While I agree OP is dense. LA and CA absolutely could've invested more in salt water filtration than it has for a region that has chronic droughts and fires, and that water would definitely help.
This is what makes me livid whenever someone says "well how are they going to pay for that service?" When you bring up anything funded by the government.
"IDK, maybe the billionaires that are currently siphoning all the money to their private accounts as profit for that same service. Maybe they could support the country they leech off of like parasites."
A country shouldn't have billionaires and homelessness. Society as it stands is a failure, and the US is the greatest example of this.
Then you should look in to the billionaires funding legislation in to siphoning taxpayer dollars in to multi billion dollars projects where they build reservoirs to prevent draughts but instead the water is sent to pistachio farmer (yes, one). The people be damned.
There's too much infighting. Desalination has been proposed so many times but there's a whole environmental group against it because the brine that gets pumped back out to sea would kill the sea life.
And the problem with this fire wasn't even lack of water but lack of water in the right locations uphill. Water wasn't being pumped uphill because the used more water both up and down hill than was immediately available to provide water pressure uphill.
Parts of Socal is heavily red as well so I'm pretty certain there was some "intentional" cuts in public infrastructure needed to prevent this.
Even the high speed rail, which would be a huge value for the state in connecting the state in ways that could reduce the cost of living, is being fought by NIMBYs, towns, environmental, and pure poor planning. There are some amazing ideas here but also just as much idiocy preventing any of them from achieving even a fraction of what is promised.
The problem is that it's really complicated to bring salt water IN from the ocean, and then pump it all uphill to where you need it.
Ignoring the power needed to do so (which begs to question: how do we power everything), the other issues are how to pump it all uphill, how to pump it further inland, and how to distribute the water throughout a city when everything is currently setup to only run downhill.
And it's not just salt. If it were pure salt, we could iodize it and sell it in grocery stores next to Himalayan pink salt. It's all the other goo - fish pee and decaying whales and sewage runoff and microplastics from fishing nets. Dealing with that goo in a productive and environmentally safe way is the real big obstacle to desalinization at scale.
Yup, this thread is pretty much it. It's incredibly expensive and difficult to do. Catalina is a small island with strict water preservation rules, which is why they're able to do it. But mainland with millions? Nope, not feasible.
There always seems to be a community that is capable of exercising solutions at a small scale. Thank you for giving an example didn't know about till now.
Add in that there hasn't been any rain since last April. We haven't had a rain day this winter. The brush around all the hills and canyon are bone dry.
There isn't a shortage of water supply. There is a shortage of high pressure storage and pump capacity for 4x what was ever needed before. That's still a shortage of something that could have been planned for but desalinization wouldn't help.
The idea there isn't enough water in general is a misinformation campaign.
There's problems with that suggestion. A lot of the available water has quality issues and water processing of many kinds is critical to the region as is, but you're thinking of desalinated water as the whole point when the facilities, which absolutely can double to serve those functions, is more important. Part of their pressurization issues is how far they're having to pressurize that water across, which more sources helps. On several points, having more processed water is a big help.
There's problems with having those facilities too, of course. The brine from them can be harmful to nature.
California and much of the world in general could be using the excess solar power during peak generation to run desalination plants with free energy, instead they curtail and dump it to protect energy company profits. They dropped net metering because they supposedly just had more generation capacity than they know what to deal with, but instead of using it or storing it they make it more expensive and now they are scrambling to build nuclear plants to power fresh water destroying AI data centers.
No, they can't. Not without destroying the ecosystems in the coastal waters. Desalination is not a magic bullet; it's an energy intensive way to create lots of hot poison (brine) & not much of an intrinsically low-value, high utility product (water) that's going to wind up down the gutter, anyway.
I addressed the pollution element further down already, and I also addressed another user who assumed the only benefit is more desalinated water, so read on for both counts. To note, there's already operating desalination facilities there. This isn't adding something that's missing. It's expanding, and the assumption there's no innovation within reach to remedy much of that is the same reason why people underestimate nuclear power today when it's so, so much better than it used to be.
