This Is Where the Palisades Fire Started
Original: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/us/palisades-fire-cause-ignition-point-site.html
Archive: https://archive.ph/Fv8d4
This Is Where the Palisades Fire Started
In the hills above Pacific Palisades, there is crime scene tape and scattered debris, clues to what may have caused the initial fire that eventually raged through thousands of structures.
By Thomas Fuller, Mike Baker, Blacki Migliozzi, K.K. Rebecca Lai, and Jonathan Wolfe
January 13, 2025
Along the trail near where the Palisades fire began, The Times found bits of power-line debris, including what appeared to be part of a lightning arrester device. But the nearest overhead power line was about a third of a mile to the north. That line, which curves down from the trail and into the neighborhood,was extensively damaged from fire, but witness photographs show it was still intact soon after the fire began.
The poles along that route have a tumultuous recent history. Many of them date from the 1930s, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power initiated a project in 2019 to replace some of them with stronger metal structures.
The project stalled after environmental regulators said the department had damaged 183 small bushes known as Braunton’s milkvetch, an endangered species.
The department agreed in 2020 to pay a fine, and won approval to resume work, saying the project was “essential in regards to our wildfire mitigation plan.” But the project does not appear to have proceeded.
The Times’s review of the ridgetop showed many damaged and fallen utility poles along the trail heading north — an area that was consumed by fire, but not until a day after the blaze began.
Endangered plants bulldozed in Topanga State Park
Archive: https://archive.ph/zgpOj
Endangered plants bulldozed in Topanga State Park
By Louis Sahagún
August 1, 2019
Crews for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power recently bulldozed hundreds of federally endangered plants in Topanga State Park, and both state and city authorities have launched investigations into DWP’s actions, part of a wildfire prevention project aimed at replacing 200 aging wooden power poles with steel ones.
“In response to recent community concerns about protected plants in the construction area, the LADWP has halted construction and is working with biologists and other experts to conduct an investigation and assessment of the site,” Stephanie Spicer, a spokeswoman for the city water and power agency, said late Wednesday in response to inquiries from The Times.
In a separate incident this year, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works apparently encased federally threatened red-legged frogs in cement while making emergency repairs to a culvert in a portion of nearby Leo Carrillo State Park, which is vulnerable to heavy debris flows because of last year’s Woolsey fire.
Both events, not previously publicized by the agencies involved, have recharged debate over balancing wildfire safety and protecting fragile ecological resources following big blazes, including last year’s deadly Camp and Woolsey fires — and the Tubbs fire the year before that.
“We’re in the middle of an investigation into a lot of troubling questions,” said Andrew Willis, enforcement supervisor for the California Coastal Commission. “We’re contacting all appropriate state and federal wildlife agencies because they are going to want to look into them closely.”
Sometime in July, DWP crews used bulldozers to clear and widen a graded road as part of a wildfire prevention project stretching from Pacific Palisades to Lake Encino. The California Public Utilities Commission has identified this area — which includes some of Southern California’s most expensive coastal real estate — as having an “elevated fire risk.” By installing steel poles, DWP hopes to make the power lines more resistant to high winds and fire.
“This project will help ensure power reliability and safety, while helping reduce wildfire threats,” DWP said in a statement Thursday. “These wooden poles were installed between 1933 and 1955 and are now past their useful service life.”
But in doing the work, say state authorities, the crews potentially destroyed hundreds of Braunton’s milk vetch plants, an endangered species whose remaining numbers have dwindled to less than 3,000 in the wild.
The city utility had been alerted to the presence of the endangered plants on July 7 via an email sent by David Pluenneke, an amateur botanist and avid hiker. It thanked him for calling the issue to their attention, according to documents obtained by The Times.
Eight days later, Pluenneke visited the site and discovered that crews had removed all vegetation across several acres for a new dirt fire road, 24 feet wide. He was livid, and remains angry.
“It’s hard not to think that if there had been blue whales and panda bears up there, they would have bulldozed them, too,” Pluenneke said.
The amateur botanist complained in writing to Deborah Hong, a spokeswoman for the LADWP in Pacific Palisades. She replied that a staff biologist was preparing a report on the matter.
In the meantime, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the California Department of Parks and Recreation and the California Coastal Commission are trying to determine if any laws were broken. They are also trying to determine the extent of the damage to the overall plant population, which consists of just a dozen colonies, all in the mountains surrounding the Los Angeles Basin.
Efforts to determine the full extent of the damage in milk vetch and frog habitat have been muddled by a confusing overlap of county, state and federal jurisdictions, officials said. In addition, the federal Endangered Species Act has minimal authority when it comes to endangered plants on state lands.
“We can’t undo what happened,” Suzanne Goode, an environmental scientist with California State Parks, said. “But we are working on what the next steps will be. Obviously, there needs to be some sort of mitigation.”
Overall, fewer than 3,000 individual Braunton’s milk vetch plants persist in a region spanning about 80 miles from east to west and 25 miles from north to south. More than half of those plants are in Topanga State Park.
A short-lived perennial in the pea family, Astragalus brauntonii, grows only in areas with calcium carbonate soils that have been disturbed by fire. Scientists say the species, which gets about 5 feet tall, has been under siege by urban development and wildfire safety projects since botanists first described it in 1903, based on specimens collected above Santa Monica, according to a federal report.
In 1998, for instance, state and federal wildlife authorities and conservation organizations were negotiating with a developer to protect a milk vetch patch in the Santa Monicas, but then “the plants and their habitat were deliberately destroyed by the developer with approval of Ventura County,” the report said.
In Leo Carrillo State Park, about 25 miles west of Topanga, the presumed loss of red-legged frogs comes as biologists are working to reintroduce the once common amphibians to streams where they have not been seen in nearly half a century.
Since the 1960s, fires, mudslides, pesticides, fungal infections, loss of habitat and other threats have decimated these frogs, which grow up to 5 inches in length and are named because of their crimson undersides.
In December, they faced a new threat: Damage done by county crews on an emergency mission to fill holes underneath the abutments of a culvert near Mulholland Highway. It was part of an effort to prevent the culvert’s collapse if it were hit by debris flows from fire-stripped slopes.
The work was halted after state officials contacted county public works with concerns about the potential for red-legged frogs inhabiting the site, said Kerjon Lee, a spokesman for the agency.
