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I really don't understand how SoCal and California residents in general find the the state's response to wildfires in the last decade to be acceptable. Not onl

I really don't understand how SoCal and California residents in general find the the state's response to wildfires in the last decade to be acceptable. Not only have fire departments seen cutbacks, but so has the forestry needed for preventative measures. What really bugs me is what I find to be a disinterest and lack of belief in vastly expanding the fleet of water dropping aircraft. Letting fires burn to the extent that they have been isn't cheap, to put it lightly. Somehow, a state that is one of the largest economies in the world can't or won't expand its aerial response such that fires of the scale we are seeing become a thing of the past. With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress. I can anticipate being told this is not possible or too expensive, which is what everyone I know seems to believe, but I don't buy it. If anyone ever runs for governor and makes my proposal their single issue platform, I will vote for them regardless of political party or whether it is truly feasible up to the extent that I am imagining. Fuck wildfires.

cameldrv 2y ago
Buying more firefighting equipment is like building a dam higher and higher every year as the reservoir fills up, instead of letting it drain out gradually. The natural cycle in California is for there to be periodic fires, but due to the policy of suppression, they haven't happened for 70 years or more, so now when they do, they are these massive infernos. Better and better fire suppression tech over the years that enables a quicker response, like aircraft, satellite monitoring, remote video cameras, etc, has just served to make the problem worse in the long run.
- nradov 2y ago
  That's not quite what's going on with these particular fires. They weren't caused by excessive fire suppression. Most of the terrain involved is chaparral rather than forest. The previous two years had relatively high rainfall which caused a lot of fast brush growth. This season has had much less rainfall so everything dried out, creating tinderbox conditions. In those areas we have to rely more on clearing defensible space around structures. https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE The forest management issues are valid but apply more to other parts of the state.
rurp 2y ago
It's not a binary choice between expanding aircraft and doing nothing. I have seen some convincing arguments that firefighting aircraft are mostly for show against large fires. Essentially the amount of water/chemicals they can move is trivial compared to land approaches, and the cost is significant. That doesn't mean that nothing should be done, just that the money should be spent on more effective measures. Lord knows I'm not going to defend the competence of the CA state govt and I'm sure they could be protecting against wildfires better, but I don't know that railing about the number of aircraft involved will help anything.
- WillPostForFood 2y ago
  Essentially the amount of water/chemicals they can move is trivial compared to land approaches I'm sure that's correct for many geographies, but most of this fire is burning on steep mountainsides and in canyons without road access, or an occasional dirt road and no water connection. With the amount of wind, probably nothing could be done, land or air, once this started. edit: Here is a glimpse of the terrain: https://x.com/firevalleyphoto/status/1876731317464760629 https://x.com/firevalleyphoto/status/1876731317464760629
  - amluto 2y ago
    Even the populated areas in the Palisades fire have roads that are remarkably poor. A lot of them are windy, with negligible visibility around corners, and are barely a single lane. I doubt that a fire truck can get through many of them easily even under ideal conditions.
fatbird 2y ago
California has a problem with overly aggressive fire suppression over the last 100 years creating a buildup of extra-flammable burnable areas. Literally, you need to let a certain amount of burning go on, continuously over time, so that the burnable areas aren't over-fueled tinderboxes that get very hot, very fast. Part of this is using controlled burns to mitigate the buildup, another thing that's been under-resourced in California. I had a discussion at a B and B with a guy who flew F-16s in the USAF, then U2s once they were going to promote him out of flying. He'd just left the service and had retrained to fly Grumman water bombers for Calfire. The problem as I've described it is apparently well-known in the wildfire fighting community in Californa.
- nradov 2y ago
  That's true in general but not really applicable to these fires. It's mostly chaparral that's burning, and most of the dry brush has built up over only a few years — not 100. We had two years of heavy rains that caused a lot of brush growth, and then this season it all dried out. Controlled burns in that terrain are impractical because there are too many structures nearby and a controlled burn can turn into an uncontrolled burn in minutes. A more realistic approach would be expanding defensible space and culling non-native flora. https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE
  - fatbird 2y ago
    Very good info.
  - hyeonwho4 2y ago
    Interesting. Wikipedia [1] also says that these biomes are supposed to have canopy fires rather than smaller burns. I'm a bit skeptical (seems awefully convenient), but it looks like the 500 year climate record supports this idea [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral [2] https://doi.org/10.1006/qres.1999.2035 https://doi.org/10.1006/qres.1999.2035 If this is the case, then homes in this biome need to be engineered to survive nearby canopy fires every few generations.
majormajor 2y ago
