this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
1003 points (99.1% liked)
Microblog Memes
6392 readers
2939 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
First, there are several fires, it's not one big one. A video cropped up showing a fire starting at the base of an Edison transmission line tower as the start of the Eaton fire. Whether that's the cause remains to be seen. The only almost confirmed arson was the Sunset fire (Hollywood Hills).
Even then, So Cal is on a record dry streak at the moment, with something like less than a quarter inch of rain since last May. Then the Santa Ana winds came, with a vengeance (75 mph sustained winds in some areas). When these winds come, humidity drops to near zero. All it takes is a tree knocking into a boulder, setting it loose down a hill, smacking a boulder and creating a spark that ignites already dry brush. We are already in the middle of a La Nina year (little to no precipitation), though the Santa Ana winds happen all the time, caused by high pressure in the Great Basin in northern Nevada with low pressure off the coast. Not staying climate change isn't a root cause of the intensity of these factors, but So Cal has a history of all these conditions.
Since California is richer than most countries of the world and these fires happen constantly, why don't they invest more into firefighting?
They have invested a lot, but these are nightmare conditions. Strongest wind storms in a decade, and hasn't rained in months. Nothing can be bought that can battle 100 mile an hour winds spreading fire faster than a car on a highway.
I hindsight they could've maybe done more controlled fires to lessen fire fuel, but that's an issue of planning and politics.
There is a large patchwork of different firefighting agencies within CA, notably city FDs, county FDs, forest FDs, hotshots, and others. However, when a fire breaks out and gets out of control, departments from all over swarm to help. When the Line fire ripped through my area back in September, we had crews from all over the country.
The problem with these fires is that there are quite a few going at the same time at a time of year where fire fighters are laying low after the fire season, but also too that conditions prohibited flying. On top of which, more firefighters have responded but the amount of damage in the first 24 hours was the most catastrophic, in which there wasn't time for outside agencies to respond.
Don't forget physics! Multiple fires going on at the same time means multiple teams draining the water supply at the same time. There was not enough pressure left to push the water uphill even with auxiliary pumps which allowed the fire to spread.
You underestimate how much open, undeveloped space there is in CA.
There's a bit more now.
Literally the definition of a fire sale. Despite the fact that maybe they shouldn't, the people in these areas have to money to rebuild almost immediately, and they absolutely will. A helping factor here is that the new homes will be built to current code spec, and will likely include improved fire defence measures (concrete siding, metal roofing, etc; a lot of the houses that went up still had wood shingle roofs that have been outlawed in CA for some time).
It’s a bigger state than you think.
What's even the point of this comment?