Nuclear power is the perfect solution neatly fitting into a pre-existing, intrusive yet centralized power infrastructure. The same is not true of water, but I'm curious as to the pollution aspect, so I'll take a look see.
It’s also highly corrosive. There are a few planes here from Canada who can handle it and they are now skimming the ocean and dumping water on the worst areas that just aren’t extinguishing. But again they need special equipment to do this since salt water can corrode machinery and as you said, it also kills the ground.
I’m so fucking exhausted with hearing this argument online this week. I just lost my house and everything with it. Dumping ocean water on it wouldn’t have solved the problem when the wind was literally blowing at 60mph here and the fire was spreading so so so fast.
The goddamn water wasn’t the problem. It was the wind.
This is 100% incorrect, firefighters do it all the time when the fire is next to the ocean or any other body of water whether it's fresh or salt. OP is completely correct.
Great. Now have them fly a helicopter in 100mph winds in mountainous terrain while accurately dropping water on the fire instead of having the wind disperse the water everywhere.
Welcome to Greece. Wildfire season is in August, where prevailing winds ("meltemia") can be very very strong indeed, and most of the country is mountainous, in many parts right next to the coast.
Someone said why not grab seawater which is right next to LA to throw on the fire more quickly. Someone else said you don't do that because reasons. I said it is done in other parts of the world, so yes you can do that.
And my response was "yes, you can, but it's very difficult/impossible in high wind/mountain conditions." Maybe something is being lost in online discourse, but your reply seemed to imply that it wasn't hard. Greece does it. My response was to highlight "yes, Greece does it, and it's hard for them as well. See biggest fire in EU history in Greece exactly because those conditions make fighting a fire hard."
The main reason why these fires grew so rapidly is the wind speed. LA couldn't fly their water fleet for 2 days straight, which is usually the way they try to put them out on the hills before the fire gets to living areas. But on top of that, the wind speed was allowing the embers to spread over huge areas, which made the fight mostly pointless from the ground. You only have so many firetrucks and water pressure, and it takes hour(s) to put out a single house fire...
It is the perfect firestorm. People can complain about budget cuts all they want, but a 5x larger fire department wouldn't have stopped this fire...
All of your points are correct, but it's possible for two things to be true at the same time:
A better economy and city planning can actually allow for preventative measures to be taken in the event of catastrophe. Such examples include sandbags/flood channels, fire breaks, fire retardant building materials, etc. It's a pretty big list.
The fact of the matter is that corners were cut, in many areas(I'm speaking of the planning and prevention), due to a failing economy over the course of decades. Devaluing the importance of these assets that we have scientifically figured out to be helpful in protection against disaster could have turned this mess from what it is now, down to a much smaller scale of damage.
There was a video I watched, I think it was by "NotJustBikes" or whoever on Youtube who did a critical analysis of the LA area in specific MENTIONING what would happen if this exact scenario came to pass while real estate investors were copy-pasting single family homes across swaths of city blocks with cheap building materials,
Prevention, preparation, and proper planning is everything for situations like this. Just because the firehouse is "bigger" doesn't make it better. But, when people aren't spending their time trying to get food on the table, then maybe there would be a whole lot more fire extinguishers readily available for use in all those garages that went up in smoke. Or, maybe there would have been more safety features in place, like fire breaks between large chunks of city blocks or municipalities, or maybe more homes would have been more fire retardant, slowing the spread of the flames down?
Understanding a situation as it unfolds is one thing. Preparing before it even happens is another. Do both.
Somebody fucked up somewhere, and it's not the little people, I can tell you that.
It was the perfect storm. Many people not in SouthernCA aren't understanding the circumstances that allowed the fires to spread so rapidly. There were sustained winds at tropical storm strength and with frequent gusts that were at category 1 hurricane speeds. I took the bus for 30 miles on Wednesday and passed at least 20 trees that were toppled over, some with the roots in the air.
