Space Faring Marsupial
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2023
All I know is the weather ain't like it was when I was a kid and I don't like it.
Live updates: Brush fire burns in Pacific Palisades as Santa Ana winds blast Southern California - Live video at link
- Thread starter mlanguishi
- Start date
- Joined
- Sep 1, 2018
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2020
Yeah, wildfires in general were never bad enough I would worry about traveling through the Grapevine whenever I needed to go up North. Now I never want to go in the Summer because I might get caught up in a wildfire.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2022
For LA water issues, misinformation spreads nearly as fast as the wildfires
Associated Press (archive.ph)
By Melissa Goldin and Brittany Peterson
2025-01-15 22:45:47GMT
Associated Press (archive.ph)
By Melissa Goldin and Brittany Peterson
2025-01-15 22:45:47GMT
A billionaire couple was accused of withholding water that could help stop Los Angeles’ massive wildfires. Democratic leadership was blamed for fire hydrants running dry and for an empty reservoir. Firefighters were criticized for allegedly using “women’s handbags” to fight the fires.
Those are just a few of the false or misleading claims that have emerged amid general criticism about California’s water management sparked by the fierce Los Angeles fires.
Much of the misinformation is being spread “because it offers an opportunity to take potshots at California Democratic leadership while simultaneously distracting attention from the real contributing factors, especially the role of climate change,” said Peter Gleick, senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit he co-founded that focuses on global water sustainability.
Attacks on a water bank
Social media users have claimed that Stewart and Lynda Resnick, co-owners of a massive agriculture company that has a majority stake in California’s Kern Water Bank, control California’s water and have refused to lend enough to firefighting efforts.
The water bank stores up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water underground for agricultural, municipal and industrial use during dry years. The water gets used by the Resnicks’ company, The Wonderful Company, known for such brands as Fiji Water and Wonderful Pistachios. It also serves Bakersfield and other farmers in Kern County.
FILE - Lynda Resnick and Stewart Resnick arrive at the Booksellers area of the White House for a state dinner, April 10, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
But the water bank is more than 100 miles north of Los Angeles and plays no part in its water supply. The Wonderful Company said there was “zero truth” that it controls California water or has anything to do with water going to Los Angeles. Kern Water Bank didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The Wonderful Company has faced criticism over its extensive water use, especially in times of drought, and its control of what many consider a public resource. But Gleick said neither the Resnicks nor their company have anything to do with water supply issues around the wildfires.
“There are many problems with how California allocates water among users and especially the control of water by large agribusinesses, exemplified by the Resnicks, but those problems are completely unrelated to the LA fires and efforts to control them,” he said.
Claims over dry hydrants, empty reservoir
Some fire hydrants in Los Angeles ran dry in early efforts to fight the fires, prompting a swirl of criticism on social media, including from President-elect Donald Trump, against the water management policies of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. State and local officials and experts said critics were connecting unrelated issues and spreading false information. State water distribution choices were not behind the hydrant problems, they said, nor was a lack of overall supply in the region.
Officials said the hydrants were overstressed for hours as aerial firefighting wasn’t possible because of high winds. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said they were pumping plenty of water into the system, but demand was so high that it wasn’t enough to refill three million-gallon tanks in Pacific Palisades that help pressurize hydrants there.
Volunteers stack donated water for people impacted by the Altadena Fire at a donation center at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, Calif., on Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said at a news conference that 3 million gallons of water were available when the Palisades fire started but demand was four times greater than ever seen. Hydrants are designed for fighting fires at one or two houses at a time, not hundreds, Quiñones said, and refilling the tanks also requires asking fire departments to pause firefighting. Bass said 20% of hydrants went dry.
Critics also questioned why the 117-million gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir that contributes water for drinking and firefighting in Pacific Palisades was empty when the fires broke out. Some social media users said officials should be jailed over the empty reservoir, or alleged that officials view diversity, equity and inclusion policies as more important than getting things done.
The reservoir has been empty for nearly a year awaiting repairs to a rubber cover that were required to provide safe drinking water, according to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which owns and operates it. The agency also said competitive bidding requires time.
Marty Adams, who retired last spring, was the general manager and chief engineer at LADWP when the reservoir was drained. He said it was difficult to see the full scope of damage without draining the reservoir, and once that was done officials realized the repairs would be a bigger job than expected.
Adams said the reservoir likely could not have been refilled fast enough to be of much use fighting fires.
Newsom has called for an independent investigation into the hydrants and the reservoir. At least one lawsuit has already been filed over the reservoir issue.
Fighting flames with purses?
Video of firefighters throwing water onto flames with small bags spread widely on social media. Some posts ridiculed the use of “women’s handbags” and alleged money that could have been used to buy proper equipment was spent elsewhere, such as on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives or foreign aid. But the state said the small canvas bags seen in the videos are routinely used by the Los Angeles Fire Department to fight small trash fires, and can be more efficient than a long hose in some situations.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes the Palisades fire, said misinformation is demoralizing for firefighters.
FILE - A firefighter hoses down flames as the Palisades Fire approaches in Mandeville Canyon, Jan. 11, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
“When they hear that there’s a suspicion that they didn’t put their best foot forward, that they weren’t at their best, that they weren’t excellent in terms of the service that they deliver, of course that’s crushing,” she said.
Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, called the misinformation “irresponsible” and said it affects the actions people take and the way they cope with trauma.
“The spread of false information at a time of crisis is nothing short of deadly,” she said.
___
The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
Those are just a few of the false or misleading claims that have emerged amid general criticism about California’s water management sparked by the fierce Los Angeles fires.
Much of the misinformation is being spread “because it offers an opportunity to take potshots at California Democratic leadership while simultaneously distracting attention from the real contributing factors, especially the role of climate change,” said Peter Gleick, senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit he co-founded that focuses on global water sustainability.
Attacks on a water bank
Social media users have claimed that Stewart and Lynda Resnick, co-owners of a massive agriculture company that has a majority stake in California’s Kern Water Bank, control California’s water and have refused to lend enough to firefighting efforts.
The water bank stores up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water underground for agricultural, municipal and industrial use during dry years. The water gets used by the Resnicks’ company, The Wonderful Company, known for such brands as Fiji Water and Wonderful Pistachios. It also serves Bakersfield and other farmers in Kern County.
FILE - Lynda Resnick and Stewart Resnick arrive at the Booksellers area of the White House for a state dinner, April 10, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
But the water bank is more than 100 miles north of Los Angeles and plays no part in its water supply. The Wonderful Company said there was “zero truth” that it controls California water or has anything to do with water going to Los Angeles. Kern Water Bank didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The Wonderful Company has faced criticism over its extensive water use, especially in times of drought, and its control of what many consider a public resource. But Gleick said neither the Resnicks nor their company have anything to do with water supply issues around the wildfires.
“There are many problems with how California allocates water among users and especially the control of water by large agribusinesses, exemplified by the Resnicks, but those problems are completely unrelated to the LA fires and efforts to control them,” he said.
Claims over dry hydrants, empty reservoir
Some fire hydrants in Los Angeles ran dry in early efforts to fight the fires, prompting a swirl of criticism on social media, including from President-elect Donald Trump, against the water management policies of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. State and local officials and experts said critics were connecting unrelated issues and spreading false information. State water distribution choices were not behind the hydrant problems, they said, nor was a lack of overall supply in the region.
Officials said the hydrants were overstressed for hours as aerial firefighting wasn’t possible because of high winds. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said they were pumping plenty of water into the system, but demand was so high that it wasn’t enough to refill three million-gallon tanks in Pacific Palisades that help pressurize hydrants there.
Volunteers stack donated water for people impacted by the Altadena Fire at a donation center at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, Calif., on Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said at a news conference that 3 million gallons of water were available when the Palisades fire started but demand was four times greater than ever seen. Hydrants are designed for fighting fires at one or two houses at a time, not hundreds, Quiñones said, and refilling the tanks also requires asking fire departments to pause firefighting. Bass said 20% of hydrants went dry.
Critics also questioned why the 117-million gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir that contributes water for drinking and firefighting in Pacific Palisades was empty when the fires broke out. Some social media users said officials should be jailed over the empty reservoir, or alleged that officials view diversity, equity and inclusion policies as more important than getting things done.
The reservoir has been empty for nearly a year awaiting repairs to a rubber cover that were required to provide safe drinking water, according to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which owns and operates it. The agency also said competitive bidding requires time.
Marty Adams, who retired last spring, was the general manager and chief engineer at LADWP when the reservoir was drained. He said it was difficult to see the full scope of damage without draining the reservoir, and once that was done officials realized the repairs would be a bigger job than expected.
Adams said the reservoir likely could not have been refilled fast enough to be of much use fighting fires.
