Two of my favorite and most knowledgeable bloggers have weighed in on the fires currently ravaging parts of Los Angeles. What they have to say is anything but comfortable . . . but it's true, and until that truth is addressed, the problem will simply recur. Let's take them in alphabetical order.
Karl Denninger observes:
At the end of the day life is about balancing risks, rewards and costs.
. . .
The same is true out in Southern California. Fires aren't new there and the Santa Ana winds are an annual phenomena that have occurred long before the California Gold Rush brought a large influx of humans. No, humans are not making it worse but we are putting more and more "stuff" of ever-increasing value in the way that can be destroyed. Couple high wind with dry conditions, given that part of the country is borderline desert, and you've got a high-risk environment with vegetation which reflects that and in some cases actually requires fire to propagate! Add to that state government policies that do not clear brush (on purpose!) and in other areas do not conduct control burns during the part of the year when high winds do not occur and you've got the natural environment and its oscillations -- including much larger fires simply because there's more fuel available and you refused to reduce said fuel load despite having the opportunity to do so in advance. Now add deliberate refusal to build out fire-suppression infrastructure (in this case California residents approved a bond issue many years ago to do exactly that but it wasn't done!) and you have all the ingredients for what is now occurring. If you want to know why insurance companies left they asked for rates that reflected this deliberate neglect and foolish set of decisions by said government agencies and, when you get down to it, the people who live there and kept voting those government agents into office. The firms had already taken large fire losses as a result and thus they had no evidence any of that would change. The rate adjustments were refused and thus their only sane option was to withdraw offering coverage and leave.
. . .
The remaining question is whether those impacted will force those who had responsibility for said mitigations, in many cases explicitly funded with tax dollars yet they did not act in accordance with their responsibilities and either did nothing or spent the funds elsewhere, to be held personally responsible for any and all of their malfeasance.
There appears to be plenty of that to go around.
There's more at the link.
Larry Lambert, writing at Virtual Mirage, has this to say.
In the 1950s, the average timber harvest in California was around 6.0 billion board feet per year. That number has dropped to ~1.5 billion board feet per year. California’s forests cover a third of the state and are now choked with nearly 163 million dead trees. California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and other regulatory policies limit the ability of local government and fire management services to clear dead trees and vegetation. (This is a big deal and prevents much of the controlled burns desperately needed.)
Multiple bills, including AB 2330, AB 1951, and AB 2639, were rejected by the Democrat-controlled legislature or vetoed by the Governor that would have exempted wildfire prevention projects from CEQA and other permitting issues. Other legislation, including SB 1003, would have provided CEQA exemptions for utility undergrounding projects, as power lines that are not adequately cleared of debris present creating wildfire risks. These bills also failed to reach the Governor’s desk. California has prioritized “suppression-only” strategies and failed to remove accumulated vegetation, leading to denser forests with increased fuel loads – our forests have become tinderboxes, leading to devastating outcomes when a fire starts.
The bottom line is that many of the wildfires CA experienced could have been prevented or significantly mitigated with better management, policies, and funding.
Again, more at the link.
And yet, despite the undeniable truth of both bloggers' comments, we see and hear plaintive cries from those who've lost their homes to the fire, "Why didn't the government do something to stop it? Why isn't the government doing something now to help us?"
My dear people, you voted that government into office, and you kept it there, with all its daft, ineffectual, touchy-feely, environmentally sensitive policies that doomed your neighborhoods to the death by fireball that they're currently enduring! When push comes to shove, it's your fault that your government isn't doing anything, because you elected politicians, and they appointed bureaucrats, who don't know how to do anything and are incompetent to act!
Do you think that truth will seep through into the California-dreamin' consciousness? Or is it too far gone to be able to distinguish reality from pie-in-the-sky happy dreams any more?
Peter
19 comments:
Stationed in Cali 2016-20 and was one hell of a hiker. What was common between the Los Padres, Santa Monica's, High Sierras and sequoias was the fire roads SUCKED. Ain't no way a truck could get up these poorly maintained, brush filled roads to put out fires. It's sad to see such natural beauty burn away but California government and the people who voted it in, are to blame every. single. year.
There are very few people in kommiefornia that think as you mentioned, about the truth of why the elected wonks are not the only problem, because they were voted in. Most of them are in the north part of the state, what some are calling Jefferson, but they are too few in number to effect change.
Like I told you several posts back.
Let the insurance companies let the entitled idiots' homes burn, with no coverage possible.
Then we'll have fewer entitled jackholes (you guess the missing word there) building homes in brush-choked wind-tunnel canyons, which burn every 5-10 years, who like having brush and oak trees inches from their multi-million $$ hillside estates "because it looks pretty", who won't let cities use eminent domain to widen the narrow streets enough to permit fire engines to get there, who elect more governmental idiots to oppose brush-clearing and controlled burns, nor fund sufficient infrastructure to make sure there's even water flowing in the hydrants at the top of those canyons, to use when you need it (like for semi-annual brushfires that have happened since Fr. Junipero Serra and Spanish conquistadors first arrived on the scene, and found out the local Indian name for the current San Fernando Valley was "the valley that smokes" because of the constant lightning-caused brushfires since time out of mind, thousands of years before Columbus).
The same idiots who won't broom out the homeless, who camp in the canyons smoking meth, and are too tweaked out to notice that 50MPH gust during the regular Santa Ana winds just blew their hillside campfire into a raging inferno, causing five out of every ten local fires to start, going back decades.
Please, hear me God! Let the fires burn unrestricted, and weed out the surplus of morons in those areas, and if possible, ship more of the morons into the fire zones while the flames rage, to preclude having to deal with them after it's all over, with their upturned palms looking for government relief paid for largely by the peons they moved to those mansions to escape.