Later, the construction plan was revised and permits were obtained from State Parks “to continue the work under certain conditions, such as a biologist on site at all times,” Lee said.
As for the frogs, “we didn’t find any — alive or dead,” Goode said. “It’s possible they were entombed in the cement.”
During a recent visit to Topanga State Park, Nick Jensen, a conservation analyst for the nonprofit California Native Plant Society, suggested a bright side to the Topanga controversy.
“We’re not against replacing these old wooden poles,” he said. “But we are demanding a plan from the city, county and regulatory agencies on how we can go forward with urgent fire safety projects without these kinds of things happening again.”
Jensen picked up a handful of broken milk vetch stems laden with seedpods. “So, we may be looking at the milk vetch that roared,” he said.
A program to protect a plant called Braunton’s milkvetch (scientific name Astragalus brauntonii) may have had an effect on fire safety in the exact same area where the Palisades fire started.
This is from the New York Times:
Original: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/us/palisades-fire-cause-ignition-point-site.html
Archive: https://archive.ph/Fv8d4
This Is Where the Palisades Fire Started
In the hills above Pacific Palisades, there is crime scene tape and scattered debris, clues to what may have caused the initial fire that eventually raged through thousands of structures.
By Thomas Fuller, Mike Baker, Blacki Migliozzi, K.K. Rebecca Lai, and Jonathan Wolfe
January 13, 2025
Along the trail near where the Palisades fire began, The Times found bits of power-line debris, including what appeared to be part of a lightning arrester device. But the nearest overhead power line was about a third of a mile to the north. That line, which curves down from the trail and into the neighborhood,was extensively damaged from fire, but witness photographs show it was still intact soon after the fire began.
The poles along that route have a tumultuous recent history. Many of them date from the 1930s, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power initiated a project in 2019 to replace some of them with stronger metal structures.
The project stalled after environmental regulators said the department had damaged 183 small bushes known as Braunton’s milkvetch, an endangered species.
The department agreed in 2020 to pay a fine, and won approval to resume work, saying the project was “essential in regards to our wildfire mitigation plan.” But the project does not appear to have proceeded.
The Times’s review of the ridgetop showed many damaged and fallen utility poles along the trail heading north — an area that was consumed by fire, but not until a day after the blaze began.
And here is the wikipedia article on that plant species:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astragalus_brauntonii
As a person with an amateur interest in the subject of risk analysis, I find this to to be quite fascinating.
It’s typical for most government policies to have both benefits and risks.
When we consider adopting a new government policy, it’s wise to take into account both the benefits and the risks.
This specific issue is something that may end up being taught in various college courses in the future.
PBS NewsHour: Is desalination the future of drought relief in California?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Skuk8DeXpE
Martin Scorsese said this is “the film that has influenced [him] most.” YouTube has it for free.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRj7aCxadEo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_by_Contract
Murder by Contract is a 1958 American film noir crime film directed by Irving Lerner. Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Ben Maddow did uncredited work on the film. Centering on an existentialist hit man assigned to kill a woman, the film is often praised for its spare style and peculiar sense of cool.
The film has exerted an influence on American cinema, most notably on director Martin Scorsese, who famously cited Murder by Contract as “the film that has influenced [him] most.”
More Prescribed Burning Could Reduce Wildland Fire Impact, Study Finds
More Prescribed Burning Could Reduce Wildland Fire Impact, Study Finds
By Patrick Healy
May 29, 2019
Western wildlands beset with increasingly severe fire seasons, including in California, would do well to follow the example of the nation’s Southeast and increase use of preventive prescribed burns, according to a newly published study.
Prescribed, or controlled burns, consume brush and other combustibles to reduce the fuel available to a random fire that might occur during more adverse heat and wind conditions, and thereby, reduce the chance of it taking off.
“We’re Not Doing Enough Prescribed Burns in the Western United States to Mitigate Wildfire Risk,” is the title of the study, authored by Crystal Kolden, PhD, Associate Professor of Fire Sciences at the University of Idaho.
“The question isn’t, ‘Is it feasible?'” said Kolden. “The question is, ‘What happens if we don’t?'”
The study found that with increasing use of prescribed burns in the Southeast, that region has largely avoided the rise in monstrous wildfires that have increasingly besieged the West, consuming hundreds of thousands of acres.
The windblown Camp Fire last November claimed at least 85 lives as it sped from forest into the Sierra Nevada foothill community of Paradise.
Prescribed burning in the West dates back generations, but in the past two decades its use by many agencies has lessened, or at most stayed level, according to data collected and organized by Kolden into spreadsheets. Budget constraints, environmental impact concerns, and fear of the risk of a burn going out of control are among the factors she sees.
“All those things can be overcome if everyone agrees that the most important thing is to really reduce and mitigate the risk of catastrophic wildfires,” Kolden said during an interview Wednesday in San Diego.
Last fall, President Trump blamed California’s massive fire disasters on forest mismanagement by the state, though much of the forest and other wildland in California is owned and managed by the federal government.
Two months ago, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency stemming from wildfires, and waived environmental review requirements to hasten 35 high priority projects to lessen fire risk in areas deemed especially at risk.
Officials at multiple county fire departments in California speak of the challenges of getting through a maze of reports, reviews, permits and approvals required to proceed with a prescribed burn.
“I think the last one I did it took about 16 or17 months,” said Capt. Ken VanWig, Vegetation Management Program Manager for the Ventura County Fire Department. It continues to conduct wildfire training on private land, but has not done a prescribed burn to reduce fuel loads in two years, VanWig said. Late in 2017, he had finished the permitting process for four areas, but regrettably, the Thomas Fire got to them first.
Los Angeles County fire had scheduled for this fall a prescribed burn on 400 acres in Malibu near Big Rock, an area that did not burn during last year’s Woolsey Fire. Despite support from Malibu City Hall, the plan ran into opposition and has been put on hold. It may be altered to call for fuel reduction by cutting and removing, which is more labor intensive and time consuming.
Final approval is still being sought for a prescribed burn in Tonner Canyon near Diamond Bar, according to Ron Durbin, LA County Fire’s acting Asst. Chief Forester. By his recollection, it has been 11 years since the department last did a prescribed burn.
The Orange County Fire Authority has no prescribed burns planned within its jurisdiction, but does work with the Cleveland National Forest on controlled burns within the federal land.
