5 ms·

A Ritzy L.A. Enclave Learned a Bitter Lesson About the Limits of Its Wealth

19 points by wallflower 1y ago

Hilift 1y ago
https://archive.is/VDwyO https://archive.is/VDwyO
codeulike 1y ago
paywalled. tldr: A posh bit of LA called Calabasas, home to "Will Smith, John Travolta, Justin Bieber, Kevin Hart, Jessica Simpson, Jake Paul, Katie Holmes, Kanye West and a bunch of Kardashians" happens to have a Landfill site in it, which most of the posh people had not noticed was there. The LA fires of 2025 generated 2.6 million tons of waste - more than the entire city of Philadelphia produces in a year. That waste was _potentially_ classifiable as toxic but the official site for toxic waste was too far away for such a large amount so someone decided to send it to local landfills including Calabasas. There was legal basis for local landfills to accept fire waste. Then there's lots of details about how posh people tried to stop it from happening but it happened away. "That, for many residents, was the most haunting revelation of all. The 2025 fires had augured a future in which even a Calabasan could suffer sudden and catastrophic environmental injustice."
- mrangle 1y ago
  >"which even a Calabasan could suffer sudden and catastrophic environmental injustice." What a crazy tactic to switch blame from the City of LA's total failure, to prevent and stop the fire, to the environment. Everyone knows that California is dry. Everyone knows that everything West of the Mississippi is dry. For how long? Much longer than industry has existed. I'd consider it to be a failure of environmental advocacy to be so ham-fisted so as to drive people away from policy support because you can't fight the impulse to abuse the issue to absolve the guilty.
  - estearum 1y ago
    Neither the City of LA nor any city in the world has a municipal water supply equipped to combat an urban wildfire. Embers were blown miles ahead of the fire front onto new rooftops. Using guidelines from the National Fire Academy to suppress housefires, they would've needed to simultaneously deploy 10 or 12 thousand industrial-zone (not residential-zone) fire hydrants. Not only do those not exist, but there would've been no way to pressurize them simultaneously. At only hour 4 of the fire (1200 acres, assume 5% are structures), they already would've had to deploy 1800 industrial-zone fire hydrants to suppress it. Again using NFA's flow rate guidelines. The Santa Ynez Reservoir, had it been full, would've been emptied in about an hour assuming it could maintain pressure (which it couldn't). Wildfires are fundamentally fought with firebreaks and aircraft, both of which are extremely challenging in high-wind urban environments. They are contained until they burn out their fuel. They are not ever combatted with municipal water supplies. Can you state specifically what were obviously avoidable failures?
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      > Can you state specifically what were obviously avoidable failures? Strategically removing/reducing fire-prone vegetation in the hills surrounding LA?
      - nradov 1y ago
        You've got to be kidding. Have you ever even gone hiking in those hills? Much of the terrain doesn't allow for heavy equipment use. The areas where the wildfires spread fastest are so rough and steep that even doing it by manual labor is extremely challenging. The state and local governments simply don't have that many workers (or goats), or the budget to pay for the work. The scale of the problem is immense.
        WalterBright 1y ago
        > Much of the terrain doesn't allow for heavy equipment use Do the areas that are reachable. After all, somehow roads manage to get constructed. > or the budget Well, the budget for the devastation from the fires will be orders of magnitude more. Fences can also be constructed that will stop flaming debris from being pushed across the ground.
  - hedora 1y ago
