All is well now 

 

 

7 hours ago, Phillyterp85 said:

Oh trust me, I've known there's nothing you can offer of help to me for a long time 🙂

Just know I'd unplug your life support to charge my phone.

7 hours ago, Alpha_TATEr said:

I am the Carlos Mencia of the EMB.

😉

Are any of those inept idiots in LA going to get terminated or removed from office?

 

4 hours ago, lynched1 said:

Just know I'd unplug your life support to charge my phone.

Yikes that’s rather harsh.  Who pissed in your coffee today?

Just now, Phillyterp85 said:

Yikes that’s rather harsh.  Who pissed in your coffee today?

Yeah. And when is it going to be my turn?

22 minutes ago, Phillyterp85 said:

Yikes that’s rather harsh.  Who pissed in your coffee today?

😆

4 hours ago, PoconoDon said:

Are any of those inept idiots in LA going to get terminated or removed from office?

Re-elected in a landslide.....because of the run off.....due to the massive defoliation.

L.A. Will Keep Having Catastrophic Fires No Matter Who You Blame | Opinion - https://www.newsweek.com/l-will-keep-having-catastrophic-fires-no-matter-who-you-blame-opinion-2012844
 

Quote

 

There's a common misconception that beneath the asphalt, Los Angeles is a desert. It isn't. It's grassland. And part of the natural cycle of the grassland ecosystem is fire.

Twenty-seven years ago, Mike Davis wrote Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. One of the chapters is titled "The Case For Letting Malibu Burn". In it, he argued that the area between the beach and the Santa Monica Mountains simply never should have been developed. No matter what measures we take to prevent it, those hills are going to burn, and the houses we erect upon them are only so much kindling.

California's binary wet/dry seasonal cycle means rain in the winter, which feeds the growth of chaparral and sage in the hills and coastal mountains, followed by dry summer heat, which turns that biomass into fuel for wildfires. In Los Angeles, add to that mix the warm Santa Ana winds, which sweep into the basin of the San Fernando Valley and are then channeled into the canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains, reaching hurricane-level velocities in the process. Then add human settlement, and all of the millions of opportunities it presents to produce a spark. The likelihood of a disaster like this happening is, in Davis' words, "a statistical certainty."

Pointing to urban development as the culprit at a time like this feels a lot like blaming the victim. But it's more honest than the many other culprits being trotted out on social media, like DEI, Gavin Newsom, or Donald Trump. Certainly, there is blame to go around—Mayor Karen Bass shouldn't have been in Ghana; we need to know why the fire hydrants went dry; climate change exacerbates the natural conditions that produce the wildfires in the first place. But the fundamental engine for these disasters is the simple, physical reality of California, which prevailed before any of us were born: We built a massive civilization in a place where fire is as much a part of the natural habitat as summer rains are in the east.

Anyone who has lived in L.A. for more than a year has experienced either a season of active wildfires or a season of worrying about whether they would come. Joan Didion has written about it. The area around Pacific Palisades, in particular, has been on fire countless times before. There was a huge conflagration in Malibu in 1929. Then 1930 and 1935. Then 1938 and 1943, and so on, averaging two per decade up to the current day.

There's a reason this happens so much in Los Angeles: It is unique among American cities for the degree to which it directly abuts wild nature. Older cities grew more gradually. Around the urban core of cities like Boston, Atlanta, or St. Louis emerged suburbs, around them exurbs, and around them rural agricultural zones. Only then do you reach wild forests, mountains or prairies.

Los Angeles grew up in a hurry. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, development occurred so rapidly that urban and suburban density extends unabated all the way up until it collides into wildlands. A long portion of the city's perimeter is fenced in by the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains. Dense residential neighborhoods and freeways sit directly beneath towering bluffs populated by mountain lions, which occasionally hop the fences of backyard swimming pools to feast on domestic cats and dogs. Where New York has its meticulously designed Central Park, Los Angeles has Griffith Park, a sprawling expanse of wild mountain terrain right in the middle of the city.