Newsom has called for an independent investigation into the hydrants and the reservoir. At least one lawsuit has already been filed over the reservoir issue.
Fighting flames with purses?
Video of firefighters throwing water onto flames with small bags spread widely on social media. Some posts ridiculed the use of “women’s handbags” and alleged money that could have been used to buy proper equipment was spent elsewhere, such as on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives or foreign aid. But the state said the small canvas bags seen in the videos are routinely used by the Los Angeles Fire Department to fight small trash fires, and can be more efficient than a long hose in some situations.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes the Palisades fire, said misinformation is demoralizing for firefighters.
FILE - A firefighter hoses down flames as the Palisades Fire approaches in Mandeville Canyon, Jan. 11, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
“When they hear that there’s a suspicion that they didn’t put their best foot forward, that they weren’t at their best, that they weren’t excellent in terms of the service that they deliver, of course that’s crushing,” she said.
Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, called the misinformation “irresponsible” and said it affects the actions people take and the way they cope with trauma.
“The spread of false information at a time of crisis is nothing short of deadly,” she said.
___
The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2020
It’s really driving me bananas that the thermal imaging is somehow gone. I have attached a screenshot I took of the Palisades fire from last week. It’s not zoomed in, but you can see the thermal spots (bright red) overlaid on the evacuation zones (yellow and pale red).
Here is a second screenshot, taken just now. Despite the fact that the fire has grown and is only reported at 21% containment, there is no thermal imaging at all.
I haven’t ever seen this before. I have had Watch Duty for years and I have used it to track the progress of many fires. I have never seen the hotspots just poof off the map like this.
Below is an example that better illustrates what we SHOULD be seeing, that I ripped from a quick google search.
Here is a second screenshot, taken just now. Despite the fact that the fire has grown and is only reported at 21% containment, there is no thermal imaging at all.
I haven’t ever seen this before. I have had Watch Duty for years and I have used it to track the progress of many fires. I have never seen the hotspots just poof off the map like this.
Below is an example that better illustrates what we SHOULD be seeing, that I ripped from a quick google search.
- Joined
- Sep 22, 2019
Almost like certain person of interests or powerful agencies would like to suppress information...
Cun75p4rkl35
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2024
Are China and India pumping out some worse shit, feels like climate really took a nosedive in the past 10 years
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2022
A long road to rebuilding — and fights over government funding — await L.A. fire victims
NBC News (archive.ph)
By Shannon Pettypiece
2025-01-15 23:54:13GMT
Firefighters are gaining ground in Los Angeles. When will the fires finally end?
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Scott Dance, Brady Dennis, and Brianna Sacks
2025-01-16 01:42:49GMT
Burned trees from the Palisades Fire are seen from Will Rogers State Park, with Los Angeles in the background. Firefighters have made progress in the containment of the fires in the city. (Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
Eight days into Los Angeles’s most destructive firestorm on record, and the initial wave of the crisis is waning: The two most massive fires are still smoldering but have not spread significantly in days, and firefighters are — slowly and steadily — gaining ground on containing them.
And though dozens of new fires have popped up in recent days, most of them have been quickly tamed: Eighteen separate fires ignited Tuesday, but they only burned 16 acres in total, said Nick Schuler, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. Winds are easing. Crews of some 8,500 firefighters are extinguishing embers, standing ready for any new sparks.
“Overall, it’s a moment to take a deep breath,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Yet the fires are far from extinguished. And how long the reprieve will last is unclear: More episodes of flame-fanning Santa Ana winds are in the forecast as early as next week, and there is no expectation of any significant precipitation on the horizon. In the interim, firefighters will take advantage of the conditions to lower threats that the largest blazes reignite.
But in an era of such extreme conflagrations, any notion that they strike only during a defined “wildfire season” has been destroyed — leaving fire officials especially reluctant to declare that danger has faded. It used to be that firefighters could walk away from fire once extinguished and leave it behind, said Scott McLean, a Cal Fire public information officer.
“I don’t feel comfortable in saying that anymore this year,” he said. Because of the potential fuel remaining in the drought-stricken region, the firefight “will be an ongoing thing for quite some time.”
A firefighter sets up a hose while fighting the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles' Mandeville Canyon neighborhood. (Eric Thayer/AP)
As of Wednesday afternoon, active flames had largely subsided and the risks of flying embers had diminished around the largest fires. The Palisades Fire was still considered only 19 percent contained, while the Eaton Fire was at 45 percent containment. The Hurst fire, a third significant blaze, at 799 acres, was 97 percent contained.
Fully extinguishing them will probably take weeks, said Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at UC-Berkeley. Firefighters work by hand, with hoses and shovels, or even with bulldozers and helicopters, to extinguish or bury hot spots that could otherwise spread embers.
“It’s going to be an immense amount of handwork,” he said. “The perimeters are so large.”
But for the first time in the harrowing episode, “We’re making significant progress,” Schuler said. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
Crews have now established a defensive line all the way around the Palisades Fire, which stands at 23,713 acres — an effort that involved firefighters working with bulldozers and by hand to halt its spread.
“We have gone down and taken the vegetation away all the way down to the earth all around the fire,” McLean said.
In their latest status report on the Eaton Fire, officials said Wednesday they expected that blaze to remain within its existing 14,117-acre footprint, allowing them to focus on reinforcing containment lines and getting areas that have been evacuated safe for residents to return home. But they said they were keeping firefighting resources in place along its western edge — ready for any potential spread.
The Palisades and Eaton fires started Jan. 7 amid conditions that firefighters said made flames all but impossible to stop, with wind gusts exceeding 60 mph and even reaching 100 mph on some ridgelines. That sent 100-foot-tall flames blowing sideways and embers flying distances of a mile or more, as winds pushed the fires toward the west and southwest.
Then a shift in the winds that began late last week and continued over the weekend meant flames instead pushed toward the north and east, creating new active firefighting fronts on opposite sides of the blazes. It elevated concern that the Palisades Fire could push in the direction of Interstate 405, threatening neighborhoods including Mandeville Canyon and Brentwood and landmarks such as the Getty Museum.
Firefighters who spoke with The Washington Post said the worst conditions of the firestorm were more dramatic than anything they had ever seen, even compared with historic blazes such as the Camp Fire, which killed 85 people in Northern California’s Butte County in November 2018, or the Thomas Fire, which burned a then-record 281,000 acres of Southern California the following month.
They described having to quickly retreat as flames raged toward them, embers flying and visibility vanishing, or needing to knock down flaming palm trees to prevent them from further spreading fire.
Robert Robledo, an engine captain with the U.S. Forest Service in the Angeles National Forest, called it the most “dynamic and intense setting on a fire I’ve been on.”
But over the past few days, conditions have begun to turn. Steady 20-mph winds with gusts of up to 50 mph were blowing across the mountains and valleys to the north and west of Los Angeles on Wednesday morning. But National Weather Service warnings of dangerous fire weather conditions were set to expire by Wednesday evening.
“The really good news is that today will be the last really windy day,” Weather Service meteorologists wrote. “Look for a marked decrease in the winds this afternoon.”
The winds were forecast to weaken further Thursday, resulting in cooler temperatures. By Friday, the winds will switch direction to blow in from the Pacific Ocean, instead of from hotter and drier inland areas, cooling Southern California down even more.
A search-and-rescue crew from Mexico arrives at the site of a mobile home park destroyed by the Palisades Fire. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
A huge corps of firefighters is ready to take advantage of the improving conditions.
Crews from across California, elsewhere in the United States and Canada and Mexico are fighting the fires, some going as long as 40 hours without sleep. In the Angeles National Forest, firefighters have been working out of 13 stations without electricity since the fires started, as temperatures drop as low as 40 degrees.
According to Cal Fire, as of Wednesday more than 5,100 personnel remained assigned to the Palisades Fire, including 524 engines, 44 helicopters, 66 bulldozers and 113 hand crews. The Eaton Fire had nearly 3,400 personnel assigned, including 274 engines, 77 water tenders, 16 helicopters and 21 dozers.
In some cases, the work to establish a perimeter of containment around the blazes involves firefighters systematically combing areas in a line, as if searching for a missing person. Instead, they seek out any hidden heat within logs, brush or debris, Schuler said. They scan burned areas from the air using infrared imagery to find any hot spots.
Firefighters are aiming for “100 percent confidence” that a wind gust cannot throw an ember into an area that hasn’t burned, he said. The fires’ footprints and the extent of damage are so massive that there’s a huge workload for firefighters to meticulously pore through.
“As each day goes by, and as their confidence level based on what they’re seeing increases, so does the percentage of containment of the fire,” Schuler said.
Still, the threat of more destruction remains. In Southern California, precipitation patterns have been virtually perfect — in a bad way — for supporting a massive fire, and that is not forecast to change for the foreseeable future.