Prescribed burns continue to be a small part of the vegetation management practices of the Angeles National Forest, accounting for 264 of the 2,671 acres treated so far this year, according to Information Officer Nathan Judy.
Prof. Kolden believes funding approved in Congress last year could enable prescribed burning to increase in the western national forests–but only if emergency demand for fire fighting stops taking so much from funds budgeted for prevention.
The real deniers of climate change are the people who…
The real deniers of climate change are the people who:
Opposed removing dry brush, dead trees, and other fuel from the forests.
Opposed building new reservoirs.
Opposed building large scale, Israeli-style desalination plants.
and
Supported sending trillions of gallons of rainwater into the ocean instead of using it for humans.
Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here: One of the driest countries on Earth now makes more freshwater than it needs
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/
Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here: One of the driest countries on Earth now makes more freshwater than it needs
By Rowan Jacobsen
July 29, 2016
Ten miles south of Tel Aviv, I stand on a catwalk over two concrete reservoirs the size of football fields and watch water pour into them from a massive pipe emerging from the sand. The pipe is so large I could walk through it standing upright, were it not full of Mediterranean seawater pumped from an intake a mile offshore.
“Now, that’s a pump!” Edo Bar-Zeev shouts to me over the din of the motors, grinning with undisguised awe at the scene before us. The reservoirs beneath us contain several feet of sand through which the seawater filters before making its way to a vast metal hangar, where it is transformed into enough drinking water to supply 1.5 million people.
We are standing above the new Sorek desalination plant, the largest reverse-osmosis desal facility in the world, and we are staring at Israel’s salvation. Just a few years ago, in the depths of its worst drought in at least 900 years, Israel was running out of water. Now it has a surplus. That remarkable turnaround was accomplished through national campaigns to conserve and reuse Israel’s meager water resources, but the biggest impact came from a new wave of desalination plants.
Bar-Zeev, who recently joined Israel’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research after completing his postdoc work at Yale University, is an expert on biofouling, which has always been an Achilles’ heel of desalination and one of the reasons it has been considered a last resort. Desal works by pushing saltwater into membranes containing microscopic pores. The water gets through, while the larger salt molecules are left behind. But microorganisms in seawater quickly colonize the membranes and block the pores, and controlling them requires periodic costly and chemical-intensive cleaning. But Bar-Zeev and colleagues developed a chemical-free system using porous lava stone to capture the microorganisms before they reach the membranes. It’s just one of many breakthroughs in membrane technology that have made desalination much more efficient. Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.
Driven by necessity, Israel is learning to squeeze more out of a drop of water than any country on Earth, and much of that learning is happening at the Zuckerberg Institute, where researchers have pioneered new techniques in drip irrigation, water treatment and desalination. They have developed resilient well systems for African villages and biological digesters than can halve the water usage of most homes.
The institute’s original mission was to improve life in Israel’s bone-dry Negev Desert, but the lessons look increasingly applicable to the entire Fertile Crescent. “The Middle East is drying up,” says Osnat Gillor, a professor at the Zuckerberg Institute who studies the use of recycled wastewater on crops. “The only country that isn’t suffering acute water stress is Israel.”
That water stress has been a major factor in the turmoil tearing apart the Middle East, but Bar-Zeev believes that Israel’s solutions can help its parched neighbors, too — and in the process, bring together old enemies in common cause.
Bar-Zeev acknowledges that water will likely be a source of conflict in the Middle East in the future. “But I believe water can be a bridge, through joint ventures,” he says. “And one of those ventures is desalination.”
Driven to Desperation
In 2008, Israel teetered on the edge of catastrophe. A decade-long drought had scorched the Fertile Crescent, and Israel’s largest source of freshwater, the Sea of Galilee, had dropped to within inches of the “black line” at which irreversible salt infiltration would flood the lake and ruin it forever. Water restrictions were imposed, and many farmers lost a year’s crops.
Their counterparts in Syria fared much worse. As the drought intensified and the water table plunged, Syria’s farmers chased it, drilling wells 100, 200, then 500 meters (300, 700, then 1,600 feet) down in a literal race to the bottom. Eventually, the wells ran dry and Syria’s farmland collapsed in an epic dust storm. More than a million farmers joined massive shantytowns on the outskirts of Aleppo, Homs, Damascus and other cities in a futile attempt to find work and purpose.
And that, according to the authors of “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was the tinder that burned Syria to the ground. “The rapidly growing urban peripheries of Syria,” they wrote, “marked by illegal settlements, overcrowding, poor infrastructure, unemployment, and crime, were neglected by the Assad government and became the heart of the developing unrest.”
Similar stories are playing out across the Middle East, where drought and agricultural collapse have produced a lost generation with no prospects and simmering resentments. Iran, Iraq and Jordan all face water catastrophes. Water is driving the entire region to desperate acts.
More Water Than Needs
Except Israel. Amazingly, Israel has more water than it needs. The turnaround started in 2007, when low-flow toilets and showerheads were installed nationwide and the national water authority built innovative water treatment systems that recapture 86 percent of the water that goes down the drain and use it for irrigation — vastly more than the second-most-efficient country in the world, Spain, which recycles 19 percent.
But even with those measures, Israel still needed about 1.9 billion cubic meters (2.5 billion cubic yards) of freshwater per year and was getting just 1.4 billion cubic meters (1.8 billion cubic yards) from natural sources. That 500-million-cubic-meter (650-million-cubic-yard) shortfall was why the Sea of Galilee was draining like an unplugged tub and why the country was about to lose its farms.
Enter desalination. The Ashkelon plant, in 2005, provided 127 million cubic meters (166 million cubic yards) of water. Hadera, in 2009, put out another 140 million cubic meters (183 million cubic yards). And now Sorek, 150 million cubic meters (196 million cubic yards). All told, desal plants can provide some 600 million cubic meters (785 million cubic yards) of water a year, and more are on the way.
The Sea of Galilee is fuller. Israel’s farms are thriving. And the country faces a previously unfathomable question: What to do with its extra water?
Water Diplomacy
Inside Sorek, 50,000 membranes enclosed in vertical white cylinders, each 4 feet high and 16 inches wide, are whirring like jet engines. The whole thing feels like a throbbing spaceship about to blast off. The cylinders contain sheets of plastic membranes wrapped around a central pipe, and the membranes are stippled with pores less than a hundredth the diameter of a human hair. Water shoots into the cylinders at a pressure of 70 atmospheres and is pushed through the membranes, while the remaining brine is returned to the sea.
Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents. Israeli households pay about US$30 a month for their water — similar to households in most U.S. cities, and far less than Las Vegas (US$47) or Los Angeles (US$58).
The International Desalination Association claims that 300 million people get water from desalination, and that number is quickly rising. IDE, the Israeli company that built Ashkelon, Hadera and Sorek, recently finished the Carlsbad desalination plant in Southern California, a close cousin of its Israel plants, and it has many more in the works. Worldwide, the equivalent of six additional Sorek plants are coming online every year. The desalination era is here.
What excites Bar-Zeev the most is the opportunity for water diplomacy. Israel supplies the West Bank with water, as required by the 1995 Oslo II Accords, but the Palestinians still receive far less than they need. Water has been entangled with other negotiations in the ill-fated peace process, but now that more is at hand, many observers see the opportunity to depoliticize it. Bar-Zeev has ambitious plans for a Water Knows No Boundaries conference in 2018, which will bring together water scientists from Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza for a meeting of the minds.
Even more ambitious is the US$900 million Red Sea–Dead Sea Canal, a joint venture between Israel and Jordan to build a large desalination plant on the Red Sea, where they share a border, and divide the water among Israelis, Jordanians and the Palestinians. The brine discharge from the plant will be piped 100 miles north through Jordan to replenish the Dead Sea, which has been dropping a meter per year since the two countries began diverting the only river that feeds it in the 1960s. By 2020, these old foes will be drinking from the same tap.
On the far end of the Sorek plant, Bar-Zeev and I get to share a tap as well. Branching off from the main line where the Sorek water enters the Israeli grid is a simple spigot, a paper cup dispenser beside it. I open the tap and drink cup after cup of what was the Mediterranean Sea 40 minutes ago. It tastes cold, clear and miraculous.
The contrasts couldn’t be starker. A few miles from here, water disappeared and civilization crumbled. Here, a galvanized civilization created water from nothingness. As Bar-Zeev and I drink deep, and the climate sizzles, I wonder which of these stories will be the exception, and which the rule.
This proposal from five Connecticut Democrats would get rid of the requirement that firefighters be strong enough to carry their own safety equipment.
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
January 11, 2025
This proposal from five Connecticut Democrats would get rid of the requirement that firefighters be strong enough to carry their own safety equipment.
The bill is sponsored by:
Michael D’Agostino (Democrat – 91st district)
Josh Elliott (Democrat – 88th district)
Robyn Porter (Democrat – 94th district)
Martin Looney (Democrat -11th district)
Jorge Cabrera (Democrat – 17th district)
The bill is at this link:
https://www.cga.ct.gov/2023/TOB/H/PDF/2023HB-05501-R00-HB.PDF
And here is the internet archive of that link:
The text of the bill states:
State of Connecticut
General Assembly
Proposed Bill No. 5501
January Session, 2023
LCO No. 259
Referred to Committee on PUBLIC SAFETY AND SECURITY
Introduced by:
REP. D’AGOSTINO, 91st Dist.
REP. ELLIOTT, 88th Dist.
REP. PORTER, 94th Dist.
SEN. LOONEY, 11th Dist.
SEN. CABRERA, 17th Dist.
AN ACT CONCERNING ALTERNATIVE PHYSICAL ABILITY TESTING
REQUIREMENTS FOR FEMALE CANDIDATES FOR FIREFIGHTER
POSITIONS.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General
Assembly convened:
That chapter 104 of the general statutes be amended to establish
physical ability test requirements for female candidates for firefighter
positions that provide an alternative to the fifty-pound simulated vest
test component of the Candidate Physical Ability Test.
Statement of Purpose:
To allow for a more diverse class of candidates for firefighter positions
at municipal and volunteer fire departments by recognizing that
additional female candidates would qualify for such positions based on
revised physical standards that offer an alternative to the fifty-pound
simulated vest test component of the Candidate Physical Ability Test.
LCO No. 2590
Here is a screenshot of the bill from that link:
One of these two headlines must be false.
Headline #1: “Here is why California can’t use ocean water to help fight the wildfires”
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/los-angeles-fire-ocean-water-debunked-b2677916.html
Headline #2: “Los Angeles Firefighters Are Getting an Assist From Canada’s Water-Bombing Planes”
This is how D.E.I. destroyed LA Fire Department’s ability to deal with the LA fires.
Was this incompetence or malice?
Mother Jones, December 12, 2017: A Century of Fire Suppression Is Why California Is in Flames
NBC News, October 18, 2020: Decades of mismanagement led to choked forests — now it’s time to clear them out, fire experts say
KQED, July 10, 2024: California Heat Turned Brush Into Prime Fuel for Fires. Forests Will Be Next
https://x.com/DanielAlmanPGH/status/1877882771537805465
https://twitter.com/DanielAlmanPGH/status/1877882771537805465
Trump has long history of warning Newsom over ‘terrible’ wildfire prevention
Trump has long history of warning Newsom over ‘terrible’ wildfire prevention
‘Get your act together Governor. You don’t see close to the level of burn in other states,’ Trump said in 2019
By Emma Colton
January 8, 2025
‘Get your act together Governor. You don’t see close to the level of burn in other states,’ Trump said in 2019
President-elect Trump, during his first administration, put Gov. Gavin Newsom on notice for his handling of repeated wildfires in the state, years ahead of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires currently raging.
“The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must ‘clean’ his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers,” the former and upcoming president posted to X in 2019.
“Every year, as the fire’s rage & California burns, it is the same thing-and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$ help. No more. Get your act together Governor. You don’t see close to the level of burn in other states,” the thread continued.
Trump’s message to Newsom came as the Kincade Fire raged in Sonoma County from Oct. 23 to Nov. 6, 2019.
“We’re successfully waging war against thousands of fires started across the state in the last few weeks due to extreme weather created by climate change while Trump is conducting a full on assault against the antidotes,” Newsom said in response to Trump’s message, the Washington Post reported at the time.
Just roughly two weeks before Trump will be inaugurated as the nation’s 47th president, he again took aim at Newsom’s wildfire prevention leadership in the state, pinning blame for the LA County fires on Newsom and his environmental policies.
“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,”Trump posted to Truth Social on Wednesday.
“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!”
