the Sechura dessert in Peru next to the Pacific Ocean or the Namib Desert in Namibia next to the Atlantic.

The humidity was due to 'unusual' lack of precipitation ( same reason those desserts exist, even with an ocean next to them as long as that moisture doesn't form into precipitation it might as well not be there. And there can be many reasons being next to a water source not leading to having a wet or even temperate climate.

Antarctica is a dessert.

So lots of very dry fuel waiting to burn, and strong winds.

The worst part; California law doesn't allow insurers to raise prices on their own. They have to get CA Gov's approval. CA Gov denied a rate increase for these owners, so the insurance company pulled out of the area because they would lose money on the deal if they kept the rates the same. These homeowners technically couldn't insure the houses for this reason. So they're screwed.

Isn't there a 'catch all' insurance for those who for profit insurance companies will not engage with. I read something about that somewhere. Also, just me being curious...

Copilot ->

Why did Newsom not allow insurance companies to raise their tarrifs

Governor Gavin Newsom's administration has been working to address California's insurance crisis, particularly in areas prone to wildfires. The state has faced a significant exodus of insurance companies, with many pausing new policies or pulling out of California entirely due to rising wildfire risks and pandemic-induced inflation2.
To stabilize the market and ensure homeowners can obtain coverage, Newsom's administration has proposed measures to streamline the approval process for insurance rate changes. This includes shortening the time state officials can take to act on proposed rate changes, making it easier for insurance providers to adjust their policies and premiums2.
However, there has been opposition to these measures, with critics arguing that allowing insurers to raise rates more quickly could lead to unjustified rate increases3.
If you have more questions or need further details, feel free to ask!

.. I know putting value on llm's answers above real people is rather silly, but why is this large language model telling me the exact opposite? What's going on here, llm's to dependent on all those 'msm articles'?

The potential is there but the imagination and interest is not.

That is true about a lot of things, but in most of those cases there is an economic incentive to do nothing. Here the incentive should be to do something, to prevent the damages ( and for the insurance companies -> prevent having to pay out large amounts of money ).

Following the logic that for-profit insurance will always maximize it's profits over anything else, I'm of the strong believe that it's apparently more lucrative to do nothing.

Either that, or those who foot the eventual bills aren't capable of influencing that which needs influencing.

Either way, even with 'early detection', you're far from out of the woods. As others pointed out, terrain might be inaccessible, and even if not if the amount of fuel is high enough and it's dry enough, good luck containing that.

Prevention, clearing dry undergrowth ect, is very labor intensive.

The only real solution is, just as with insurance companies no longer offering policies to people 'willing' to live on coastal barrier islands in prone hurricane paths, to not live in area's which are prone to fires.

Fighting the conditions which makes those fires dangerous is just to labor intensive if even possible.

We'll see more regions experience these exceptional conditions, like the flash floods we saw in Spain.

 

[jonescg]

Perth is right next to the sea as well. During one of four crazy heatwaves last summer the humidity in the Perth Hills was single digits!


Similarly, on the east coast, we have what's known as the 'Sydney Basin'. As the name implies, it's a major confluence of rivers on a floodplain with a single river to drain any precipitation to the sea. It was magnificent alluvial land for growing food, and whenever that happens, houses happen soon after. Oh, it's also a floodplain.

But the mass relocation of 2 million people isn't going to happen, so insurers just increase premiums or refuse to insure homes against floods.

So yeah, we do this to ourselves.

 

[Stealth_Chopper]

We have pretty good drone technology and satellites hovering every inch of the earth. You'd think it'd be easy to catch a fire quickly with tools like those.

It would greatly reduce the amount of resources we spend fighting fires when they're big, to squash them when they are small.

Nature does need to clear things out every once and a while, so we do have to let some burns happen.

Hi, it seems that "Urban, heavily populated Hollywood has uncontrolled fire" BTW and the Boulevard by LA City Fire .
"Flee the fire on Hollywood Boulevard"

 

[neptronix]

The humidity was due to 'unusual' lack of precipitation ( same reason those desserts exist, even with an ocean next to them as long as that moisture doesn't form into precipitation it might as well not be there. And there can be many reasons being next to a water source not leading to having a wet or even temperate climate.