Los Angeles still hasn’t seen more than a few drops of rain in the past eight months. The winter rainy season, which typically begins in early December, never arrived. It was a marked change from the past two winters, as is typical for California. Los Angeles International Airport received twice its normal rainfall during the winter of 2022-2023, and nearly as much precipitation last winter.
Vegetation that thrived amid the wet conditions only continues to dry, leaving the landscape a tinderbox ready to burn.
This winter, “severe” drought has quickly developed across nearly 60 percent of Los Angeles County, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Only in the county’s northernmost sections is the drought considered “moderate.”
That means fire risk will elevate again each time the Santa Ana winds blow.
And there are increasing signs of yet another Santa Ana wind event — when strong and dry winds blow across Southern California from inland deserts toward the Pacific — on Monday, with gusts expected to blow more from due east. That could give firefighters a greater opportunity to contain fires on their southern and eastern sides — but could allow the western side of the fires to advance once again.
Weather Service meteorologists expressed confidence on X that the region would “NOT see a repeat of last week” but added that “dangerous fire weather conditions are expected.”
Beyond that, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center notes more trouble brewing in the medium range.
Meteorologists there project below-average precipitation, as well as a potential reemergence of Santa Ana winds and “widespread critical fire weather conditions” around Jan. 22-25.
While the chaparral shrubs that dominate much of the landscape tend to burn quickly, leaving little additional fuel after the initial blaze, Stephens from UC-Berkeley said there remains a high likelihood that smoldering houses, cars and other human-made structures could have material at risk of reigniting.
Even when the fires eventually are extinguished, the work is not fully done. Crews must work to repair some of the damage created by heavy equipment used during firefighting. And there are the assessments about where flooding and mudslide risks will be higher after the event, as well as environmental risks posed by all that has burned.
Only nature could truly give officials a sigh of relief, McLean said — and even then, only over time.
“What we need is years — plural — of winters,” McLean said. “We need the water. We need the snow.”
NBC News (archive.ph)
By Shannon Pettypiece
2025-01-15 23:54:13GMT
The scenes of destruction in Los Angeles have brought a sense of déjà vu for Steve Crowder. Six years ago, similar images of fires ravaging his community of Paradise, California, were plastered across televisions and social media.
“It is Paradise revisited,” said Crowder, the mayor of Paradise. “Sitting here watching the news, these fires in L.A. have hit me the hardest.”
Now, his town could give an indication of what the road to recovery may look like for those in the Los Angeles area joining the growing list of towns and cities devastated by wildfires. For those communities, recovery has been measured in years, not months. It has required billions of dollars in federal assistance, though federal money doesn't address every need after a disaster. And putting that money to use comes with unexpected challenges that have gone far deeper than the surface-level destruction.
“My message to any of these towns is, don’t let anybody tell you you can’t come back, because we are proof you can come back. There is light at the end of the tunnel,” Crowder said. “The first time you walk through your town you’re going to think, ‘Oh, there’s no way we can come back from this.’ Well, there is, even though it looks like you’re walking through where a nuclear bomb went off.”
For those in Los Angeles, where the wildfires have killed at least 25 people and destroyed more than 12,300 structures, officials are beginning to discuss what may come next. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he is already starting to “reimagine L.A. 2.0,” with a Marshall Plan-style rebuilding effort that could cost tens of billions of dollars.
But much of that recovery will depend on federal resources, which could get entangled in wider political fights in Washington. Republicans in Washington have suggested putting conditions on aid to California or linking it to other policy priorities.
President Joe Biden has made federal funding available for the next six months to cover temporary housing, emergency assistance to individuals and costs related to immediate public safety threats, like debris cleanup and hazardous materials. But longer-term funding to rebuild public infrastructure, like water systems, roads and schools, will be up to the incoming administration and Congress.
Meanwhile, coarsened political rhetoric and public blame-seeking on the part of Trump and others have added to an already uncertain situation for the fire survivors — and could be fueling politicization of the disaster, said Jennifer Gray Thompson, whose organization After the Fire has worked since 2017 with communities affected by wildfires.
“One of the things I love about working in disasters is it’s nonpartisan, everyone gathers together as Americans and they support each other. But now I’m getting messages every day telling me, ‘You deserve it, we’re so glad this happened to you,’” Thompson said. “There have been parts of America that have always been unkind, but I’ve never known us to have this level of cruelty.”
A long road to recovery
Even without the current level of political infighting, the rebuilding process for communities affected by past wildfires has been yearslong and could indicate a long road ahead for those in Los Angeles.
It can take weeks before residents are even able to check on their properties and more than a year before all the debris and hazardous materials are removed so homeowners can start rebuilding. It could be several more years before critical infrastructure, like water systems, power lines, roads and schools, is fully rebuilt, with funding fights in Washington potentially delaying that progress further.
“I hate to say it, but if you lost your house, and even if you have the means to rebuild, you better buckle up, because it’s going be a ride that you’re not going to like,” said Pete Gaynor, who served as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the Trump administration. “I’m sorry to say it that way. It’s just the way it is.”
For those who lost their homes, FEMA provides temporary shelter, typically in hotels. But setting up longer-term temporary housing, like mobile home communities, can take more than a year, in order to find the land for those structures and to build out the road, water and electric infrastructure, Gaynor said.
In Paradise, 90% of the town, including 18,000 structures, was destroyed and 85 people were killed. The population went from around 26,000 people, many of them retirees, to as few as 2,000 overnight. Along with losing their homes and businesses, residents lost their jobs, children lost their schools and the city lost nearly all of its tax revenue.
Six years later, rebuilding is now well underway. The city is constructing around 500 homes a year and has rebuilt a third of its homes with its population up to 11,000, according to Crowder. Last year, Paradise was the fastest-growing city in California, attracting a mix of returning residents and newcomers, many of whom are families drawn to the town because of its schools and relative affordability, Crowder said.
Nearly all of the city’s infrastructure was damaged in the fire, including water systems, cell towers, power lines, roads and schools. Officials are still in the process of installing underground power lines and repaving roads. One silver lining of the process has been the ability for the city to rebuild with more modern infrastructure and buildings that will be more resilient to future fires.
FEMA has helped fund much of that rebuilding, but the federal process has felt belabored and full of red tape, at times, Crowder said.
“They operate like a typical big government machine. Although the help was appreciated, it is a little slow sometimes,” Crowder said. “It’s all good intentions, but some of the assistance that is offered is almost impossible to get. It sounds good on paper, but we are still seeing some of that with the housing situation where people are applying for programs but they are so stringent that no one could qualify.”
Crowder, who was a city council member as the city started to rebuild, has been on the phone with local officials in Los Angeles County, helping guide them through the early stages of their recovery.
The most recent California fires have also affected him personally: His daughter lost her home in Altadena last week to the Eaton Fire, which has killed at least 11 residents and destroyed more than 1,900 structures.
Federal funding is only part of the equation in fire recovery
Crowder lost his home and business in the 2018 fire, and it took him 18 months to be able to rebuild at a cost that far exceeded what his insurance company paid him for his loss. While most fire victims in Paradise had some form of insurance, many didn’t receive enough to cover the full cost of rebuilding, because costs skyrocketed following the surge in demand for labor and materials after the disaster.
“The majority of people that had insurance in Paradise were underinsured and didn’t realize it,” Crowder said. “If one or two houses had burned, we probably wouldn’t have been underinsured, because before the fire you could build a house for $150 a square foot. That went overnight to $350 a square foot, and the insurance didn’t go that far.”
The town also had to contend with alleged fraud by contractors, who fire victims said took millions of dollars in insurance payments from them without providing the promised work, Crowder said.
For those who have been able to rebuild, finding and affording homeowners insurance has become another struggle. Crowder said the typical policy has gone from around $1,500 a year to $5,000 through the state-backed insurer of last resort. It's an issue that will likely only get worse for Californians following the Los Angeles fires.
In Maui, Hawaii, more than 2,000 structures were destroyed in the community of Lahaina and around 12,000 were displaced in a fire that killed at least 100 people in August 2023.
FEMA and other federal agencies have provided about $3 billion toward Maui’s wildfire recovery, with more than $1.3 billion going to direct rebuilding efforts, like removing debris, providing temporary housing, rebuilding a local school and repairing public infrastructure.
Much of the first year of the recovery in Maui was spent clearing debris and hazardous material before property owners could begin rebuilding. It also took around a year for the Environmental Protection Agency to complete the process of testing, inspecting and clearing damaged water and sewer infrastructure so local officials could begin repairing and rebuilding those systems.