Newsom’s director of communications Izzy Gardon told Fox Digital in response to Trump’s Truth Social: “We’re focused on protecting lives and battling these blazes – not playing politics.”
“There is no such document as the water restoration declaration – that is pure fiction. The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need,” Gardon added.
Trump has a long history of putting Newsom’s handling of wildfires under the microscope across his first four years in the White House, including in January 2019 when he threatened to cut off federal funds to California if reforms were not made to the state’s forest management services.
“Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forest fires that, with proper Forest Management, would never happen. Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money. It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!” he posted to X that year.
“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!,”he added in 2018 on X.
Newsom and other Democrats have historically pushed back that wildfires in the state are due to climate change and global warming.
“You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation,” Newsom shot back at Trump in 2019, for example, after the president slammed him for his wildfire leadership.
California Republicans, however, have echoed Trump that Newsom and other Democrats in the state “failed” in addressing forestry management.
“The Democrats who control this state, have been in charge of the legislature, and hold every statewide office have failed to take care of forestry management in California,” Assemblyman James Gallagher said on Fox News in 2020. “We have overgrown forests with brush piles 10 feet high and dead and dying trees and it’s a tinderbox waiting for a spark.”
The California governor pledged in 2019 to reform California’s approach to wildfire prevention, but a 2021 NPR investigation reported the governor overstated the efforts.
“The investigation found Newsom overstated, by an astounding 690%, the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities,” Scott Rodd wrote of the findings in 2021. “Newsom has claimed that 35 ‘priority projects’ carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres. But the state’s own data show the actual number is 11,399.”
The state pushed back on the report, saying their efforts on wildfire prevention were hampered by the pandemic, “along with an unprecedented wildfire season which pulled our already strained wildfire crews away from prevention work to firefighting work.”
“The notion that the Newsom administration is retreating on wildfire response – in dollars or actions – is wholly inaccurate,” the governor’s office said after the investigation’s findings were released.
The Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan has since achieved and begun working on 100% of its 99 key actions, with the state also hiring an additional 3,000 new firefighters to CAL FIRE since 2019.
At least four wildfires are currently raging in Los Angeles County, tearing through the Pacific Palisades and Sylmar neighborhoods, as well as near Pasadena.
Newsom propositioned 65 fire engines, seven helicopters, nine bulldozers, and more than 105 specialized personnel in Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Ventura Counties ahead of the fire spiraling earlier this week. The National Guard was also deployed in response to the fire.
“California has deployed 1400% firefighting personnel & hundreds of propositioned assets to combat these unprecedented fires in LA,” Newsom said on X this week. “Emergency officials, firefighters, and first responders are all hands on deck through the night to do everything possible to protect lives.”
California Heat Turned Brush Into Prime Fuel for Fires. Forests Will Be Next
California Heat Turned Brush Into Prime Fuel for Fires. Forests Will Be Next
By Kevin Stark and Brian Krans
July 10, 2024
After two wet winters in a row, summer heat has turned California’s tremendously thick layer of grass and shrubs into fuel for many of the wildfires that are burning across the state.
All of that vegetation baked to a crisp under a record-shattering heat wave that stretched on for days and is set to dial up again across Northern California after a slight cooldown on Tuesday.
“There’s a lot of vegetation, and with the heat and the wind that we’ve been seeing, it’s dried out significantly,” Chelsea Burkett, a public information officer with Cal Fire’s Santa Clara Unit, told KQED. “There’s always potential for a fire to start and to spread easily in the type of vegetation we’re seeing.”
The heat shot above 110 degrees in many cities, especially in the Central Valley, and Redding hit a record at 119 degrees.
Dead brush on the ground across Northern California is “becoming critically flammable,” according to the latest forecast from the National Interagency Fire Center, and “the heat wave will flip the switch in terms of flammability in the live woody fuels across the lower and some mid-elevations.”
That means the heat dried out some of California’s forests enough that they are now primed to burn, edging the state beyond an active grass fire season as wildfires rip through the Klamath and Tahoe national forests.
Many dozens of other smaller fires have ignited and then were quickly suppressed during the past week by some of the 7,000-plus firefighters working across the state, supported by a near-constant deployment of helicopters and planes.
At least 1,197 fires have started across Northern California and 2,396 in Southern California this summer, according to the latest tally from the National Interagency Fire Center (PDF).
After keeping the Royal Fire from running away across Placer County in the Tahoe National Forest near Sugar Bowl with a steady barrage of water and retardant released from planes, officials cleared an area of the dense forest to drop firefighters in using helicopters on Tuesday.
These crews are wielding chainsaws and other hand tools to hack lines around the fire, which is currently 15% contained but only a few hundred acres in size.
In California’s far north, the Shelly Fire continues to churn through the dense Marble Mountain Wilderness near the Pacific Crest Trail and Shelly Lake.
That blaze has consumed more than 8,285 acres and is burning in the vicinity of the communities of Etna and Greenview, threatening more than 4,200 homes and buildings in a situation that Chris Christofferson, forest supervisor for the Klamath National Forest, called “gravely serious” during a community town hall on Monday night.
“I have seen a number of communities like this be threatened by wildfire, whether it was Quincy, or destroyed by wildfire, Greenville and Paradise,” Christofferson said. “And so when I look at this, I am very concerned.”
Fire officials have ordered bulldozers and hand crews to construct a series of pockets, fire breaks they hope will keep it from threatening the rural communities nearby.
“Some of you are probably in an evacuation zone; I am too. Please heed the warnings,” Siskiyou County Supervisor Ray Haupt said at the town hall. “I’ve lost six friends in recent years in Siskiyou County because they refused to go. These fires are nothing to mess around with. I can help you rebuild homes, but I can’t bring friends back to life.”
Decades of mismanagement led to choked forests – now it’s time to clear them out, fire experts say
Decades of mismanagement led to choked forests – now it’s time to clear them out, fire experts say
“Forest management is a lot like gardening. You have to keep the forest open and thin,” said Mike Rogers, a former Angeles National Forest supervisor.
By Alicia Victoria Lozano
October 18, 2020
The Western United States is enduring yet another devastating fire year, with more than 4.1 million acres already scorched in California alone, at least 31 people dead and hundreds of others forced to flee their homes.
Wildland fires are increasingly following a now-familiar pattern: bigger, hotter and more destructive. A recent Los Angeles Times headline declaring 2020 to be “The worst fire season. Again” illustrated some of the frustration residents feel over the state’s fire strategy.
