The article doesn't seem to mention it, but last week they accidentally sent out a mandatory evacuation order to all 10 million phones: https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/emergency-evacuation-alert-sent-to-residents-across-la-county/
I wonder how much that will dampen the effect of the real order if it comes. Colorado sends emergency alerts for so much- missing children and geriatrics, violence against cops anywhere in the state- that there's a lot of notification fatigue when we get the handful of wildfire alerts each year.
It's one of the fundamental problems of outrage-driven engagement and for profit news. Eventually people burn out and tune out. Then something important happens and people are ambivalent. Some people wallow in it and go bananas (see: fox News chuds) but the majority of people don't like being harangued by spectacle every goddamn day.
This is really sad. But we're also seeing what happens when you let corporations go unchecked and exacerbate climate change.
An entire city burning to the ground should be a radicalizing point, but I'm afraid the media is going to do everything they can to divert from the climate question to things like firefighter funding, DEI etc.
Trump is making it about water rights and complaining that farmers didn’t get enough water because of ecological regulations.
As always. Also the governor of California already promised to waive environmental review so they could 'rebuild faster'--seriously ironic liberal brainrot.
Environmental reviews of the sort like exposure to hazards, such as, to take an example at random, wildfires? Is Los Angeles urban development about to end up on a 10-year cycle?
I could fill a few pages with names of contractors who would love nothing more than that.
Its crazy because every right winger is talking about LA running out of water which is obviously untrue. Most angelenos (except maybe those in actively byrning or burnt areas) still has clean water coming from their tap. And more importantly, we all see water drop after water drop on the TV coverage. The actual crews fighting the fire havent indicated any trouble getting water and there are dozens of reservoirs available.
Yeah but if the almond trees had more water they wouldn’t be as dry (in January) and wouldn’t have caught flame. That’s trump’s argument lmao, it’s so stupid it’s unbelievable. The fire didn’t spread cross farms it spread across forest, suburban housing developments and rough hills
Yea that's what I don't get a out his whole "I told Newsom to sweep the leaves from the forests" because I thought this fire started in the urban area
Lib media at least acknowledges it's climate change but their solution is to vote blue harder next time. Meanwhile the chuds go over world events with a fine tooth comb to find a minority to scapegoat. Both are not helpful in any way.
Not just a city, but the richest city in the richest state of the richest country
So i guess the plan is to annex Canada because we are abandoning the southern US.
There was a conversation about this here a few months ago. Seriously what happens when these places get too hot to live in? If it turns into 145° temperatures in Las Vegas, for example, will we just abandon the city, turning it into a ghost town? Even while inside, you can't stay cool because of the power consumption. You can't just be blaring the AC 24/7 in every building and every car. Not to mention, you can't cool the outside of cars or buildings, so those could overheat. How do you get food and water to these places? I suppose they could build high speed rail going in and out of the city, but you still run into the same problems of having to keep the entire thing refrigerated.
Now multiply this for hundreds of cities, towns, and shotgun shacks across the southern US. Will the entire state of Texas have to leave because nighttime temperatures are over 150°? Just miles and miles of Death Valley conditions spread out across the South.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how things will be worse south of the border going into Mexico and South America.
The first warning sign will be insurance companies pulling out of entire regions, like what happened in California.
Might be survivable if people adapted and figured out ways to conserve water and energy and build better, more resiliant infrastructure, but that's not going to happen in this country.
If the annexation of Canada happens I figure that will be the unofficial reasoning for it. A climate-lebensraum if you will
I suppose it's a small mercy that THE BIG ONE turned out to be a wildfire and not an earthquake, since that would've killed far more people
Jesus Christ. And to think this is only the worst wildfire, yet.
Gonna be another one of those years when centuries happen, huh?
We still have what I presume to be a long hot dry summer coming up.
I can't wait for smoke season /s
When I first heard about all these new wildfires cropping up, I automatically assumed it was in Australia. I was shocked it was California in midwinter.
There are no evacuation warnings for the majority of LA county, see for yourself: https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents
Not to be a "source?" lib, but where did you read that all of LA was warned to be ready to evacuate?
It wasn't in the article, as far as I could tell, and I haven't followed its growth but LA is so massive I can't imagine it's large enough yet to take over LA as a whole to warrant that warning.
oh I took it straight from the article, looks like they changed it, here it is in the archive
https://archive.ph/Lbjvp
Ah, no worries! They do that. Thanks for clarifying!
I was just curious because that would be a fucking massive exodus.
To be fair, I don't think they mean all at once, but rather that all of the area of LA is under potential threat.
That makes sense. It also makes sense that they'd probably say that out of an abundance of caution rather than thinking this is actually happening soon.
You're right - a red flag warning (which does cover almost the entire county) is not an evacuation warning. Red flag warnings in this context indicate that conditions in the area are favorable for fires. Evacuation warnings mean be ready to evacuate at any time, and if you have mobility issues and/or animals, start evacuating now.
Source: CERT training and 8 years in the health, safety, and emergency management field. Plus fire.ca.gov
That makes sense. Thanks!
Any insight or thoughts you want to share about what is happening in LA right now or what you might expect?
Happy to help! And sure, if you can call this an insight I'll share it.
My biggest takeaway from this incident, so far, has been that since southern California is hotter, drier, and windier than any time in living memory - undeniably because of human-made climate change - this was inevitable. And once this round is over, it will happen again, and probably soon.
Local authorities need to have the guts to attack this problem head on before then. Climate change is here to stay, so while global efforts to mitigate the effects must switch into high gear yesterday, locally they need to start planning now for at least a 3-tiered approach to the problem.
First, engineer away as much of the risk as possible. This means burying every power line they can. Those that must remain above ground should be under constant upkeep to prevent spark-producing events and the forest from growing close to the lines themselves. Sure campfires and other individual actions (like setting off fireworks) can also cause fires, but the state already pushes hard to keep those under control and can easily ramp up educational campaigns and enforcement.
Second, more practices that effectively reduce the abundance of tinder-like fuel sources (in this case, dry brush) need to be implemented. Indigenous people from the region (Chumash and Tong-va tribes, for instance) have a long history of successful forest management and those practices should be studied and used to enhance what is currently being done (the indigenous tribes should be given a leadership role in this, if they want it, IMO).
Finally, it's not that easy (as far as I know) to make sure buildings and infrastructure are both fire- and earthquake-resistant in the region. And even if it is straightforward, it's not practical to retrofit every structure for fire on the scale needed, much like retrofitting for earthquakes has been a thing for 50 years and is still not complete. So what is to be done in the near term? Things like having industrial scale, automated fire suppression systems installed to douse homes and other infrastructure on the edge of communities near fire-prone areas could buy valuable time for firefighters and residents. Creating a low-fuel buffer zone along those edges and controlling land use in it could be a valuable addition to that approach.
But yeah, I am pessimistic that any large-scale, coordinated project like I just described would ever make it through our dysfunctional government processes intact. The track record is abysmal (see high speed rail and the unhoused crisis, for example). It'll probably end up being a patchwork of half- and quarter-measures implemented here and there, with poorer communities getting no preventative support whatsoever. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Thank you so much for sharing that! That's really interesting.
Yeah, it is a shame that it seems nothing will be done to prevent this from happening again, on a similar or larger scale at least anyway. I'm also hearing people talk about conspiracies that just skip over the reality of capitalism and climate change. I don't think the average USian can yet accept that truth even as they watch damn near entire cities burn to the ground.
No hope for the elites to do anything if that's still the case, especially depressing since there are things that can be done as you said.
literally