In addition to debris removal, the properties also had to pass soil inspections, since fires can cause toxic materials to leak into the ground, and have erosion control measures put in place following the loss of the vegetation that typically holds the soil in place.
Housing has been an especially difficult challenge in Lahaina, where there was already an affordable housing shortage — something Los Angeles was struggling with as well before the fires. Many residents were forced to move to other parts of the island or leave altogether, and housing has been a particular challenge for renters, said Jason Economou, president of the Maui United Way.
Nearly 15 months after the fire, families began moving into a temporary FEMA housing complex that consists of 169 modular homes. FEMA is also providing mobile homes that people can place on their private properties while they wait to rebuild.
But not all residents displaced from their homes were eligible for FEMA housing assistance. That includes people whose homes were badly damaged but didn’t burn, as well as undocumented immigrants, said Kimo Carvalho, executive director for HomeAid Hawaii, a nonprofit affordable housing developer.
His organization is in the process of moving residents into a state-funded development for those ineligible for FEMA assistance. It received more than 900 applications for 450 manufactured housing units where residents can live for up to five years. The first residents started moving in a year after the fire and the development is expected to be fully occupied by April.
“Their lives have been on pause for a year. Most have been in three to four different living arrangements, a lot of them weren’t able to maintain their full-time jobs, so they’ve been trying to figure out how to make money,” Carvalho said. “It wasn’t until I started seeing everyone move in that they started stabilizing. Then it’s almost like all the things that they were dealing with pre-fire are finally starting to come out.”
Beyond the price and logistics of rebuilding, there has also been the emotional cost.
Families have had to frequently move between temporary housing arrangements across the island, and a once tight-knit community has unraveled. That’s left residents feeling isolated and without a support network, compounding the struggles they face with rebuilding their lives after the fire, Economou said.
“The community is never going to be quite the same,” Economou said. “When people are forced to move as economic refugees, the makeup of the community changes, the size and the amount of housing that’s available changes. It’s not just that the old stuff is gone, so we’re just going to rebuild and pick up where we left off. That’s impossible. The community will never be the same after an event like this.”
“It is Paradise revisited,” said Crowder, the mayor of Paradise. “Sitting here watching the news, these fires in L.A. have hit me the hardest.”
Now, his town could give an indication of what the road to recovery may look like for those in the Los Angeles area joining the growing list of towns and cities devastated by wildfires. For those communities, recovery has been measured in years, not months. It has required billions of dollars in federal assistance, though federal money doesn't address every need after a disaster. And putting that money to use comes with unexpected challenges that have gone far deeper than the surface-level destruction.
“My message to any of these towns is, don’t let anybody tell you you can’t come back, because we are proof you can come back. There is light at the end of the tunnel,” Crowder said. “The first time you walk through your town you’re going to think, ‘Oh, there’s no way we can come back from this.’ Well, there is, even though it looks like you’re walking through where a nuclear bomb went off.”
For those in Los Angeles, where the wildfires have killed at least 25 people and destroyed more than 12,300 structures, officials are beginning to discuss what may come next. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he is already starting to “reimagine L.A. 2.0,” with a Marshall Plan-style rebuilding effort that could cost tens of billions of dollars.
But much of that recovery will depend on federal resources, which could get entangled in wider political fights in Washington. Republicans in Washington have suggested putting conditions on aid to California or linking it to other policy priorities.
President Joe Biden has made federal funding available for the next six months to cover temporary housing, emergency assistance to individuals and costs related to immediate public safety threats, like debris cleanup and hazardous materials. But longer-term funding to rebuild public infrastructure, like water systems, roads and schools, will be up to the incoming administration and Congress.
Meanwhile, coarsened political rhetoric and public blame-seeking on the part of Trump and others have added to an already uncertain situation for the fire survivors — and could be fueling politicization of the disaster, said Jennifer Gray Thompson, whose organization After the Fire has worked since 2017 with communities affected by wildfires.
“One of the things I love about working in disasters is it’s nonpartisan, everyone gathers together as Americans and they support each other. But now I’m getting messages every day telling me, ‘You deserve it, we’re so glad this happened to you,’” Thompson said. “There have been parts of America that have always been unkind, but I’ve never known us to have this level of cruelty.”
A long road to recovery
Even without the current level of political infighting, the rebuilding process for communities affected by past wildfires has been yearslong and could indicate a long road ahead for those in Los Angeles.
It can take weeks before residents are even able to check on their properties and more than a year before all the debris and hazardous materials are removed so homeowners can start rebuilding. It could be several more years before critical infrastructure, like water systems, power lines, roads and schools, is fully rebuilt, with funding fights in Washington potentially delaying that progress further.
“I hate to say it, but if you lost your house, and even if you have the means to rebuild, you better buckle up, because it’s going be a ride that you’re not going to like,” said Pete Gaynor, who served as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the Trump administration. “I’m sorry to say it that way. It’s just the way it is.”
For those who lost their homes, FEMA provides temporary shelter, typically in hotels. But setting up longer-term temporary housing, like mobile home communities, can take more than a year, in order to find the land for those structures and to build out the road, water and electric infrastructure, Gaynor said.
In Paradise, 90% of the town, including 18,000 structures, was destroyed and 85 people were killed. The population went from around 26,000 people, many of them retirees, to as few as 2,000 overnight. Along with losing their homes and businesses, residents lost their jobs, children lost their schools and the city lost nearly all of its tax revenue.
Six years later, rebuilding is now well underway. The city is constructing around 500 homes a year and has rebuilt a third of its homes with its population up to 11,000, according to Crowder. Last year, Paradise was the fastest-growing city in California, attracting a mix of returning residents and newcomers, many of whom are families drawn to the town because of its schools and relative affordability, Crowder said.
Nearly all of the city’s infrastructure was damaged in the fire, including water systems, cell towers, power lines, roads and schools. Officials are still in the process of installing underground power lines and repaving roads. One silver lining of the process has been the ability for the city to rebuild with more modern infrastructure and buildings that will be more resilient to future fires.
FEMA has helped fund much of that rebuilding, but the federal process has felt belabored and full of red tape, at times, Crowder said.
“They operate like a typical big government machine. Although the help was appreciated, it is a little slow sometimes,” Crowder said. “It’s all good intentions, but some of the assistance that is offered is almost impossible to get. It sounds good on paper, but we are still seeing some of that with the housing situation where people are applying for programs but they are so stringent that no one could qualify.”
Crowder, who was a city council member as the city started to rebuild, has been on the phone with local officials in Los Angeles County, helping guide them through the early stages of their recovery.
The most recent California fires have also affected him personally: His daughter lost her home in Altadena last week to the Eaton Fire, which has killed at least 11 residents and destroyed more than 1,900 structures.
Federal funding is only part of the equation in fire recovery
Crowder lost his home and business in the 2018 fire, and it took him 18 months to be able to rebuild at a cost that far exceeded what his insurance company paid him for his loss. While most fire victims in Paradise had some form of insurance, many didn’t receive enough to cover the full cost of rebuilding, because costs skyrocketed following the surge in demand for labor and materials after the disaster.
“The majority of people that had insurance in Paradise were underinsured and didn’t realize it,” Crowder said. “If one or two houses had burned, we probably wouldn’t have been underinsured, because before the fire you could build a house for $150 a square foot. That went overnight to $350 a square foot, and the insurance didn’t go that far.”
The town also had to contend with alleged fraud by contractors, who fire victims said took millions of dollars in insurance payments from them without providing the promised work, Crowder said.
For those who have been able to rebuild, finding and affording homeowners insurance has become another struggle. Crowder said the typical policy has gone from around $1,500 a year to $5,000 through the state-backed insurer of last resort. It's an issue that will likely only get worse for Californians following the Los Angeles fires.
In Maui, Hawaii, more than 2,000 structures were destroyed in the community of Lahaina and around 12,000 were displaced in a fire that killed at least 100 people in August 2023.
FEMA and other federal agencies have provided about $3 billion toward Maui’s wildfire recovery, with more than $1.3 billion going to direct rebuilding efforts, like removing debris, providing temporary housing, rebuilding a local school and repairing public infrastructure.
Much of the first year of the recovery in Maui was spent clearing debris and hazardous material before property owners could begin rebuilding. It also took around a year for the Environmental Protection Agency to complete the process of testing, inspecting and clearing damaged water and sewer infrastructure so local officials could begin repairing and rebuilding those systems.
In addition to debris removal, the properties also had to pass soil inspections, since fires can cause toxic materials to leak into the ground, and have erosion control measures put in place following the loss of the vegetation that typically holds the soil in place.
Housing has been an especially difficult challenge in Lahaina, where there was already an affordable housing shortage — something Los Angeles was struggling with as well before the fires. Many residents were forced to move to other parts of the island or leave altogether, and housing has been a particular challenge for renters, said Jason Economou, president of the Maui United Way.