For decades, federal, state and local agencies have prioritized fire suppression over prevention, pouring billions of dollars into hiring and training firefighters, buying and maintaining firefighting equipment and educating the public on fire safety.
But as climate change continues to fuel dry conditions in the American West, many experts say it’s long past time to shift the focus back to managing healthy forests that can better withstand fire and add to a more sustainable future.
“Fires have always been part of our ecosystem,” said Mike Rogers, a former Angeles National Forest supervisor and board member of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees. “Forest management is a lot like gardening. You have to keep the forest open and thin.”
Federal forest management dates back to the 1870s, when Congress created an office within the U.S. Department of Agriculture tasked with assessing the quality and conditions of forests. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt oversaw the birth of the U.S. Forest Service, which manages 193 million acres of public land across the country.
In California, forest management also falls under the purview of the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire.
Since 2011, Cal Fire has spent more than $600 million on fire prevention efforts and removed or felled nearly 2 million dead trees. In 2018, California set the goal of treating — which can include slashing, burning, sawing or thinning trees — 500,000 acres of wildland per year, yet Cal Fire remains far from meeting that target.
“It’s an ongoing process,” said Cal Fire spokeswoman Christine McMorrow. “There is always going to be more work.”
Cal Fire is steadily receiving injections of money to do what it can to reduce wildfire risk, including better land management and training a new generation of foresters. In 2018, former Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that will allocate $1 billion over five years to Cal Fire to be used on fire prevention measures. But experts warn that more money is needed.
“Is it enough? Well, it’s enough for what we’re doing right now, but is that enough to get all the work that needs to be done in one year or five years or 10 years? It’s going to a take lot,” McMorrow said.
Long before the country’s founding, Spanish explorers documented wildland fires in California. In 1542, conquistador Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed along the coast and noticed smoke billowing up from what is now known as the Los Angeles Basin. He called it “la baya de los fumos,” or “the bay of smoke.”
Studies by archaeologists and historians support a theory that Cabrillo might have been witnessing an early form of land management, including the burning of shrubs and chaparral to clear dry brush and promote better conditions for hunting big game.
Prescribed and controlled burns were integral to the American landscape for generations. In 1910, focus started to shift away from forest management and steer toward fire suppression after “The Big Burn” ravaged 3 million acres across Washington, Idaho and Montana, killing at least 85 people and reshaping U.S. fire policy for years to come.
The U.S. Forest Service ordered that all wildland fires be extinguished as soon as possible, eventually settling on the so-called 10 a.m. policy, which emphasized suppressing fires by the morning after they started.
The state’s policy to stop fires as soon as they ignite resulted in a backlog of trees in forests now choked with brush and other dry fuels. According to the U.S. Forest Service, one researcher studying the Stanislaus National Forest in Northern California found records from 1911 showing just 19 trees per acre in one section of the forest. More than a century later, the researcher and his team counted 260 trees per acre.
With denser tree cover comes the danger of bigger fires, Rogers said.
“We have more large trees per acre than we’ve ever had because they have continued to grow, and underneath these large trees are young shrubs that fuel fires in the crown of the trees,” he said. “When a fire starts in there, it’s unstoppable.”
Drought, climate change and bark-beetle infestations have all contributed to the backlog of trees, leaving some experts to push for creative solutions to managing California’s crowded forests.
One potential solution could be turning dead and diseased trees into biomass energy before they start massive wildfires.
Jonathan Kusel founded the nonprofit research organization Sierra Institute for Community and Environment in 1993 in an effort to better understand how state and federal agencies could put leftover organic material to use. The institute is now working with federal and state partners on ways to supply wood chips made from low-value vegetation to biomass facilities that can then burn the organic matter to produce heat and electricity.
Kusel estimates the process, when done correctly in confined barrels, is exponentially cleaner than relying on natural gas for energy. It also facilitates what Kusel calls “the appropriate thinning of forests,” or the clearing of smaller growth, to not only lower the risk of wildfires, but also to contribute to cleaner waterways and lower carbon emissions by promoting healthier forests.
“We aren’t going to be successful if all we do is try to stop fire,” he said. “But we can make it less damaging … and we can try to introduce smaller fires that can maintain habitats in a healthy state.”
But finding buyers for biomass remains a big question for the Sierra Institute. Biomass is considered a dirty word among environmentalists who warn that burning plant material and releasing it into the air can increase carbon emissions.
Removing small growth from forests is also more expensive and not as economically attractive as focusing on large-growth removal that can be turned into timber, Kusel acknowledged. Still, as wildfires threaten to become bigger and more dangerous, Kusel is hopeful that a new locally based biomass market could offset the cost of thinning out the state’s forests by creating smaller, better-maintained facilities that do not release dangerous pollutants into the air.
“Societally we have to think differently about our forests, but we have to invest and manage them differently, too,” he said. “We have to do better.”
‘Devastating’: California had record rainfall last year, but lacked infrastructure to store it
‘Devastating’: California had record rainfall last year, but lacked infrastructure to store it
By Jamie Joseph
January 10, 2025
Experts lay blame primarily on the state’s handling of its forestry management and a lesser-known problem, the state’s outdated water reserves system. California’s existing reservoirs can only hold so much water, and many were built in the mid-20th century.
Last year, the state experienced record-breaking rainfall after an atmospheric river event, but the existing water infrastructure faced difficulties managing the sudden influx of water. A significant portion of that rainfall was dumped into the ocean.
Ring also pointed to “environmentalist extremists” in the state who have pushed for heavier regulations like the Endangered Species Act, which requires freshwater to flow through rivers and into the Pacific Ocean to protect the endangered delta smelt and salmon. The mandates restrict how much water can be diverted to storage, even during wet years.
California voters passed Proposition 1 in 2014, also known as the Water Quality, Supply and Infrastructure Improvement Act, which authorized $2.7 billion in bonds to increase the state’s water storage capacity through building new reservoirs and groundwater storage facilities. Yet as of January 2025, no new reservoirs have been completed under Prop. 1.
Pacific Palisades reservoir was offline and empty when firestorm exploded
Pacific Palisades reservoir was offline and empty when firestorm exploded
By Matt Hamilton
January 10, 2025
A large reservoir in Pacific Palisades that is part of the Los Angeles water supply system was out of use when a ferocious wildfire destroyed thousands of homes and other structures nearby.