    California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts (replacing thousands of years of work by indigenous people with fire suppression), and also unprecedented climate change. Should they do more? Of course. With what resources? I recently learned 82% of California fire fighters are unpaid volunteers. That doesn’t include the prison labor. The entire government has its priorities completely wrong, especially at the federal level. Blaming the city of LA makes very little sense. Blaming environmentalists for consistently sounding the alarm over this stuff for 50+ years and then being ignored also doesn’t make sense. One thing that does make sense: Look at the writings of the people that blocked wind and nuclear power in the 1980’s, and solar / batteries in the 1990s. They explicitly said they knew their actions would burn the planet down, and it didn’t matter to them. Now they’ve dismantling our democracy, eliminating emergency response groups like FEMA, and retasking the national guard (California’s last line of fire defense) as an illegal police force.
    - duped 1y ago
      > California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts Including building in the chaparral hills in the first place. Sane policy would be to forbid new construction where fires have ravaged in the past or at least deny insurance, because it's like building in a floodplain. The problem is that the same area is suffering from systemic under-construction of housing.
    - nradov 1y ago
      Your comment is quite disconnected from reality. Blaming the city of LA makes a lot of sense. The mayor Karen Bass was completely ineffectual. And even before she was elected the city had failed to properly upgrade their fire fighting infrastructure or building codes. Most volunteer fire fighters act as reserves in more rural areas and are only called up for major incidents. The city of LA and surrounding cities like Calabasas don't rely heavily on volunteers. Climate change might be a minor factor in the intensity of the 2025 Southern California wildfires but those have been happening periodically for millennia. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) will sometimes dump a lot of rain on Southern California for several years at a stretch causing extensive brush growth, then shift north for several years allowing everything to dry out. At that point any little spark will ignite a raging wildfire, especially when the Santa Ana winds are blowing. This is not "forest" that can be actively managed, it's chaparral in rough hilly terrain. It's simply impossible to clear much of the brush or conduct controlled burns. The only effective measures are building fire-resistant structures with defensible space around them — or simply not building in those areas at all.
cratermoon 1y ago
Multiple bitter lessons 1. Somehow people moving into houses that went for $4 to $25 million didn't notice or bother to check that there's a landfill a mile from their houses. 2. Ash waste from last year's huge wildfires needs a place to go, but it's de facto toxic. 3. A waiver granted to allow the toxic waste to be dumped into landfills not rated for handling it. 4. Rich people find they have no more power than residents of Flint, MI Addendum: at least the cops are deferential to the crowd of protestors that include rich white moms with a babies. They didn't declare a "riot" and didn't fire teargas or rubber bullets at anyone.
- mrangle 1y ago
  Of course people with babies didn't riot, and of course rubber bullets can't be fired near them. What are you suggesting?? There's some truly "weird" stuff on HN as of late. Moving on. Perhaps they didn't riot. Whereas we know that a lot of actual riots in the past six years weren't treated enough as such. Allowing the populations that they affected to be terrorized, sometimes over an extended period of time.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    Peaceful protestors in Washington D.C. have been teargassed in recent memory. Rioting is not needed for police to abuse their authority.
    - mrangle 1y ago