Nearly 15 months after the fire, families began moving into a temporary FEMA housing complex that consists of 169 modular homes. FEMA is also providing mobile homes that people can place on their private properties while they wait to rebuild.
But not all residents displaced from their homes were eligible for FEMA housing assistance. That includes people whose homes were badly damaged but didn’t burn, as well as undocumented immigrants, said Kimo Carvalho, executive director for HomeAid Hawaii, a nonprofit affordable housing developer.
His organization is in the process of moving residents into a state-funded development for those ineligible for FEMA assistance. It received more than 900 applications for 450 manufactured housing units where residents can live for up to five years. The first residents started moving in a year after the fire and the development is expected to be fully occupied by April.
“Their lives have been on pause for a year. Most have been in three to four different living arrangements, a lot of them weren’t able to maintain their full-time jobs, so they’ve been trying to figure out how to make money,” Carvalho said. “It wasn’t until I started seeing everyone move in that they started stabilizing. Then it’s almost like all the things that they were dealing with pre-fire are finally starting to come out.”
Beyond the price and logistics of rebuilding, there has also been the emotional cost.
Families have had to frequently move between temporary housing arrangements across the island, and a once tight-knit community has unraveled. That’s left residents feeling isolated and without a support network, compounding the struggles they face with rebuilding their lives after the fire, Economou said.
“The community is never going to be quite the same,” Economou said. “When people are forced to move as economic refugees, the makeup of the community changes, the size and the amount of housing that’s available changes. It’s not just that the old stuff is gone, so we’re just going to rebuild and pick up where we left off. That’s impossible. The community will never be the same after an event like this.”
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Scott Dance, Brady Dennis, and Brianna Sacks
2025-01-16 01:42:49GMT
Burned trees from the Palisades Fire are seen from Will Rogers State Park, with Los Angeles in the background. Firefighters have made progress in the containment of the fires in the city. (Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
Eight days into Los Angeles’s most destructive firestorm on record, and the initial wave of the crisis is waning: The two most massive fires are still smoldering but have not spread significantly in days, and firefighters are — slowly and steadily — gaining ground on containing them.
And though dozens of new fires have popped up in recent days, most of them have been quickly tamed: Eighteen separate fires ignited Tuesday, but they only burned 16 acres in total, said Nick Schuler, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. Winds are easing. Crews of some 8,500 firefighters are extinguishing embers, standing ready for any new sparks.
“Overall, it’s a moment to take a deep breath,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Yet the fires are far from extinguished. And how long the reprieve will last is unclear: More episodes of flame-fanning Santa Ana winds are in the forecast as early as next week, and there is no expectation of any significant precipitation on the horizon. In the interim, firefighters will take advantage of the conditions to lower threats that the largest blazes reignite.
But in an era of such extreme conflagrations, any notion that they strike only during a defined “wildfire season” has been destroyed — leaving fire officials especially reluctant to declare that danger has faded. It used to be that firefighters could walk away from fire once extinguished and leave it behind, said Scott McLean, a Cal Fire public information officer.
“I don’t feel comfortable in saying that anymore this year,” he said. Because of the potential fuel remaining in the drought-stricken region, the firefight “will be an ongoing thing for quite some time.”
A firefighter sets up a hose while fighting the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles' Mandeville Canyon neighborhood. (Eric Thayer/AP)
As of Wednesday afternoon, active flames had largely subsided and the risks of flying embers had diminished around the largest fires. The Palisades Fire was still considered only 19 percent contained, while the Eaton Fire was at 45 percent containment. The Hurst fire, a third significant blaze, at 799 acres, was 97 percent contained.
Fully extinguishing them will probably take weeks, said Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at UC-Berkeley. Firefighters work by hand, with hoses and shovels, or even with bulldozers and helicopters, to extinguish or bury hot spots that could otherwise spread embers.
“It’s going to be an immense amount of handwork,” he said. “The perimeters are so large.”
But for the first time in the harrowing episode, “We’re making significant progress,” Schuler said. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
Crews have now established a defensive line all the way around the Palisades Fire, which stands at 23,713 acres — an effort that involved firefighters working with bulldozers and by hand to halt its spread.
“We have gone down and taken the vegetation away all the way down to the earth all around the fire,” McLean said.
In their latest status report on the Eaton Fire, officials said Wednesday they expected that blaze to remain within its existing 14,117-acre footprint, allowing them to focus on reinforcing containment lines and getting areas that have been evacuated safe for residents to return home. But they said they were keeping firefighting resources in place along its western edge — ready for any potential spread.
The Palisades and Eaton fires started Jan. 7 amid conditions that firefighters said made flames all but impossible to stop, with wind gusts exceeding 60 mph and even reaching 100 mph on some ridgelines. That sent 100-foot-tall flames blowing sideways and embers flying distances of a mile or more, as winds pushed the fires toward the west and southwest.
Then a shift in the winds that began late last week and continued over the weekend meant flames instead pushed toward the north and east, creating new active firefighting fronts on opposite sides of the blazes. It elevated concern that the Palisades Fire could push in the direction of Interstate 405, threatening neighborhoods including Mandeville Canyon and Brentwood and landmarks such as the Getty Museum.
Firefighters who spoke with The Washington Post said the worst conditions of the firestorm were more dramatic than anything they had ever seen, even compared with historic blazes such as the Camp Fire, which killed 85 people in Northern California’s Butte County in November 2018, or the Thomas Fire, which burned a then-record 281,000 acres of Southern California the following month.
They described having to quickly retreat as flames raged toward them, embers flying and visibility vanishing, or needing to knock down flaming palm trees to prevent them from further spreading fire.
Robert Robledo, an engine captain with the U.S. Forest Service in the Angeles National Forest, called it the most “dynamic and intense setting on a fire I’ve been on.”
But over the past few days, conditions have begun to turn. Steady 20-mph winds with gusts of up to 50 mph were blowing across the mountains and valleys to the north and west of Los Angeles on Wednesday morning. But National Weather Service warnings of dangerous fire weather conditions were set to expire by Wednesday evening.
“The really good news is that today will be the last really windy day,” Weather Service meteorologists wrote. “Look for a marked decrease in the winds this afternoon.”
The winds were forecast to weaken further Thursday, resulting in cooler temperatures. By Friday, the winds will switch direction to blow in from the Pacific Ocean, instead of from hotter and drier inland areas, cooling Southern California down even more.
A search-and-rescue crew from Mexico arrives at the site of a mobile home park destroyed by the Palisades Fire. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
A huge corps of firefighters is ready to take advantage of the improving conditions.
Crews from across California, elsewhere in the United States and Canada and Mexico are fighting the fires, some going as long as 40 hours without sleep. In the Angeles National Forest, firefighters have been working out of 13 stations without electricity since the fires started, as temperatures drop as low as 40 degrees.
According to Cal Fire, as of Wednesday more than 5,100 personnel remained assigned to the Palisades Fire, including 524 engines, 44 helicopters, 66 bulldozers and 113 hand crews. The Eaton Fire had nearly 3,400 personnel assigned, including 274 engines, 77 water tenders, 16 helicopters and 21 dozers.
In some cases, the work to establish a perimeter of containment around the blazes involves firefighters systematically combing areas in a line, as if searching for a missing person. Instead, they seek out any hidden heat within logs, brush or debris, Schuler said. They scan burned areas from the air using infrared imagery to find any hot spots.
Firefighters are aiming for “100 percent confidence” that a wind gust cannot throw an ember into an area that hasn’t burned, he said. The fires’ footprints and the extent of damage are so massive that there’s a huge workload for firefighters to meticulously pore through.
“As each day goes by, and as their confidence level based on what they’re seeing increases, so does the percentage of containment of the fire,” Schuler said.
Still, the threat of more destruction remains. In Southern California, precipitation patterns have been virtually perfect — in a bad way — for supporting a massive fire, and that is not forecast to change for the foreseeable future.
Los Angeles still hasn’t seen more than a few drops of rain in the past eight months. The winter rainy season, which typically begins in early December, never arrived. It was a marked change from the past two winters, as is typical for California. Los Angeles International Airport received twice its normal rainfall during the winter of 2022-2023, and nearly as much precipitation last winter.
Vegetation that thrived amid the wet conditions only continues to dry, leaving the landscape a tinderbox ready to burn.
This winter, “severe” drought has quickly developed across nearly 60 percent of Los Angeles County, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Only in the county’s northernmost sections is the drought considered “moderate.”
That means fire risk will elevate again each time the Santa Ana winds blow.
And there are increasing signs of yet another Santa Ana wind event — when strong and dry winds blow across Southern California from inland deserts toward the Pacific — on Monday, with gusts expected to blow more from due east. That could give firefighters a greater opportunity to contain fires on their southern and eastern sides — but could allow the western side of the fires to advance once again.