Yeah but 5-15% humidity is still weird when you're literally on the coast.



Apparently this isn't as freakish as i think it is, according to these records from JonesCG.

Isn't there a 'catch all' insurance for those who for profit insurance companies will not engage with. I read something about that somewhere. Also, just me being curious...

Not that easy. A house is super expensive to insure. This is an upper class area, so they're even more expensive.

The only real solution is, just as with insurance companies no longer offering policies to people 'willing' to live on coastal barrier islands in prone hurricane paths, to not live in area's which are prone to fires.

LA area is nowhere near as risky to live on as a barrier island, it's a major population center in the USA.

Key problem: California's government removed these people's ability to buy insurance. Companies were willing to sell a policy; California's government said no, you can't sell it, the price is too high. Months earlier, these people lost their insurance due to that.

The city was also unable to provide a response to the fire. They were expected to, but didn't.



By the way, this is not some indefensible outpost, this is the edge of the Los Angeles area.

LLMs aren't capable of learning in real time, and the less they know about something, the more they hallucinate. I hope you aren't using a LLM as a primary information source.

 

[marvin78]

LA area is nowhere near as risky to live on as a barrier island, it's a major population center in the USA.

.. and population centers are often not located in 'optimal' places. See the floodplain bassin example above. Or do you think New Orleans was built in the best spot for a city?

It's the same thing for my entire country, we didn't pick the 'best spot' in terms of safety we picked the best spots because of economic reasons and as such we're constantly dealing with water, both from the major rivers which we house the delta's off as with the sea level which is already higher as most of the country. We're fine for now ofc, but I can't say with certainty that will be the case in a few centuries.

You think for-profit insurance is the way to deal with this risk? Or would it be better if we accepted we choose our initial settling spots based on necessity and not always out of 'best judgement'. Roughly 1/3rd of us people world wide 'choose' to live within 20km of a coastline. We're not choosing based on what would keep us safer. And there is no amount of insurance which will fix that.

I feel a bit like wanting to put that burden on insurance is just giving the middle finger to the normal people who wouldn't be able to afford it anyway.

Yeah but 5-15% humidity is still weird when you're literally on the coast.

The driest dessert is Antarctica iirc. Just saying, proximity to bodies of water does not imply higher humidity.

The city was also unable to provide a response to the fire. They were expected to, and they could, but didn't.

'they were expected to' -> I don't think everyone actually did, I think this is a false consensus pushed by certain politically aligned media. I don't think anyone really expects people to beat mother nature's fury. People might have expected that it could eventually be contained, but not that 'this is not supposed to happen'. And those outlets which are pushing this narrative, are just following a political agenda.

'they could' -> from the information I have gathered, they could not.

'they didn't' -> because they couldn't.

Off course people can claim that 'if we invested billions into proper firefighting capacity, this wouldn't happen' but you can't blame Newsom for that.

If you really want to know why there wasn't that much water available, the reason for that is not mismanagement by the city but mismanagement on a much higher level where 80% of the water is used for agriculture... putting a lot of money into the hands of very few people.

Bet those firefighters would have liked that water pressure, but hey people want their pistachio's it seems more then they care about other things.

LLMs aren't capable of learning in real time, and the less they know about something, the more they hallucinate. I hope you aren't using a LLM as a primary information source.

I am using it as example to showcase what someone needs to use for information when they are from another part of the planet See it as a sign post for people to post more sources with their claims, it will help people from other regions and prevent them from having to ask Bing / ChatGpt because as you say they do hallucinate a lot and are very good at confirming underlying insinuations in questions even if completely off the mark.

edit: I did read the Politica link it gave as reference, and everything there looked legit. 'Newsom didn't allow higher premiums' might be 100% true, but it's very much intentionally leaving out additional context. Even if you allow for profit insurance to have outrageous policies only affordable by the filthy rich, what influence would this have on current and future coverage for normal people?

edit2:

Well i would agree that global warming is a factor but then there's also:

1) Assholes
2) Idiots
3) Large swaths of mostly unsupervised land which may or may not contain items #1 and #2
4) The increasing extraction of any potential source of useable water, which gradually dries a place out by interrupting the cycle of water.

5. population growth directly influencing all the above points