How much water do you need to dump enough to saturate all the territory that would need to be covered with wind gusts up to 100MPH? (How do you fly and aim the water in those winds?) Wildfires are obviously not new, if you're saying the fault is of the administration of the last 10 years, how do you explain that the earlier government for the fifty years prior ALSO failed to see and implement your "just dump the water everywhere from planes" approach to the fires in the 90s, say? We're, what, 13 years from terrible financials for the state and local governments that forced widespread major cuts and furloughs and reduction in hours? Everyone who's been hit by those can point to negative outcomes somewhere or other (crime is up! education achievement stats are down! wait times are up! etc) but there's no free lunch here to just have avoided any cutbacks in any area.
Syonyk 2y ago
Wildfires, unfortunately, have a way of "not caring in the slightest about what people think of them." Throw in the winds of southern CA, and a wildfire can go from "freshly started" to "a few thousand acres" by the time anyone manages to get their boots on and equipment started. You don't fight wildfires in 60-100mph winds. Firebombers can't fly in those winds (or at night, since it's close to terrain), and even if they did, that sort of wind will scatter your drop before it has a chance to do anything useful. > With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress. Great, you've just put out the fire, and kicked the can for next time. Even if it did work that way, it doesn't fix the root problem, which is simply: Many western forests need to burn. Not in the sort of uncontrolled canopy fires we see with this sort of situation, but a lower, "clean the brush out, candle off some weaker trees, and open up the seeds" sort of fire. The problem is, for most of the past century, we haven't been allowing them to burn. Wildfire fighting in the US really ramped up and became a capable force with the post-WWII surplus - Jeeps, bombers that could be bought for nothing and converted to fire bombers, cheap spotting aircraft. So, for about 80 years, we've been fighting fires - or, explained differently, "We've been letting fire load build up for 80 years." When those areas light, with most of a century worth of buildup, they go off like a bomb, and your option in high winds is to "get out of the way." You cannot allow endless fuel growth in a forest without consequences - and we're out of runway on that. All the aerial firefighting in the world won't fix that problem, because it's not the problem that needs fixing.
- defrost 2y ago
  Where I live we routinely do prescribed (planned) burns and aim to mosaic the landscape | fuel load regions to break up high load buildups. See (for example): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKsLRNbczJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKsLRNbczJY Cool burning's been going on for several thousand years (geolocked?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM72NtXxyLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM72NtXxyLs
  - throwup238 2y ago
mulmen 2y ago
The wind is too high for aerial firefighting. You could have every firefighting plane in the world in LA right now and it wouldn't matter. None of them can fly. Do you have some reason to believe more planes is the best allocation of resources?
nradov 2y ago
California recently acquired several C-130H firefighting aircraft. These are extremely expensive platforms and while they're useful for fast response in some scenarios they're hardly a complete solution. For these particular fires the winds were often too strong for air tankers to fly. Effective fire prevention and suppression requires a variety of different solutions. It would be foolish to focus on a single issue. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/08/26/c-130-hercules-is-now-fighting-california-wildfires/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/08/26/c-130-hercules-is-now-figh...
jonstewart 2y ago
Hundreds or thousands of planes??? “Federal agencies are responsible for managing 200 to 300 wildland fire aircraft.” - Nat’l Interagency Fire Center, https://www.nifc.gov/resources/aircraft https://www.nifc.gov/resources/aircraft “CAL FIRE’s fleet of more than 60 fixed and rotary wing aircraft make it the largest civil aerial firefighting fleet in the world.” — CAL FIRE, https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-protection/aviation-program https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-protection/aviation-...
- ravenstine 2y ago
  I was throwing out a number. Clearly, my perspective is that we need more water-dropping aircraft than we have or that we are borrowing.
perihelions 2y ago
Not an expert: I think one of the issues is that there's only a handful[0] of satellites with the appropriate infrared instruments, which means that any given point of Earth is only sampled at a multiple-hour cadence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Information_for_Resource_Management_System#Instruments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Information_for_Resource_... It's a generic problem for any sensing problem that's real-time + low-orbit. I speculate adding instruments to large LEO constellations, en masse, would solve that problem—though I have no clue if that's practical. (Perhaps if the same instrument were doing other kinds of real-time imaging, you could piggyback wildfire alerts on that datastream, and the get the functionality essentially for free?) edit: More info: - "Geostationary satellite sensors view the same area of Earth’s surface at all times while polar-orbiting sensors, such as MODIS and VIIRS, typically view the same area of Earth’s surface twice daily. Consequently, geostationary satellite sensors can provide repeated observations on a sub-hourly basis, making it possible to detect fires which may not be detected at longer temporal intervals. Geostationary satellites provide data at 10-15 minute intervals, so they can detect more fire events and capture their growth and change. However, the spatial resolution of geostationary satellite data is coarser and therefore less sensitive to small fires." https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/tools/firms/faq https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/tools/firms/faq