      The comment under discussion was the one psychopathically lamenting that well-off peaceful protestors "with babies" weren't met with force. In contrast, no one thinks that the recent LA riots were peaceful.
  - MadnessASAP 1y ago
    Sometimes the riot happens after the teargas and rubber bullets. Sometimes the riot happens because people whose humanity isn't being respected choose not to respect your property. And sometimes riots happen because people are assholes and nobody is going to stop them. The neat thing is all 3 of those can be true at the same time.
Hilift 1y ago
This is about where to put the toxic waste created by the Palisades (7,000 homes) and Altadena (9,400 structures) fires. The process removes the top 12" and replaces with with clean fill. The governor granted an exemption from California Environment Quality Act (CEQA), and recent legislation passed will streamline or waive the process for all future development. The material will go somewhere, the question is which NIMBY is the recipient. Probably worth noting that before the CEQA revamp legislation this year, 50% of all California construction development was challenged/thwarted with lawsuits by the same people for multiple or no reasons. That usually resulted in one or two years of delays, with the cost added to the construction. The price to build "affordable" housing in California is $700,000 to $1,000,000. https://www.pacificresearch.org/newsom-right-to-waive-ceqa-for-wildfire-rebuilding-but-lawmakers-should-also-act/ https://www.pacificresearch.org/newsom-right-to-waive-ceqa-f...
- jordanb 1y ago
  For those who are interested, Pacific Research is a libertarian organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Research_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Research_Institute
alistairSH 1y ago
Aside from a healthy dose of schadenfreude, my next reaction is anger - we shouldn't be putting toxic waste next to anybody's home, particularly not in landfills that aren't configured to deal with it. "It was a big fire" is a pretty shit excuse to ignore the law.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  No one is arguing that it's a good idea. However, finding a better idea is difficult.
mediumsmart 1y ago
They want me to subscribe to read a about the ritzy enclave. Came for the bitter lesson, not disappointed.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- koliber 1y ago
  Newspapers used to be printed on paper and no one batted an eye when they were asked to fork over a few quarters per issue. It was not considered ritzy or posh to read about what is going on. Someone needs to pay those people who create the papers. Now that newspapers are online, somehow it's ritzy to be able to read and the fact that people have jobs which involve creating newspaper content is a bitter lesson.
  - draw_down 1y ago
    [dead]
  - devmor 1y ago
    Newspapers also used to be heavily syndicated or covered the same large subjects, while keeping 2-3 to a geographical area. Now that newspapers are online, an end user may be presented with hundreds or thousands of them, asking for a subscription.
  - netsharc 1y ago
    The price was mostly symbolic (if they were free people would probably abuse it, e.g. for paper to line your birdcage with), and it was ads in the paper that paid for the business. Heck, now we have multi-billion dollar companies selling us ads (Google, Meta) but no one wants to pay the people whose jobs include investigating government corruption (as well as reporting on Taylor Swift getting a ring...). Somewhat understandably, since ads on the Internet are much more obnoxious than ads on newspaper/magazines.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    > a few quarters per issue Not X dollars per month with a yearly commitment that auto renews and for which you need to stay on hold for 6-12 hours to cancel... Cry me a river. If "newspapers" really wanted my money they'd band up and set up a micropayments agency so I could pay them for the issue i'm interested in again. But they're only chasing whales instead so I have zero compassion.