Weather Service meteorologists expressed confidence on X that the region would “NOT see a repeat of last week” but added that “dangerous fire weather conditions are expected.”
Beyond that, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center notes more trouble brewing in the medium range.
Meteorologists there project below-average precipitation, as well as a potential reemergence of Santa Ana winds and “widespread critical fire weather conditions” around Jan. 22-25.
While the chaparral shrubs that dominate much of the landscape tend to burn quickly, leaving little additional fuel after the initial blaze, Stephens from UC-Berkeley said there remains a high likelihood that smoldering houses, cars and other human-made structures could have material at risk of reigniting.
Even when the fires eventually are extinguished, the work is not fully done. Crews must work to repair some of the damage created by heavy equipment used during firefighting. And there are the assessments about where flooding and mudslide risks will be higher after the event, as well as environmental risks posed by all that has burned.
Only nature could truly give officials a sigh of relief, McLean said — and even then, only over time.
“What we need is years — plural — of winters,” McLean said. “We need the water. We need the snow.”
- Joined
- Sep 1, 2018
Hitting the fire with a large purse would be more effective than those backpack pumps. They are for mopup only.
Pulled these stills from Little Mountain Cam 1
- Joined
- Mar 25, 2021
This is clearly a fed plant. We all know about the nazi space mirror they are using to target every individual car on the road whilst sparing the cups and trees. They use the bird drones for pinpoint accurate target acquisition. You can't fool me agent.
Space Faring Marsupial
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2023
China and India are the worst polluters. China pollutes more than all other countries combined too. I would not be surprised if those constant grey skies are a bad sign. Not to mention all the other shit those bug hives do. I really hate China and India. We have that Pindia game for a reason.
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2014
There has been endless El Niño and La Niña BS messing with the weather.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2022
The Armed Homeowners Defying the Rules of L.A.’s Burn Zones
The Wall Street Journal (archive.ph)
By Sean McLain, Dan Frosch, and Joe Flint
2025-01-15 02:00:00GMT
The Wall Street Journal (archive.ph)
By Sean McLain, Dan Frosch, and Joe Flint
2025-01-15 02:00:00GMT
LOS ANGELES—In the still-smoldering neighborhoods of Altadena, where fires destroyed more than 2,700 structures, about 80 people have defied orders to evacuate, staying behind to protect what is left of their properties from looters and more fires after losing faith in authorities.
Residents patrol streets and interrogate strangers, living in a Hobbesian world without electricity or clean drinking water. Some are armed. They are hemmed in by yellow caution tape at neighborhood entrances flanked by National Guard troops, Los Angeles County Sheriff deputies and California Highway Patrol officers.
“We do feel like we’re in the Wild West,” said Aaron Lubeley, a 53-year-old lawyer who is one of the holdouts and serves as an unofficial emissary with police and fire representatives.
If Lubeley and the others try to leave, they risk being unable to return. On Monday, one of Lubeley’s friends, Janely Sandoval, delivered essentials. The real-estate broker drove her white Mercedes SUV up to the neighborhood checkpoint and stacked supplies for Lubeley and others at the makeshift border: water, bagels, bananas, grain-free tortilla chips and other staples.
“Can you guys hurry up?” one officer told Sandoval as she finished. “We just got an order not to allow any supplies through.”
Before Sandoval departed, Lubeley asked, “Can I hug my friend?”
The officer nodded, and Lubeley and Sandoval embraced across the yellow caution tape.
EveAnna Manley, one of the Altadena holdouts, had prepared for this moment. Her house has a natural-gas generator supplying 22 kilowatts of power, enough for several refrigerators, making her one of the few neighbors with electricity. She has 60 gallons of drinking water in the basement, as well as a reverse-osmosis water filter and hot-water tanks for showering.
“My old neighbor was a real prepper, I learned it from him,” said Manley, who runs an audio-equipment business. “I also replaced my wood shingles on my roof with concrete ones. I don’t know if that’s why my house survived.”
Farther west, residents of the Pacific Palisades, much of it in ruins, engage in their own standoff with public-safety officials.
Police and fire officials say they are keeping residents from returning to burned neighborhoods because of such hazards as downed power lines and precarious fire-weakened trees. “Do not go back in there. Do not sneak in there,” said Brian Rice, president of the California Professional Firefighters union. “It’s not worth losing your life over.”
The message isn’t getting across to everyone.
Pacific Palisades resident Ross Gerber, president of a wealth-management firm, is among those who have been sneaking past police to check on his house, official edicts be damned. “I have no patience for any of them,” he said. “After you survive this, you don’t care what they say.”
On Tuesday morning, Gerber, 53, was thwarted. “I’m trying to sneak in right now and it’s super hard,” he said by phone, his voice winded as he walked briskly, looking for an opening. Police had entry points “tight as hell,” he said. “They are everywhere now.”
Using a map, Gerber said he tried stairs and alleyways to slip past authorities until finally deciding to retreat. “There are literally so many police,” he said. “North Korea is easier.”
Gerber’s house sits in a neighborhood shaded by towering eucalyptus trees. It is set back from some of the hardest-hit areas of the Palisades, where opulent homes perched high above the Pacific Ocean now make up a landscape of smoking, gutted properties.
Houses still standing, including Gerber’s, have no electricity or safe drinking water. He has decamped with his family to the Ritz Carlton in the oceanfront Marina del Rey neighborhood.
Gerber joined with neighbors to hire a private water truck and driver to sit by their empty homes in case of another fire outbreak. The water truck was initially blocked from entering the neighborhood by law-enforcement officers.
“So we called somebody who was very important who called Gavin Newsom and told him to let our water truck into our neighborhood,” Gerber said.
Gov. Newsom’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Unsafe
The Los Angeles-area fires have killed 24 people and destroyed more than 12,000 structures, sparing neither America’s priciest real estate nor the homes of middle- and working-class Californians.
“Nobody has ever seen anything like this,” said Rice, president of the union that represents 35,000 firefighters in the state. “It’s like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the fire that followed. It’s that bad.”
Last week, city and county law enforcement and National Guard stepped up patrols around the perimeter of neighborhoods struck by fires after dozens of people were arrested for looting.
On Saturday, a half-dozen residents pleaded with police officers to let them return to houses not far from the Mandeville Canyon fire in Brentwood. “We’re not letting people up there,” one of the officers said. “There have been looters. I don’t know who you are.”
Marica Zellers and a friend zigzagged around the outskirts of Altadena last Thursday, looking for an opening that would allow her to evade barricades and check on her house. “The police were guarding every single street,” she said.
Then Zellers got a tip from a friend: The parking structure of the Super King Market offered an entry point that bypassed the roadblocks.
When Zellers arrived, she saw that her house on West Mariposa Street was rubble. She hunted for her safe, which was intact. After she and her friend managed to pry it open, she said, they had to jump back. “The safe was burning inside because it was holding all the heat,” she said.
Her house was gone, she said, and so was everything in her safe: birth records, property records, sports memorabilia, family history documents and $40,000 worth of Treasury bonds.
Regret, resolve
The Jan. 7 evacuation warning for Altadena came while Lubeley was away from home. His wife and 26-year-old son fled with such haste that his wife forgot her purse. Late that night, as fire spread through Eaton Canyon, Lubeley returned to retrieve passports, family photos and anything else he could think of.
After he was done, Lubeley said, he stayed in the driveway for the better part of an hour, too scared to go back into the house and too reluctant to leave. He recalled being barely able to afford the house when he bought it 15 years ago for $800,000. Online estimates recently valued it at around $1.8 million.
Lubeley returned to his neighborhood the following morning. Some homes were untouched. His was a charred shell. Small fires still burned in his neighbor’s yard, and Lubeley reached for a fallen shovel. Its fiberglass handle unraveled like silk threads in his hands as he picked it up.
Little but a brick fireplace remained of his house. “I built that fireplace by hand,” Lubeley said, his voice choking as he walked through the property Monday. Lemons, looking like lumps of coal, still hung from branches of a backyard tree.
When hot embers had rained down last week, igniting lawns and trees, the neighbors who refused to evacuate stomped out spot fires all night to preserve as many homes as possible. “If I had stayed and saved my house, I could have saved three of my neighbors’” houses, he said.
Lubeley’s regret turned to resolve. He has stayed over the past eight days to defend what is left in the neighborhood against fires springing from buried embers. His wife has pleaded for him to abandon his vigil. “I could be having a Manhattan and a steak, but I couldn’t live with myself if I did that and my neighbor’s house goes up,” Lubeley said.
Standing guard, Lubeley said, “gives me a sense of value and purpose.”