If I were governor for a day, the aerial tankers would be dropping napalm and aviation gasoline around the clock for the entire day, until the problem self-corrected, and the hillsides looked like Hiroshima on August 7th, 1945.
Oh, and the survivors now? No points for guessing who'll be back next spring, when the scrubbed-bare hillsides predictably turn into mudslides and flooding, crying to anyone who'll listen about how terrible this is, instead of being forced into public struggle sessions to own up to their stupid life choices and cranio-rectal impaction issues.
Never have so many deserved to be crapped upon from a great height by the Flying Fickle Finger Of Fate.
And the government here is a symptom, not a root cause.
As I've said many times in the past and will probably say many times in the future:
A people always gets the government it deserves.
Yeah. I don't hold much hope for Califruitopia to change any time soon. Too many people who know better than the current crop are gone, never to return.
The smoke from those fires is a national problem.
Hard to argue with Raz0rfist's recent video that this is the fruit of their choices.
The real question is whether they are going to bother learning from this or not.
You can tell the difference between California and Florida easily. In 1998, Florida had a year of firestorms, and due to that we rewrote all the fire codes, all the prescribed burn regulations, building codes and all that jazz.
California? They ignore every huge fire season and double down on the stupid. Instead of allowing for brush to be cleared they, instead, fine owners for doing so. They continue building codes that require wood shingle roofs in fire territory. They dismantle dams and reservoirs. And then blame companies like PG&E for the damage caused by fires.
Dumbasses.
I have zero f**ks to give for all the entitled, wealthy, hypocritical leftists crying about losing their mansions. Hmmn, Eugene Levy, Steve Guttenberg, Billy Crystal . . . is there an echo in here? Let them reap what they've sown. Burn it all down and salt the ground.
Aesop is dead on, along with both commenters in the post. And don't forget the insurance issues, as the large companies dropped coverage for thousands of people due to the government's stand, so a lot of those homes have NO insurance...
CA, the most populous state in the Union, with ~40 million residents, has, dare I say, more conservatives within them that of many states.
The problem is a self-perpetuating cadre in government who imagine and seek to create a world of perfect harmony yet without consideration of the details of constructing and managing that glorious image. And they are never wrong, they'll tell you.
There are plenty of us THROUGHOUT the state who share the common sense gene Grog, and NONE OF US voted for ANY of the lunatics that inhabit Sacramento, LA, and San Fran! Fact is, folks like us don't ask "the government" to "do something." We take care of it OURSELVES!
They're convinced it's all the fault of global warming and Orange Man Bad.
Communists never learn, nor do the people who continually vote them into office.
This is possibly the last straw for Southern California because after this insurance rates are going to have to rise to levels that are generally unaffordable. They have to because the state of Ca has no money any more ($70B+ deficit for 24/25 ) and therefore cannot subsidize things without massive tax rises and the insurance companies have already told the state (see your previous article) that they have to raise rates to remain in the market
My estimate of the required amount is ~5%-10% of the cost to totally rebuild. On a $1M + home (of which there are many thousands in SoCal) that's $5000/month or more in insurance premiums
More at my substack - https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/firefighting-by-kristen?r=7yrqz
I feel for those who didn't vote their way into the mess. Regarding the others, however, hopefully those are a bulk of the cancelled and non-renewed insurance policies and they will consider rebuilding on their own in-place too expensive, especially at what building materials are likely to cost after the ashes and smoke settle.
But for EVERYONE in the area insurance in the future is going to be even harder to find. Wonder how many existing policies won't have sufficient underwriting for damages to be paid.
I live in the Los Angeles area, and while I am NOT a fan of the LA and state govenment, and agree that they don't manage forests properly, this set of fires was caused far more by the very high winds (gusts up to ~100 mph) and very low humidity (<10%) making to so that any fires that did start (arson, homeless, vehicle fires have all been identified as causes for some fire so far) are going to spread horribly fast. The wind blowing embers FAR further than any fire break would cover. And further than the area that the local firefighters could cover to be able to smother the small fires the embers start before they grew to big ones. The winds also grounded the aircraft that are the primary tool to get water on large fires.
Normal wildfires burn the wilderness areas and some houses surrounded by wilderness, but when they get to an urban area, the streets and yards make enough fire breaks that there is not a lot of damage (loosing hundreds of houses in a fire is very unusual, these fires have destroyed thousands).
Under the conditions of the last several days, these urban fire breaks have done very little to slow the fires, better fire roads/fire breaks in the hills would have done very little good.
Now, I don't argue that budget cuts in LAFD and it's focus on DEI made it's response less effective than it could have been, but under these weather conditions those problems wouldn't have made a huge difference and most of the area would still have burned even with the best prepared fire department you can imagine.
Pacific Palisades ran out of water, they had 3x 1m water tanks on the hills to feed their system, in that area any wildfire would normally be fought with helicopter water drops where they could dip the buckets in the ocean and fly a few minutes to drop it on the fire. The hydrants ran out of water some 15 hours into fighting the fire, but even if they had 3x the amount of water, most of the houses would still have been lost. The fire fighters trying to put water on the fires would have had to retreat as more fires started behind them.
We scoff at the Left when their answer to every fire is 'Climate Change', but many people on the right seem to be falling into the trap that the answer must be 'forest mismanagement'
David Lang
for those who say that people should not be allowed to build in a area subject to disasters, what location in the world isn't subject to fire/drought/flooding/tornados/hurricanes/blizzards/earthquakes/tsunami/etc? where do you think it's "safe" to live?
They supported and voted for dei commie libturds into gummint office. They are getting what they have voted for. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Heltau
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