These abrupt borders between nature and city are called
"wildland-urban interfaces," and they're inherently volatile. Man-made sparks from homeless encampments, discarded cigarettes, and downed power lines easily ignite wildfires, while brush fires that start from natural causes like lightning easily make the leap into residential areas and become urban conflagrations.

The pattern of residential development that has yielded these interfaces isn't limited to Southern California. In 2018, the Camp Fire in Northern California's rural Butte County started as a human-ignited forest fire, but ended up killing dozens and displacing thousands because towns like Paradise were carved out of the landscape and were edged up directly against the forests.

People should be held accountable for the mistakes they make in forest management, climate emissions, or reckless behavior with flammable objects. But the hazards of California's built environment are nobody's fault, or at least no one who is still alive. Many of the state's wildland-urban interfaces are the result of residential developments that began in the nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth.

This is the tinderbox we inherited. This will not be the last time we watch it burn.

 

 

Climate change may have contributed here.  I looked up the rainfall history (last 130 years so small sample but it is the phase that is relevant for the current climate change issue) and the past year wasn't an outlier historically and the incidence of the higher volume years isn't increasing.  However, I didn't look at the drought side so maybe that was more severe.

No doubt the public mgmt has failed to some extent here and we will for sure get a lot more info on this aspect in the post mortem.

 

8 hours ago, Phillyterp85 said:

Yikes that’s rather harsh.  Who pissed in your coffee today?

Himself

2 hours ago, DrPhilly said:

L.A. Will Keep Having Catastrophic Fires No Matter Who You Blame | Opinion - https://www.newsweek.com/l-will-keep-having-catastrophic-fires-no-matter-who-you-blame-opinion-2012844
 

 

Climate change may have contributed here.  I looked up the rainfall history (last 130 years so small sample but it is the phase that is relevant for the current climate change issue) and the past year wasn't an outlier historically and the incidence of the higher volume years isn't increasing.  However, I didn't look at the drought side so maybe that was more severe.

No doubt the public mgmt has failed to some extent here and we will for sure get a lot more info on this aspect in the post mortem.

 

Now imagine how much land was developed into homes in that 130 years and where

13 hours ago, lynched1 said:

1 hour ago, ToastJenkins said:

Himself

jerk, beat about 300 other posters to it. 

9 hours ago, lynched1 said:

Re-elected in a landslide.....because of the run off.....due to the massive defoliation.

It was a rhetorical question but...yeah. they won't miss a beat.

Fema Money goes to illegal immigrants. The convicted felon says it. So it must be true.

3 hours ago, ToastJenkins said:

Now imagine how much land was developed into homes in that 130 years and where

That was the point of the article

1 hour ago, PoconoDon said:

It was a rhetorical question but...yeah. they won't miss a beat.

I mean, I can certainly think of worse people they could elect

5 minutes ago, DrPhilly said:

That was the point of the article

And Houston is built on top of a bayou then we all act surprised when 50,000 homes flood in a hurricane.

btw, the thought of you looking up historical rainfall in L.A. made me laugh.  I take it you’ve never spent time out there.

5 minutes ago, Dave Moss said:

And Houston is built on top of a bayou then we all act surprised when 50,000 homes flood in a hurricane.

btw, the thought of you looking up historical rainfall in L.A. made me laugh.  I take it you’ve never spent time out there.

The reason I looked it up was to see if 2024 was an outlier in terms of rainfall totals OR if the years with higher rainfall totals was increasing.  It wasn't and they aren't.  I'm fully aware that they get a good chunk of rain in LA in the winter.

As for Houston, the data does show that hurricanes are becoming more numerous and on average more powerful in the Gulf of Mexico.  That doesn't mean anything for LA.

1 minute ago, DrPhilly said:

The reason I looked it up was to see if 2024 was an outlier in terms of rainfall totals OR if the years with higher rainfall totals was increasing.  It wasn't and they aren't.  I'm fully aware that they get a good chunk of rain in LA in the winter.

As for Houston, the data does show that hurricanes are becoming more numerous and on average more powerful in the Gulf of Mexico.  That doesn't mean anything for LA.

Found the European 

2 minutes ago, DEagle7 said:

Found the European 

Well it's not the dude whos not using a thumb to signify 3, that's for sure.