19 points by wallflower 1y ago

https://archive.is/VDwyO https://archive.is/VDwyO

paywalled. tldr: A posh bit of LA called Calabasas, home to "Will Smith, John Travolta, Justin Bieber, Kevin Hart, Jessica Simpson, Jake Paul, Katie Holmes, Kanye West and a bunch of Kardashians" happens to have a Landfill site in it, which most of the posh people had not noticed was there. The LA fires of 2025 generated 2.6 million tons of waste - more than the entire city of Philadelphia produces in a year. That waste was _potentially_ classifiable as toxic but the official site for toxic waste was too far away for such a large amount so someone decided to send it to local landfills including Calabasas. There was legal basis for local landfills to accept fire waste. Then there's lots of details about how posh people tried to stop it from happening but it happened away. "That, for many residents, was the most haunting revelation of all. The 2025 fires had augured a future in which even a Calabasan could suffer sudden and catastrophic environmental injustice."

mrangle 1y ago
>"which even a Calabasan could suffer sudden and catastrophic environmental injustice." What a crazy tactic to switch blame from the City of LA's total failure, to prevent and stop the fire, to the environment. Everyone knows that California is dry. Everyone knows that everything West of the Mississippi is dry. For how long? Much longer than industry has existed. I'd consider it to be a failure of environmental advocacy to be so ham-fisted so as to drive people away from policy support because you can't fight the impulse to abuse the issue to absolve the guilty.
- estearum 1y ago
  Neither the City of LA nor any city in the world has a municipal water supply equipped to combat an urban wildfire. Embers were blown miles ahead of the fire front onto new rooftops. Using guidelines from the National Fire Academy to suppress housefires, they would've needed to simultaneously deploy 10 or 12 thousand industrial-zone (not residential-zone) fire hydrants. Not only do those not exist, but there would've been no way to pressurize them simultaneously. At only hour 4 of the fire (1200 acres, assume 5% are structures), they already would've had to deploy 1800 industrial-zone fire hydrants to suppress it. Again using NFA's flow rate guidelines. The Santa Ynez Reservoir, had it been full, would've been emptied in about an hour assuming it could maintain pressure (which it couldn't). Wildfires are fundamentally fought with firebreaks and aircraft, both of which are extremely challenging in high-wind urban environments. They are contained until they burn out their fuel. They are not ever combatted with municipal water supplies. Can you state specifically what were obviously avoidable failures?
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    > Can you state specifically what were obviously avoidable failures? Strategically removing/reducing fire-prone vegetation in the hills surrounding LA?
    - nradov 1y ago
      You've got to be kidding. Have you ever even gone hiking in those hills? Much of the terrain doesn't allow for heavy equipment use. The areas where the wildfires spread fastest are so rough and steep that even doing it by manual labor is extremely challenging. The state and local governments simply don't have that many workers (or goats), or the budget to pay for the work. The scale of the problem is immense.
      - WalterBright 1y ago
        > Much of the terrain doesn't allow for heavy equipment use Do the areas that are reachable. After all, somehow roads manage to get constructed. > or the budget Well, the budget for the devastation from the fires will be orders of magnitude more. Fences can also be constructed that will stop flaming debris from being pushed across the ground.
- hedora 1y ago
  California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts (replacing thousands of years of work by indigenous people with fire suppression), and also unprecedented climate change. Should they do more? Of course. With what resources? I recently learned 82% of California fire fighters are unpaid volunteers. That doesn’t include the prison labor. The entire government has its priorities completely wrong, especially at the federal level. Blaming the city of LA makes very little sense. Blaming environmentalists for consistently sounding the alarm over this stuff for 50+ years and then being ignored also doesn’t make sense. One thing that does make sense: Look at the writings of the people that blocked wind and nuclear power in the 1980’s, and solar / batteries in the 1990s. They explicitly said they knew their actions would burn the planet down, and it didn’t matter to them. Now they’ve dismantling our democracy, eliminating emergency response groups like FEMA, and retasking the national guard (California’s last line of fire defense) as an illegal police force.
  - duped 1y ago
    > California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts Including building in the chaparral hills in the first place. Sane policy would be to forbid new construction where fires have ravaged in the past or at least deny insurance, because it's like building in a floodplain. The problem is that the same area is suffering from systemic under-construction of housing.
  - nradov 1y ago
    Your comment is quite disconnected from reality. Blaming the city of LA makes a lot of sense. The mayor Karen Bass was completely ineffectual. And even before she was elected the city had failed to properly upgrade their fire fighting infrastructure or building codes. Most volunteer fire fighters act as reserves in more rural areas and are only called up for major incidents. The city of LA and surrounding cities like Calabasas don't rely heavily on volunteers. Climate change might be a minor factor in the intensity of the 2025 Southern California wildfires but those have been happening periodically for millennia. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) will sometimes dump a lot of rain on Southern California for several years at a stretch causing extensive brush growth, then shift north for several years allowing everything to dry out. At that point any little spark will ignite a raging wildfire, especially when the Santa Ana winds are blowing. This is not "forest" that can be actively managed, it's chaparral in rough hilly terrain. It's simply impossible to clear much of the brush or conduct controlled burns. The only effective measures are building fire-resistant structures with defensible space around them — or simply not building in those areas at all.

cratermoon 1y ago

Multiple bitter lessons 1. Somehow people moving into houses that went for $4 to $25 million didn't notice or bother to check that there's a landfill a mile from their houses. 2. Ash waste from last year's huge wildfires needs a place to go, but it's de facto toxic. 3. A waiver granted to allow the toxic waste to be dumped into landfills not rated for handling it. 4. Rich people find they have no more power than residents of Flint, MI Addendum: at least the cops are deferential to the crowd of protestors that include rich white moms with a babies. They didn't declare a "riot" and didn't fire teargas or rubber bullets at anyone.