cameldrv 2y ago

Buying more firefighting equipment is like building a dam higher and higher every year as the reservoir fills up, instead of letting it drain out gradually. The natural cycle in California is for there to be periodic fires, but due to the policy of suppression, they haven't happened for 70 years or more, so now when they do, they are these massive infernos. Better and better fire suppression tech over the years that enables a quicker response, like aircraft, satellite monitoring, remote video cameras, etc, has just served to make the problem worse in the long run.

nradov 2y ago
That's not quite what's going on with these particular fires. They weren't caused by excessive fire suppression. Most of the terrain involved is chaparral rather than forest. The previous two years had relatively high rainfall which caused a lot of fast brush growth. This season has had much less rainfall so everything dried out, creating tinderbox conditions. In those areas we have to rely more on clearing defensible space around structures. https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE The forest management issues are valid but apply more to other parts of the state.

rurp 2y ago

It's not a binary choice between expanding aircraft and doing nothing. I have seen some convincing arguments that firefighting aircraft are mostly for show against large fires. Essentially the amount of water/chemicals they can move is trivial compared to land approaches, and the cost is significant. That doesn't mean that nothing should be done, just that the money should be spent on more effective measures. Lord knows I'm not going to defend the competence of the CA state govt and I'm sure they could be protecting against wildfires better, but I don't know that railing about the number of aircraft involved will help anything.

WillPostForFood 2y ago
Essentially the amount of water/chemicals they can move is trivial compared to land approaches I'm sure that's correct for many geographies, but most of this fire is burning on steep mountainsides and in canyons without road access, or an occasional dirt road and no water connection. With the amount of wind, probably nothing could be done, land or air, once this started. edit: Here is a glimpse of the terrain: https://x.com/firevalleyphoto/status/1876731317464760629 https://x.com/firevalleyphoto/status/1876731317464760629
- amluto 2y ago
  Even the populated areas in the Palisades fire have roads that are remarkably poor. A lot of them are windy, with negligible visibility around corners, and are barely a single lane. I doubt that a fire truck can get through many of them easily even under ideal conditions.

fatbird 2y ago

California has a problem with overly aggressive fire suppression over the last 100 years creating a buildup of extra-flammable burnable areas. Literally, you need to let a certain amount of burning go on, continuously over time, so that the burnable areas aren't over-fueled tinderboxes that get very hot, very fast. Part of this is using controlled burns to mitigate the buildup, another thing that's been under-resourced in California. I had a discussion at a B and B with a guy who flew F-16s in the USAF, then U2s once they were going to promote him out of flying. He'd just left the service and had retrained to fly Grumman water bombers for Calfire. The problem as I've described it is apparently well-known in the wildfire fighting community in Californa.

nradov 2y ago
That's true in general but not really applicable to these fires. It's mostly chaparral that's burning, and most of the dry brush has built up over only a few years — not 100. We had two years of heavy rains that caused a lot of brush growth, and then this season it all dried out. Controlled burns in that terrain are impractical because there are too many structures nearby and a controlled burn can turn into an uncontrolled burn in minutes. A more realistic approach would be expanding defensible space and culling non-native flora. https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE
- fatbird 2y ago
  Very good info.
- hyeonwho4 2y ago
  Interesting. Wikipedia [1] also says that these biomes are supposed to have canopy fires rather than smaller burns. I'm a bit skeptical (seems awefully convenient), but it looks like the 500 year climate record supports this idea [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral [2] https://doi.org/10.1006/qres.1999.2035 https://doi.org/10.1006/qres.1999.2035 If this is the case, then homes in this biome need to be engineered to survive nearby canopy fires every few generations.

majormajor 2y ago

How much water do you need to dump enough to saturate all the territory that would need to be covered with wind gusts up to 100MPH? (How do you fly and aim the water in those winds?) Wildfires are obviously not new, if you're saying the fault is of the administration of the last 10 years, how do you explain that the earlier government for the fifty years prior ALSO failed to see and implement your "just dump the water everywhere from planes" approach to the fires in the 90s, say? We're, what, 13 years from terrible financials for the state and local governments that forced widespread major cuts and furloughs and reduction in hours? Everyone who's been hit by those can point to negative outcomes somewhere or other (crime is up! education achievement stats are down! wait times are up! etc) but there's no free lunch here to just have avoided any cutbacks in any area.