He wears the same clothes—sweatshirt, fleece pants and L.A. Dodgers cap—that he bought at Costco after the fire. He sleeps in his SUV and wakes up to the sound of parrots in the Sycamore trees, he said, much as he did before the fire. He said he keeps a 9mm handgun.
During the day, he checks in on residents and passes out supplies. His moods swing from grief to a moment of gallows humor about his home’s new “open floor plan.”
On Monday afternoon, he discovered more holdouts in the neighborhood, a family of four adults. They were covered in soot and hadn’t eaten for a couple of days. They eyed him with suspicion, and he broke the ice by offering them bananas.
In the first few days after the fire, Altadena neighbors said, sympathetic law-enforcement officers looked the other way as Lubeley and other holdouts slipped through checkpoints to buy supplies at Costco and Home Depot. After restrictions were tightened, Lubeley turned to family, friends and acquaintances.
Monday was the third time that volunteers came to checkpoints, like smugglers, to deliver supplies. It might be the last trip. Officers told Lubeley the supply drop-off would no longer be allowed.
That night, Lubeley and others gathered before the mandatory 6 p.m. curfew to figure out ways around the new rules. Some law-enforcement personnel brought them sandwiches, he said.
Rebel force
Gerber, the Pacific Palisades resident, managed to check his house on Thursday and Friday last week without interference by authorities. He carried a firearm, he said, and walked around local streets with neighbors, questioning anyone the group didn’t recognize. “The whole neighborhood banded together,” he said.
Many residents waited hours for police escorts to their property. Officers led small groups of cars to their properties, warning residents they had only a few minutes to gather valuables and essential belongings. Gerber said he was able to navigate his way past authorities alone.
On Sunday, officials ended those home checks. “People are saying: ‘I just want to go to my house and see what’s left,’” Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said Monday at a news conference. “We know that, but we have people literally looking for the remains of your neighbors.”
“I get that they’ll say this is ‘the rule,’ but it’s our land and our neighborhood and as much as I respect the authorities, we’re much more competent than them,” Gerber said. “Let us in to defend our neighborhood.”
Gerber and his neighbors have turned to their community WhatsApp, which had been used largely to air minor gripes about traffic and such. Now, it is an organizing tool, he said, “better than any government.”
He had long been skeptical of the system, he said, but the fires further showed him that communities need to be prepared to fend for themselves.
After this disaster is over, Gerber said, he hopes the neighborhood will build “our own fire-like militia.”
Residents patrol streets and interrogate strangers, living in a Hobbesian world without electricity or clean drinking water. Some are armed. They are hemmed in by yellow caution tape at neighborhood entrances flanked by National Guard troops, Los Angeles County Sheriff deputies and California Highway Patrol officers.
“We do feel like we’re in the Wild West,” said Aaron Lubeley, a 53-year-old lawyer who is one of the holdouts and serves as an unofficial emissary with police and fire representatives.
If Lubeley and the others try to leave, they risk being unable to return. On Monday, one of Lubeley’s friends, Janely Sandoval, delivered essentials. The real-estate broker drove her white Mercedes SUV up to the neighborhood checkpoint and stacked supplies for Lubeley and others at the makeshift border: water, bagels, bananas, grain-free tortilla chips and other staples.
“Can you guys hurry up?” one officer told Sandoval as she finished. “We just got an order not to allow any supplies through.”
Before Sandoval departed, Lubeley asked, “Can I hug my friend?”
The officer nodded, and Lubeley and Sandoval embraced across the yellow caution tape.
EveAnna Manley, one of the Altadena holdouts, had prepared for this moment. Her house has a natural-gas generator supplying 22 kilowatts of power, enough for several refrigerators, making her one of the few neighbors with electricity. She has 60 gallons of drinking water in the basement, as well as a reverse-osmosis water filter and hot-water tanks for showering.
“My old neighbor was a real prepper, I learned it from him,” said Manley, who runs an audio-equipment business. “I also replaced my wood shingles on my roof with concrete ones. I don’t know if that’s why my house survived.”
Farther west, residents of the Pacific Palisades, much of it in ruins, engage in their own standoff with public-safety officials.
Police and fire officials say they are keeping residents from returning to burned neighborhoods because of such hazards as downed power lines and precarious fire-weakened trees. “Do not go back in there. Do not sneak in there,” said Brian Rice, president of the California Professional Firefighters union. “It’s not worth losing your life over.”
The message isn’t getting across to everyone.
Pacific Palisades resident Ross Gerber, president of a wealth-management firm, is among those who have been sneaking past police to check on his house, official edicts be damned. “I have no patience for any of them,” he said. “After you survive this, you don’t care what they say.”
On Tuesday morning, Gerber, 53, was thwarted. “I’m trying to sneak in right now and it’s super hard,” he said by phone, his voice winded as he walked briskly, looking for an opening. Police had entry points “tight as hell,” he said. “They are everywhere now.”
Using a map, Gerber said he tried stairs and alleyways to slip past authorities until finally deciding to retreat. “There are literally so many police,” he said. “North Korea is easier.”
Gerber’s house sits in a neighborhood shaded by towering eucalyptus trees. It is set back from some of the hardest-hit areas of the Palisades, where opulent homes perched high above the Pacific Ocean now make up a landscape of smoking, gutted properties.
Houses still standing, including Gerber’s, have no electricity or safe drinking water. He has decamped with his family to the Ritz Carlton in the oceanfront Marina del Rey neighborhood.
Gerber joined with neighbors to hire a private water truck and driver to sit by their empty homes in case of another fire outbreak. The water truck was initially blocked from entering the neighborhood by law-enforcement officers.
“So we called somebody who was very important who called Gavin Newsom and told him to let our water truck into our neighborhood,” Gerber said.
Gov. Newsom’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Unsafe
The Los Angeles-area fires have killed 24 people and destroyed more than 12,000 structures, sparing neither America’s priciest real estate nor the homes of middle- and working-class Californians.
“Nobody has ever seen anything like this,” said Rice, president of the union that represents 35,000 firefighters in the state. “It’s like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the fire that followed. It’s that bad.”
Last week, city and county law enforcement and National Guard stepped up patrols around the perimeter of neighborhoods struck by fires after dozens of people were arrested for looting.
On Saturday, a half-dozen residents pleaded with police officers to let them return to houses not far from the Mandeville Canyon fire in Brentwood. “We’re not letting people up there,” one of the officers said. “There have been looters. I don’t know who you are.”
Marica Zellers and a friend zigzagged around the outskirts of Altadena last Thursday, looking for an opening that would allow her to evade barricades and check on her house. “The police were guarding every single street,” she said.
Then Zellers got a tip from a friend: The parking structure of the Super King Market offered an entry point that bypassed the roadblocks.
When Zellers arrived, she saw that her house on West Mariposa Street was rubble. She hunted for her safe, which was intact. After she and her friend managed to pry it open, she said, they had to jump back. “The safe was burning inside because it was holding all the heat,” she said.
Her house was gone, she said, and so was everything in her safe: birth records, property records, sports memorabilia, family history documents and $40,000 worth of Treasury bonds.
Regret, resolve
The Jan. 7 evacuation warning for Altadena came while Lubeley was away from home. His wife and 26-year-old son fled with such haste that his wife forgot her purse. Late that night, as fire spread through Eaton Canyon, Lubeley returned to retrieve passports, family photos and anything else he could think of.
After he was done, Lubeley said, he stayed in the driveway for the better part of an hour, too scared to go back into the house and too reluctant to leave. He recalled being barely able to afford the house when he bought it 15 years ago for $800,000. Online estimates recently valued it at around $1.8 million.
Lubeley returned to his neighborhood the following morning. Some homes were untouched. His was a charred shell. Small fires still burned in his neighbor’s yard, and Lubeley reached for a fallen shovel. Its fiberglass handle unraveled like silk threads in his hands as he picked it up.
Little but a brick fireplace remained of his house. “I built that fireplace by hand,” Lubeley said, his voice choking as he walked through the property Monday. Lemons, looking like lumps of coal, still hung from branches of a backyard tree.
When hot embers had rained down last week, igniting lawns and trees, the neighbors who refused to evacuate stomped out spot fires all night to preserve as many homes as possible. “If I had stayed and saved my house, I could have saved three of my neighbors’” houses, he said.
Lubeley’s regret turned to resolve. He has stayed over the past eight days to defend what is left in the neighborhood against fires springing from buried embers. His wife has pleaded for him to abandon his vigil. “I could be having a Manhattan and a steak, but I couldn’t live with myself if I did that and my neighbor’s house goes up,” Lubeley said.
Standing guard, Lubeley said, “gives me a sense of value and purpose.”