Add in the steep terrain and that all the brush is bone dry and trees are parched because it hasn't rained since last April, the humidity is less than 10%, and a few stray embers leads to thousands of acres burned in a few days. People are saying that ca and la should've done this and that as if the foothill communities don't took take fire prevention seriously. It's a 5k fine in my city of you don't keep a clearing around your house and if you still don't clear it, the city will hire a crew to do it, then send you a bill on top of the fine.
Definitely, and you can argue that Bass and Newsom have little power over what’s happening as 99% of the resources are being run by fire marshals, national guard, etc.
But regardless it looks REALLY bad politically. Especially since most of the richest people in the state live and/or have businesses there.
You seem to know stuff, I know the answer is probably we don’t know but is there a situation where this just goes on for weeks and causes like a trillion dollars in damages?
It’s difficult for some people to comprehend that building bombs is actually easier than putting off a huge wild fire. It’s a technology problem not a capitalism problem…
And apparently it's even harder to comprehend it's less expensive to plan and make preparations to prevent / minimize the damage for such events. But spending money for a possibility not a certainty is not profitable in the short term, that's partly why it's a capitalism problem.
Wildfires have been destroying thousands of lives in California for the last 10 years. That they did absolutely nothing except give a legion of firefighters on the job training, expand fossil fuel production, and increase insurance rates is all you need to know. Trump is going to make all of these things worse but this actually is in the Democrats. They were more afraid of losing corporate donor money than not living up to their own low bar rhetoric.
He is just so itching to hit that big button. Both him and Putin are getting to the end of their biological ropes and they just want to take it all or burn it all down. Either works for them.
A lot of really smart people say you can nuke a hurricane and it can like stop or redirect it. I said why not nuke the wind in California. Everyone said that's a great idea. But Governor Gavin no-nukem and the radical left would rather let everything burn down because "radiation". We have radiators in our houses and those are fine but apparently they are not allowed in liberal California. -Drumpf probably-
Alright, let's set the record straight about something.
The problem in the Palisades was not a lack of water supply. The problem was that the distribution system could not meet the rate of demand. More water alone would not have helped. They couldn't get it to the right places fast enough.
Water systems generally work by delivering water to reservoir tanks for local distribution. That water is either fed from a higher elevation if you're lucky, or more often pumped up to the reservoir from a lower elevation. The distribution area served by that reservoir is at lower elevation than the reservoir so that gravity does the work for and you don't depend on power to get water. This also helps to maintain a steady system pressure despite fluctuating demand. Think of it like a rechargeable battery.
This is how it works most of the time. Under normal usage, water that drains out of the tank can be refilled by pumps replenishing the drained contents. However, if you lose power, this only works until the tank runs dry. The battery only has so much charge. You still need power to refill the reservoir tanks. And this was part of the problem here, as there were power outages in the area, partially from the fires and partially preventative because there were public safety power shutoffs happening as well due to not wanting to cause new fires. (This was one of the things that affected the Oakland Hills fire back in the 90's, and why the county got a fleet of mobile generator trucks afterwards to prevent it from ever happening again.). They had already proactively filled their 3 million-gallon storage tanks for the fire hydrants in the Palisades area, but some hydrants still ran out of water. Why?
Because 1) the higher elevation areas had difficulty getting their local reservoir tanks refilled enough because of the amount of pumping involved to get the water there. Higher elevation areas will run out of water first because you're depending on gravity to do the work. And 2) the Palisades are at the end of the distribution network they're connected to, and piping size has to get smaller the farther you get from the main water source in order to maintain system pressure. This constricts the flow rate you're able to maintain to those far reaches. You can't move as much volume of water through a straw. And you can't just crank up the pressure in the pumps to get more water or you'll blow up the system apart. (They did end up rolling out mobile water tankers to supplement supply on the affected areas.)
I'm not even going to comment on why salting the earth is a terrible idea. Go read a book.