Officials told The Times that the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been closed for repairs to its cover, leaving a 117 million gallon water storage complex empty in the heart of the Palisades.
The revelation comes among growing questions about why firefighters ran out of water while battling the blaze. Numerous fire hydrants in higher-elevation streets of the Palisades went dry, leaving firefighters struggling with low water pressure as they combated the flames.
Department of Water and Power officials have said that demand for water during an unprecedented fire made it impossible to maintain any pressure to hydrants at high elevations.
Had the reservoir been operable, it would have extended water pressure in the Palisades on Tuesday night, said former DWP general manager Martin Adams, an expert on the city’s water system. But only for a time.
“You still would have ended up with serious drops in pressure,” Adams said in an interview Thursday. “Would Santa Ynez [Reservoir] have helped? Yes, to some extent. Would it have saved the day? I don’t think so.”
A DWP official acknowledged that the reservoir’s absence likely contributed to some diminished pressure and dry hydrants in upper regions of the Palisades.
However, a spokesperson for the utility said in a statement that DWP was still evaluating the effect of the reservoir being placed offline, and that staffers were conducting a root-cause analysis.
“Our primary focus is to provide water supply throughout the city,” the DWP spokesperson said, adding, “The system was never designed for a wildfire scenario that we are experiencing.”
It’s unclear when the reservoir first went offline. Adams said it had been out of service “for a while” due to a tear in the cover and that DWP’s vast storage and supply infrastructure still provided water to residents without disruptions, until this week.
Water pressure in the upper Palisades is sustained with three storage tanks, which hold 1 million gallons each. The tanks, part of a network of more than 100 across the city, are located at successively higher elevations in the coastal, hilly neighborhood, with water pumped up to the tanks, then flowing down by gravity to maintain pressure.
By 3 a.m. Wednesday, all three tanks had gone dry.
DWP Chief Executive Officer Janisse Quiñones said the tanks could not be refilled fast enough and that demand at lower elevations hampered the ability to pump water to tanks at higher elevations. In one case, DWP crews attempting to reroute water to refill a tank had to be evacuated, officials said.
Quiñones said four times the usual demand for water on the trunk line over a 15-hour period led to drops in water pressure.
Had the Santa Ynez Reservoir been in use in that period, Adams estimated, that demand might have been three times as high. Water in the reservoir would have fed the firefighting equipment and helped the pump stations push water to the storage tanks. But the reservoir “wouldn’t have lasted forever and would not have been a fix-all,” Adams said.
“Eventually, you would have gotten to the same place,” he added. Adams cautioned that he was basing his assertion on a rough estimate, and that he had not calculated the specific impact.
Whether the reservoir would have had a meaningful impact on fighting a blaze of such intensity remains unclear. Researchers said urban water systems like DWP’s were not designed to fight wildfires that overtake whole neighborhoods.
The National Weather Service had warned of “life threatening” winds before the fire broke out. By then, Adams said, the DWP’s options were limited. He noted that fire risk is not exclusive to the Palisades but is present across L.A. County.
Had DWP held water in the reservoir with a ripped cover, the water would have been legally undrinkable except in emergencies.
And had the utility opted to start filling the reservoir over the weekend, in advance of the extreme winds, Adams said it was unclear whether the water could have been added fast enough to be useful.
“They would have been betting that there would be a fire that wipes out the whole neighborhood, which of course, no one has ever seen before,” he said. “It would have been a strange bet.”
The reservoir is one of several operated by DWP across the city, which have a combined capacity of more than 4.1 billion gallons of water. Including aqueduct reservoirs, the city can store more than 91 billion gallons across its vast infrastructure. The Santa Ynez complex, at 117 million gallons, is among several sources of water in the area, including a large pipeline from Stone Canyon and a smaller site, the nearby Palisades Reservoir.
The utility designs the system with redundancies and multiple sources of water. In a statement, the agency said that none of its infrastructural assets failed Tuesday and early Wednesday but that the “intensity” of the fire disrupted the contingencies in place.
Joseph Ramallo, a chief communications officer for DWP, said the reservoir was scheduled to reopen in February. The maintenance, he said, was needed to comply with water quality regulations.
Adams said that if the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been in normal use with a fully repaired cover, the water level would likely have been well below maximum capacity.
In the winter, water levels are kept purposely lower because of a seasonal decline in water use by residents. If water remains stagnant in a reservoir, there is a risk that the disinfectant, chloramine, will break down and chlorine will evaporate, leaving behind ammonia that could foster bacterial growth in the water supply.
“You would not have had a whole pile of water just sitting there,” Adams said. “That’s the battle in water storage — you’ve got to keep your tanks and reservoirs fluctuating.”
Furious residents have pointed to the lack of water pressure as one factor contributing to the destruction of 5,300 homes and buildings in L.A., Santa Monica and Malibu. Civic leaders like L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park and developer Rick Caruso have pointed to the issue as a sign of poor infrastructure upkeep.
Push to build biggest California reservoir in decades hit with lawsuit
https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/sites-reservoir-lawsuit-newsom-18566639.php
Push to build biggest California reservoir in decades hit with lawsuit
By Kurtis Alexander
December 20, 2023
A plan to build the largest reservoir in California in decades, Sites Reservoir about 70 miles north of Sacramento, is being challenged as ecologically destructive and not worth the cost in a lawsuit filed by environmental groups Wednesday.
The $4.5 billion project, which seeks to boost water supplies for drought-plagued cities and farms, was recently put on the fast track by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The suit, though, alleges the reservoir’s environmental impact report was insufficient, failing to address harm to fish and greenhouse gas emissions — problems opponents say make the additional water hard to justify.
“It’s not a negligible amount of (water) storage that is provided, but it comes with a big cost,” said John Buse, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the organizations behind the suit. “There are other alternatives that were really not considered that might achieve some of the same benefits.”
While the legal challenge is a potential setback for the reservoir, Newsom’s streamlining of the proposal, under recently passed Senate Bill 149, was done to expedite legal challenges. The new law calls for the courts to resolve disputes under the California Environmental Quality Act within 270 days. The law was among several efforts by the governor to reduce red tape for infrastructure projects.
Sites Reservoir, planned in rural Colusa and Glenn counties, would be the state’s eighth biggest reservoir. Its water would be piped across the state, including to the Bay Area.