Syonyk 2y ago

Wildfires, unfortunately, have a way of "not caring in the slightest about what people think of them." Throw in the winds of southern CA, and a wildfire can go from "freshly started" to "a few thousand acres" by the time anyone manages to get their boots on and equipment started. You don't fight wildfires in 60-100mph winds. Firebombers can't fly in those winds (or at night, since it's close to terrain), and even if they did, that sort of wind will scatter your drop before it has a chance to do anything useful. > With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress. Great, you've just put out the fire, and kicked the can for next time. Even if it did work that way, it doesn't fix the root problem, which is simply: Many western forests need to burn. Not in the sort of uncontrolled canopy fires we see with this sort of situation, but a lower, "clean the brush out, candle off some weaker trees, and open up the seeds" sort of fire. The problem is, for most of the past century, we haven't been allowing them to burn. Wildfire fighting in the US really ramped up and became a capable force with the post-WWII surplus - Jeeps, bombers that could be bought for nothing and converted to fire bombers, cheap spotting aircraft. So, for about 80 years, we've been fighting fires - or, explained differently, "We've been letting fire load build up for 80 years." When those areas light, with most of a century worth of buildup, they go off like a bomb, and your option in high winds is to "get out of the way." You cannot allow endless fuel growth in a forest without consequences - and we're out of runway on that. All the aerial firefighting in the world won't fix that problem, because it's not the problem that needs fixing.

defrost 2y ago
Where I live we routinely do prescribed (planned) burns and aim to mosaic the landscape | fuel load regions to break up high load buildups. See (for example): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKsLRNbczJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKsLRNbczJY Cool burning's been going on for several thousand years (geolocked?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM72NtXxyLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM72NtXxyLs
- throwup238 2y ago

mulmen 2y ago

The wind is too high for aerial firefighting. You could have every firefighting plane in the world in LA right now and it wouldn't matter. None of them can fly. Do you have some reason to believe more planes is the best allocation of resources?

nradov 2y ago

California recently acquired several C-130H firefighting aircraft. These are extremely expensive platforms and while they're useful for fast response in some scenarios they're hardly a complete solution. For these particular fires the winds were often too strong for air tankers to fly. Effective fire prevention and suppression requires a variety of different solutions. It would be foolish to focus on a single issue. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/08/26/c-130-hercules-is-now-fighting-california-wildfires/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/08/26/c-130-hercules-is-now-figh...

jonstewart 2y ago

Hundreds or thousands of planes??? “Federal agencies are responsible for managing 200 to 300 wildland fire aircraft.” - Nat’l Interagency Fire Center, https://www.nifc.gov/resources/aircraft https://www.nifc.gov/resources/aircraft “CAL FIRE’s fleet of more than 60 fixed and rotary wing aircraft make it the largest civil aerial firefighting fleet in the world.” — CAL FIRE, https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-protection/aviation-program https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-protection/aviation-...

ravenstine 2y ago
I was throwing out a number. Clearly, my perspective is that we need more water-dropping aircraft than we have or that we are borrowing.

perihelions 2y ago

Not an expert: I think one of the issues is that there's only a handful[0] of satellites with the appropriate infrared instruments, which means that any given point of Earth is only sampled at a multiple-hour cadence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Information_for_Resource_Management_System#Instruments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Information_for_Resource_... It's a generic problem for any sensing problem that's real-time + low-orbit. I speculate adding instruments to large LEO constellations, en masse, would solve that problem—though I have no clue if that's practical. (Perhaps if the same instrument were doing other kinds of real-time imaging, you could piggyback wildfire alerts on that datastream, and the get the functionality essentially for free?) edit: More info: - "Geostationary satellite sensors view the same area of Earth’s surface at all times while polar-orbiting sensors, such as MODIS and VIIRS, typically view the same area of Earth’s surface twice daily. Consequently, geostationary satellite sensors can provide repeated observations on a sub-hourly basis, making it possible to detect fires which may not be detected at longer temporal intervals. Geostationary satellites provide data at 10-15 minute intervals, so they can detect more fire events and capture their growth and change. However, the spatial resolution of geostationary satellite data is coarser and therefore less sensitive to small fires." https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/tools/firms/faq https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/tools/firms/faq