He wears the same clothes—sweatshirt, fleece pants and L.A. Dodgers cap—that he bought at Costco after the fire. He sleeps in his SUV and wakes up to the sound of parrots in the Sycamore trees, he said, much as he did before the fire. He said he keeps a 9mm handgun.
During the day, he checks in on residents and passes out supplies. His moods swing from grief to a moment of gallows humor about his home’s new “open floor plan.”
On Monday afternoon, he discovered more holdouts in the neighborhood, a family of four adults. They were covered in soot and hadn’t eaten for a couple of days. They eyed him with suspicion, and he broke the ice by offering them bananas.
In the first few days after the fire, Altadena neighbors said, sympathetic law-enforcement officers looked the other way as Lubeley and other holdouts slipped through checkpoints to buy supplies at Costco and Home Depot. After restrictions were tightened, Lubeley turned to family, friends and acquaintances.
Monday was the third time that volunteers came to checkpoints, like smugglers, to deliver supplies. It might be the last trip. Officers told Lubeley the supply drop-off would no longer be allowed.
That night, Lubeley and others gathered before the mandatory 6 p.m. curfew to figure out ways around the new rules. Some law-enforcement personnel brought them sandwiches, he said.
Rebel force
Gerber, the Pacific Palisades resident, managed to check his house on Thursday and Friday last week without interference by authorities. He carried a firearm, he said, and walked around local streets with neighbors, questioning anyone the group didn’t recognize. “The whole neighborhood banded together,” he said.
Many residents waited hours for police escorts to their property. Officers led small groups of cars to their properties, warning residents they had only a few minutes to gather valuables and essential belongings. Gerber said he was able to navigate his way past authorities alone.
On Sunday, officials ended those home checks. “People are saying: ‘I just want to go to my house and see what’s left,’” Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said Monday at a news conference. “We know that, but we have people literally looking for the remains of your neighbors.”
“I get that they’ll say this is ‘the rule,’ but it’s our land and our neighborhood and as much as I respect the authorities, we’re much more competent than them,” Gerber said. “Let us in to defend our neighborhood.”
Gerber and his neighbors have turned to their community WhatsApp, which had been used largely to air minor gripes about traffic and such. Now, it is an organizing tool, he said, “better than any government.”
He had long been skeptical of the system, he said, but the fires further showed him that communities need to be prepared to fend for themselves.
After this disaster is over, Gerber said, he hopes the neighborhood will build “our own fire-like militia.”
- Joined
- Mar 30, 2023
So basically California is fucked so bad that they are trying to hide it. I don't think they can hide it, but them trying to hide it prevents people from being able to safely evacuate which is going to cause a high death tool.
Any kiwibros in California should just assume that they won't know if a fire is bearing down on them until they look out the window and see the house next door burning.
It looks like public order is collapsing and the bughives are imploding. Expect to see looting and public disorder that makes the 2020 "fiery but mostly peaceful" Summer of Love look tame.
Any trust the Democrats still have after this is going to go up in flames.
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Not Really Here
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
You ever hear of that tax "scam" of planting pine, and calling your property a "farm" for doing nothing?
There's a large number of tree farms in the US supplying some of the domestic need. Plus targeted operations on public lands where trees groups diseased, or near the end of their lifecycle, are sold before they can burn in a wildfire.
Then there's Celulosa Arauco y Constitución in Chile, they've been buying land, and planting massive tree farms since 1970. You have wood from that company in your home right now, they do all lumber products, and use the mountain sawdust they create to manufacture a massive amount of fibreboard.
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- Joined
- Dec 17, 2022
It's not your land if you can't visit it on your own volition, at a time of your choosing. Maybe you should rethink your stance of "as much as I respect the authorities" and think long and hard about what it's getting you. The government hates you and they are not concerned with you or your property, they're concerned with holding their grip on power which is going to start slipping the longer this goes on.
John Badman
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2024
I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t care anymore. 1 week was enough.
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2014
Except maybe with the most delusional and/or ignorant people.
So I could see "Chris Chan" still voting Democrat after this.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2022
They're so jumpy that they're reporting people carrying flowers and dinner as a man with a rifle.
DWP says workers have been threatened with bodily harm and, possibly, a rifle
Los Angeles Times (archive.ph)
By Richard Winton and Dakota Smith
2025-01-16 03:24:52GMT
A worker with the L.A. Department of Water and Power trims trees around power lines in Mandeville Canyon on Tuesday. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
In the wake of the Palisades fire, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power employees have alerted police to a pair of incidents that have raised alarm inside the utility.
Shortly after noon Wednesday, officers responded to Mulholland Drive in Beverly Crest after a person threatened a DWP employee who was working on a downed electrical pole, L.A. Police Department officials said.
A person in a gray Mercedes-Benz drove up to the utility worker and threatened bodily harm. The DWP employee phoned 911, and by the time officers responded, the person had left the area, police said.
On Tuesday, officers were alerted around 7 p.m. to a man possibly armed with a rifle at the downtown headquarters of the DWP, the John Ferraro Building on Hope Street. No details were provided on what occurred during the incident.
Police searched the area and detained a man matching the description of the suspect. Officers determined, however, the man was walking home with dinner and flowers for his wife.
Additional supervisors responded to the call, canvassed the area, and did not recover a weapon. No arrests were made.
“We can confirm that threats have been made against our employees,” said a DWP spokesperson. “We take every threat and incident seriously and report them immediately to law enforcement. “
Calling its staff an “essential part of the city family,” the DWP spokesperson added: “Our employees are working tirelessly around the clock to support the city’s response, and their work is critical to those efforts.”
Since the Palisades fire, the DWP is one of several city and state agencies to face scrutiny and public criticism. The utility supplies water and electrical service to 4.1 million residents of L.A., including Pacific Palisades.
Late in the evening on the first night of the Palisades fire, firefighting crews reported difficulty getting water from several hydrants. The utility has said enormous demand from the wildfire strained the water system, which has occurred in other areas contending with massive fires, and that about 20% of hydrants in the Palisades saw a loss in pressure.
The DWP also faced criticism over the empty Santa Ynez Reservoir, located in the middle of the Palisades burn area. The reservoir was drained nearly a year ago for repairs to its floating cover, which have not been completed.
Former DWP general manager Martin Adams told The Times that he believed the reservoir would have helped prolong water pressure in the Palisades but would not have averted the inevitable drop in pressure due to the wildfire.
DWP says workers have been threatened with bodily harm and, possibly, a rifle
Los Angeles Times (archive.ph)
By Richard Winton and Dakota Smith
2025-01-16 03:24:52GMT
A worker with the L.A. Department of Water and Power trims trees around power lines in Mandeville Canyon on Tuesday. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
In the wake of the Palisades fire, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power employees have alerted police to a pair of incidents that have raised alarm inside the utility.
Shortly after noon Wednesday, officers responded to Mulholland Drive in Beverly Crest after a person threatened a DWP employee who was working on a downed electrical pole, L.A. Police Department officials said.
A person in a gray Mercedes-Benz drove up to the utility worker and threatened bodily harm. The DWP employee phoned 911, and by the time officers responded, the person had left the area, police said.
On Tuesday, officers were alerted around 7 p.m. to a man possibly armed with a rifle at the downtown headquarters of the DWP, the John Ferraro Building on Hope Street. No details were provided on what occurred during the incident.
Police searched the area and detained a man matching the description of the suspect. Officers determined, however, the man was walking home with dinner and flowers for his wife.
Additional supervisors responded to the call, canvassed the area, and did not recover a weapon. No arrests were made.
“We can confirm that threats have been made against our employees,” said a DWP spokesperson. “We take every threat and incident seriously and report them immediately to law enforcement. “
Calling its staff an “essential part of the city family,” the DWP spokesperson added: “Our employees are working tirelessly around the clock to support the city’s response, and their work is critical to those efforts.”
Since the Palisades fire, the DWP is one of several city and state agencies to face scrutiny and public criticism. The utility supplies water and electrical service to 4.1 million residents of L.A., including Pacific Palisades.
Late in the evening on the first night of the Palisades fire, firefighting crews reported difficulty getting water from several hydrants. The utility has said enormous demand from the wildfire strained the water system, which has occurred in other areas contending with massive fires, and that about 20% of hydrants in the Palisades saw a loss in pressure.
The DWP also faced criticism over the empty Santa Ynez Reservoir, located in the middle of the Palisades burn area. The reservoir was drained nearly a year ago for repairs to its floating cover, which have not been completed.
Former DWP general manager Martin Adams told The Times that he believed the reservoir would have helped prolong water pressure in the Palisades but would not have averted the inevitable drop in pressure due to the wildfire.
- Joined
- Mar 30, 2023
It does turn away those who willingly remained ignorant because they profited from it.