The facility is designed to capture water from the Sacramento River during wet years and store up to 1.5 million acre-feet for dry years, enough to meet the annual needs of more than 3 million households.
Unlike traditional reservoirs, Sites is planned as an “off-stream” facility, meaning water wouldn’t be stored directly on the river, thus avoiding having to dam the waterway and disturb flows for fish.
Still, critics have long noted that any water diverted from the Sacramento would mean less for wildlife and the natural habitat along the river. Many have wondered, in an age of increasing drought, whether there’s enough water to make the project worthwhile.
Joining the Center for Biological Diversity in the new lawsuit were Friends of the River, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, the California Water Impact Network and Save California Salmon. The complaint was filed in Yolo County Superior Court.
Even without the legal challenge, the reservoir faces obstacles, including closing the gap on funding and winning a water right to move forward with the diversions on the Sacramento River.
Building reservoirs in California hasn’t been easy because of the increasingly known environmental toll and because most of the good spots have been taken. The last reservoir built with more than a million acre feet of capacity was New Melones Lake, about 45 miles east of Stockton, in the late 1970s.
The Sites Project Authority, the agency leading the project, hopes to break ground on Sites Reservoir in 2026 and complete construction by 2032.
The Getty Villa survived LA’s firestorms while everything around it burned, revealing a key lesson for homeowners
https://www.yahoo.com/news/getty-villa-survived-las-firestorms-172532911.html
The Getty Villa survived LA’s firestorms while everything around it burned, revealing a key lesson for homeowners
By Jessica Orwig and Morgan McFall-Johnsen
January 9, 2025
The Palisades and Eaton fires have razed thousands of homes and burned tens of thousands of acres.
Some buildings have survived, though, like the Getty Villa art museum in Pacific Palisades.
The Villa is not your average home, but homeowners can learn from what Getty staff have been doing all year.
As the Palisades and Eaton fires burned through thousands of acres on Tuesday, razing nearly 2,000 homes , the iconic Getty Villa remained standing with minor damage. Meanwhile, homes and trees around it went up in flames.
“We deeply appreciate the tireless work and dedication of the Los Angeles Fire Department, Los Angeles County Fire Department, and other agencies,” the museum said in a statement Wednesday morning.
The Getty Villa is part of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which includes the largest endowment of any museum in the world, estimated at more than $8 billion in 2023. It houses the trust’s collection of Ancient Greek and Roman art.
Fire departments used “state-of-the-art air handling systems” to help protect the building, Katherine E. Fleming, the president and CEO of the Getty Trust, told USA Today.
Moreover, builders designed the galleries with double-walled construction, which also helped protect the precious art inside.
However, it wasn’t just expensive architecture and state-of-the-art firefighting that helped. Getty staff have been consistently clearing brush from the surrounding area all year as part of its fire-mitigation efforts, the museum said.
That’s a crucial lesson for homeowners in fire-risk areas.
Yard work to save your home
The Palisades fire has become the most destructive ever to hit Los Angeles, CNN reported, citing CalFire data.
The fire has been fueled by an explosion of grasses and brush that grew abundant over the past two winters, which were rainier than usual. But with drought conditions over the past few months, that brush dried out, becoming kindling for the fast-moving blazes.
To mitigate the risk of fire, cities, fire departments, and community members can clear dried grasslands around residential areas.
Individual homeowners can also protect their properties by clearing a 5-foot perimeter around their houses and removing flammable materials like ornamental plants, bark mulch, or deck furniture.
“This is an urban fire. We’re burning urban fuels,” said Pat Durland, a wildfire-mitigation specialist and instructor for the National Fire Protection Association with 30 years of federal wildfire management experience.
Keeping gutters and roofs clear can also prevent spot ignitions that can send entire structures up in flames.
“People believe that they’re helpless,” Durland told Business Insider in 2023. But that’s not the case, he said. “Nine out of 10 times, this boils down to two words: yard work.”
Homeowners can also install noncombustible, 1/8-inch mesh screening on any vents to a crawl space or attic to prevent embers from entering the home that way.
“You are where the rubber meets the road. The things you do on your house and around your house are going to make the difference,” Durland said.
California’s opposition to Israeli-style desalination is yet another reason why they are having such a big problem with fires.
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
January 9, 2025
Earlier today, I wrote this blog post, which I titled, “California virtue signalers who sent trillions of gallons of rainwater into the ocean, and allowed huge amounts of dead trees, excess brush, and other fuel to accumulate in their forests, are now paying the price for their virtue signalling. But instead of being mad at themselves for doing these horrible these, they are mad at people such as myself for pointing it out.”
And now I have yet another reason to blame California for its current fire problems.
USA Today just wrote the following:
Lack of water is hampering LA fire battle. Why not use ocean water to fight fires?
January 9, 2025
To use salt water as effectively as hydrant water, it needs to be desalinated, a controversial proposition in the American West that some environmentalists consider inefficient, expensive and unnecessary as many fought for a systemic implementation to combat droughts and wildfires.
Meanwhile, 11 years ago, this is what Israel was doing:
Over and Drought: Why the End of Israel’s Water Shortage Is a Secret
Remember all the years of being told to conserve ‘every drop?’ Well, times have changed: Today, Israel has so much affordable water, it can offer to export it. So why is this achievement being kept so secret?
January 24, 2014
There is now a surplus of water in Israel, thanks largely to the opening of several new desalination plants
There’s also this other, more recent article about Israel’s use of desalination:
Israel refills the Sea of Galilee, supplying Jordan on the way
January 30, 2023
When the floodgates are open, a torrent of water gushes into a dry river bed and races to the shore of the Sea of Galilee, a biblical lake in northern Israel that was being lost to drought and the growing population around it.
The water is fresh, high-quality, expensive. Desalinated from the Mediterranean Sea and transported across the country where it awaits the order to replenish the lake should it start to shrink again.
So Israel, which is in the desert, and has constant, perpetual drought, has chosen to end its water shortages with large scale desalination.
Note that I just used the phrase “has chosen.”
That’s important.
To use large scale desalination, or to not use it, is a choice.
And, for whatever reason, California has chosen not to use it.
That was a choice.
Just like sending trillions of gallons of rainwater into the ocean was a choice.
And just like allowing huge amounts of dead trees, excess brush, and other fuel accumulate in their forests was a choice.
People have choices.
Choices have consequences.
And now, California is paying the price of its choices.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 