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Fires in California seem really bad - Mandate of Heaven in danger?
Let me just preface this in that I'm not American so I don't fully really appreciate what it's like over there or how systems are supposed to work. Anyway, when we have fires in Australia, it exclusively impacts rural areas right next to woodland. Rich people tend to live closer to the cities in inner suburbs, near the sea. It's unthinkable that a fire reaches them, it'd have to burn through huge swathes of suburban sprawl first. All that happens for most Australians (and especially rich Australians) is that air quality gets horrendously bad for two weeks. Of course the state still tries very hard to protect homes but it's very much a rural issue, the rural fire service goes out to volunteer and firefight.
I'm reading that in Los Angeles, it's the opposite. Rich people live on the edge of the city, right next to woodland. You've got expensive houses burning down.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg525q2ggl4o
There are pretty serious complaints about political neglect too. I hear that the mayor of LA was off in Ghana (which is frankly bizarre, this whole subnational diplomacy meme needs to be put down and buried in the backyard). I hear that the LA fire hydrants are somehow out of water in the Palisades. There have also been allegations that homeless people were lighting fires, I haven't seen any proof of this. TBH fire-lighting seems like very low-risk, high-return terrorism, it's astonishing we haven't seen it become more common in certain vulnerable countries.
Naturally the first have turned into a political issue. Anti-Trump people have started blaming climate change and arguing that Trump wanted to cut fire defence spending.
Pro Trump people have pointed out that Trump was critical of California's water infrastructure before. And it's not as though California is known for being run by legions of Trump toadies: https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1877055198604017790
There also seems to be dysfunction in insurance, a very high number of fire insurance plans were cancelled right before the fire (possibly due to regulations preventing rate rises): https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1877128641802285064
IMO the solution is intensive backburning when it's cool. There can be no fires if you destroy the fuel beforehand.
However, it does seem like a major failure in state legitimacy if you can't even protect the rich from fires. From Chris Bakke on twitter:
Thoughts? I don't really have a thesis here.
First, California has been mismanaged all to hell since the days when that was bipartisan consensus because there were republicans in government. Not filling the reservoirs over ‘a stupid and worthless fish called a smelt’ is just California being California and the lack of water in the hydrants is probably not solely attributable to that. Second, it’s not like, a fixable issue. The sorts of people running California are not willing to compromise the iron law of bureaucracy mission of state agencies in order to serve the public. Political heads will not roll; this is a one party state.
The lack of water in hydrants isn't anything surprising. No water system is designed for a wildfire that's impacting 2000+ structures. Depending on how the system and lift stations and such are planned out, you're typically planning for 1 or 2 residential fires per zone, more for commercial, more for industrial. And you have to keep in mind that once a structure becomes compromised, their water pipes are going to be effectively turned on at max (the pipes and valves being compromised by heat or gravity loads) creating even more demand on the system. Reservoirs are pretty much your best and only affordable option for water for wildfires and such.
I keep seeing this take, and it frustrates me.
Somebody was tasked with designing a system to deliver water to fire hydrants. They designed the system in a way where it fails during a fire.
California is a cargo cult of government competence. It's all performative. They make things that look functional until they need to be used and, like the bamboo airplanes, they do nothing when needed.
It's basic infrastructure engineering. You can allocate nigh-infinite resources to making something safer or stronger or higher capacity and there will still be a theoretical load case that will exceed it. We don't have anything close to nigh-infinite resources to throw at anything so you determine an acceptable level of risk or design load case based on the probability of exceedance and the cost of mitigation and that is what you design to. This isn't California specific, this is the case in all responsible engineering everywhere.
What is possibly California specific is not having additional options available when their design cases are exceeded, i.e. reservoirs holding that excessive rain from last year. Or if some of those videos are to be trusted, not even having extra buckets and hoses for LAFD to use.
If California is so determined not to collect rain water, I don't see why they don't invest in (nuclear?) desalination plants. Would solve a great deal of the water disputes they seem to be having with adjacent states as well.
California is (unsurprisingly) anti-nuclear. They were planning to shutter their final remaining nuclear power plant (Diablo Canyon) last year, and the only reason it didn't happen was because the resulting blackouts would have been a political disaster for Newsom et al.
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California has many reservoirs, but it doesn't help you at all that cachuma lake has 170k AF of water when it's a hundred miles away. The problem is not that there's no water, the problem is supplying water to all the hydrants (at elevation!) when they're in use and domestic water lines are leaking after the houses burned down.
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