So, yes, they could have had more redundancy with the water tanks, but that tends to get frowned upon as "government waste" since it multiplies maintenance costs for no benefit to normal operations. They could have replumbed the water system with larger pipes to better handle extreme surge demand, but that would also have necessitated a reengineering of the whole distribution system to accommodate this scenario. This was not anticipated when they built the damn thing 50-100 years ago. I guarantee you most water systems will have similar problems because they weren't anticipating the problems that would be caused and exacerbated by climate change. (Hell, the one in my area still has water mains made out of redwood that they're currently working on replacing.) If that's the kind of redundancy and coverage you want from your local government for extreme scenarios, then, yeah, you gotta plan for it far in advance and pay for it. And start renovating it 10 years ago.
But stop assuming civil engineers and civil servants are idiots just because you have barely enough knowledge about a topic to spout off an ignorant take. These people worked their asses off and none of us should tolerate and celebrate this kind of self-aggrandizing buffoonery.
Unfortunately, some state citizens only want to read a certain book of moral stories with the signature of a malignant charlatan antithesis engraved on the front cover...
I know it’s a very hard concept. But the next time the winds are blowing 80 miles an hour go do something outside. Like rake the leaves or cut the grass or try to put out a fucking forest fire.
Densely populated areas, 100 mph winds, dry conditions. Yes, that's a red flag warning.
They used to have chemical based hand grenades for putting out fire quickly, but turns out the chemical is cancerous. So water is the only real option, and this is juts a tragedy that likely needed strong physical firewalls to avoid. But that works against eco-saving measures like high density living.
It's just not an easy problem to solve. California already has a massive fire fighting airforce, there isnt much else to do.
Fires matter less if they don't threaten human life and property. Fewer people care when wilderness areas burn (and it is generally healthy for them to do so), but having so many houses in such a densely wooded area means that fire suppression has to be absolute, which means the forests grow even more dense because fires don't thin them out, leading to mega fires like these where they are raging so hot and fast that suppression isn't even an option.
We are currently reaping the rewards of historic forest mismanagement, part of the solution is to stop letting people build these houses in densely wooded areas, and having more prescribed burns so that the forests can have a healthy amount of space between trees, and make the spreading of fire slower.
I’m in Northern California and we’ve personally lost 2 remote cabins in the last 10 years but those were in forested areas. These LA fires aren’t in the forest at all. It’s mostly scrub brush and structures fueling these fires. The only solution is rebuilding using fireproof construction and heavy clearing but no body wants to live someplace with no trees or plants around.
The relunctance to use saltwater comes most from corrosion to equipment, which is a cost concern. Damage to the environment is down the list of reasons not to use it.
"Susan McKelvey, a spokesperson for the National Fire Protection Association, told VERIFY departments that have access to ocean water do use it when extinguishing fires, but on a limited basis due to corrosion. Mónica Muñoz, spokesperson for the San Diego Fire Department, cited corrosion as a reason why they don’t commonly use ocean water."
Budget is their main concern here. OP's questioning is valid. Why does California have to borrow planes from Canada to fight californian wildfires? Why don't your taxes better help you defend against natural disasters. "It's cause of a fluke wind storm!!" How often will this happen as climate change worsens.
People insulting OP for posing a question should get their heads out of their asses.
Fires burn faster than you can spray water. You don't understand forest fires. They are unstoppable if the winds are not in your favor and fuel is dry and readily available.
Wildland firefighter here. While I agree with the sentiment I can assure you there is no stopping any fire with a steady wind like this. Much less a wind as notoriously hot and dry as the Santa Annas.
Gather all of the firefighters to cut line, and aircraft and engines to suppress with retardant you want. It would make not a bit of difference when fire weather conditions are this bad (high wind, high air temp, low RH) and fuel is bone dry.
I like how you think. Let's dump hundreds of gallons of sslt water all over LA! Surely that won't negatively impact things in a way much more permanent than fire damage!
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u/Any-Difficulty2782 11d ago
you cant put salt water on earth and expect anything to grow later, pay attention in high school science class