mrangle 1y ago
Of course people with babies didn't riot, and of course rubber bullets can't be fired near them. What are you suggesting?? There's some truly "weird" stuff on HN as of late. Moving on. Perhaps they didn't riot. Whereas we know that a lot of actual riots in the past six years weren't treated enough as such. Allowing the populations that they affected to be terrorized, sometimes over an extended period of time.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  Peaceful protestors in Washington D.C. have been teargassed in recent memory. Rioting is not needed for police to abuse their authority.
  - mrangle 1y ago
    The comment under discussion was the one psychopathically lamenting that well-off peaceful protestors "with babies" weren't met with force. In contrast, no one thinks that the recent LA riots were peaceful.
- MadnessASAP 1y ago
  Sometimes the riot happens after the teargas and rubber bullets. Sometimes the riot happens because people whose humanity isn't being respected choose not to respect your property. And sometimes riots happen because people are assholes and nobody is going to stop them. The neat thing is all 3 of those can be true at the same time.

Hilift 1y ago

This is about where to put the toxic waste created by the Palisades (7,000 homes) and Altadena (9,400 structures) fires. The process removes the top 12" and replaces with with clean fill. The governor granted an exemption from California Environment Quality Act (CEQA), and recent legislation passed will streamline or waive the process for all future development. The material will go somewhere, the question is which NIMBY is the recipient. Probably worth noting that before the CEQA revamp legislation this year, 50% of all California construction development was challenged/thwarted with lawsuits by the same people for multiple or no reasons. That usually resulted in one or two years of delays, with the cost added to the construction. The price to build "affordable" housing in California is $700,000 to $1,000,000. https://www.pacificresearch.org/newsom-right-to-waive-ceqa-for-wildfire-rebuilding-but-lawmakers-should-also-act/ https://www.pacificresearch.org/newsom-right-to-waive-ceqa-f...

jordanb 1y ago
For those who are interested, Pacific Research is a libertarian organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Research_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Research_Institute

alistairSH 1y ago

Aside from a healthy dose of schadenfreude, my next reaction is anger - we shouldn't be putting toxic waste next to anybody's home, particularly not in landfills that aren't configured to deal with it. "It was a big fire" is a pretty shit excuse to ignore the law.

IAmBroom 1y ago
No one is arguing that it's a good idea. However, finding a better idea is difficult.

mediumsmart 1y ago

They want me to subscribe to read a about the ritzy enclave. Came for the bitter lesson, not disappointed.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
koliber 1y ago
Newspapers used to be printed on paper and no one batted an eye when they were asked to fork over a few quarters per issue. It was not considered ritzy or posh to read about what is going on. Someone needs to pay those people who create the papers. Now that newspapers are online, somehow it's ritzy to be able to read and the fact that people have jobs which involve creating newspaper content is a bitter lesson.
- draw_down 1y ago
  [dead]
- devmor 1y ago
  Newspapers also used to be heavily syndicated or covered the same large subjects, while keeping 2-3 to a geographical area. Now that newspapers are online, an end user may be presented with hundreds or thousands of them, asking for a subscription.
- netsharc 1y ago
  The price was mostly symbolic (if they were free people would probably abuse it, e.g. for paper to line your birdcage with), and it was ads in the paper that paid for the business. Heck, now we have multi-billion dollar companies selling us ads (Google, Meta) but no one wants to pay the people whose jobs include investigating government corruption (as well as reporting on Taylor Swift getting a ring...). Somewhat understandably, since ads on the Internet are much more obnoxious than ads on newspaper/magazines.
- nottorp 1y ago
  > a few quarters per issue Not X dollars per month with a yearly commitment that auto renews and for which you need to stay on hold for 6-12 hours to cancel... Cry me a river. If "newspapers" really wanted my money they'd band up and set up a micropayments agency so I could pay them for the issue i'm interested in again. But they're only chasing whales instead so I have zero compassion.