OT: Typical Globlist

Not exactly. The trip to Ghana was presumably set up before the fires broke out, and Los Angles has a perfectly competent fire department, which did all that was humanly possible. Sadly, they can't do anything about anthropogenic global warming (which Cursitor Doom choses not to believe in, while fantasising about non-existent Globalists).

Part of the problem was too many trees and other plants close together - I don't notice anyone campaigning about that.

Trees don't destroy CO2, they simply store it and release it later, either as CO2 or as methane.

Things that grow in California must get harvested or will burn. It's been that way for millenia; the natives warned the Spanish about that. When people put out small fires, as we have done for over a century now, we add to the fuel load for giant firestorms. Blame Smokey The Bear.

Not only are unnaturally dense forests great fuel, houses are even better. That was obvious in the Oakland and Paradise and Lahaina fires; rows of houses set one another on fire and the trees survived.

Pics show forests in California that are six times denser than they were naturally, a century ago.

And why do people build insanely flammible houses, right next to other insanely flammible houses? Our cabin in the mountains won't burn, because it would be very hard to ignite, and because we keep the landscape free of stuff that would burn a lot.

Let the insurance free market work.

In Australia we have fuel reduction burns every winter, when the weather is suitable - dry enough that the scrub will burn, but not so dry that the fires they set are likely to run away (though it has been known to happen).

I doubt if the people responsible for monitoring this in California don't know about Australian practice - American fire control aircraft come over here to work on our fires during the American off season.

John Larkin might be less well-informed.

Modern houses are built to be hard to ignite. Older houses are often less carefully constructed. California's earthquakes favour flexible timber frames, but you should cover the frame with something that isn't inflamable.

Individual pictures can show individual idiosyncrsies. Surveying a whole forest is a rather larger job.

Housing regulations are designed to avoid this. Some Americans think that this in government interference in their freedom of action.

It's less helpful than it might be. Insurance companies set rates based on historical records, and if anthropogenic global warming is changing the environment, the historical a record is less helpful than it used to be.

The atlantic multidecadal oscillation produces some long term cycles that people weren't aware of -

Quite. Be very intersting to see how Pacific Pallisades and its neighbouring suburbs look in a few years' time from now. I suspect the area will be far less verdant! Here's another uncomfortable fact for our Democrat supporters to chew on: seems the worst fire was started by an illegal immigrant from Mexico with a blowlamp and the 'Kenneth' fire was - again - set by another illegal alien. We're constantly told these people enrich our culture, but that's hard to swallow when you take a look at all those square miles of ruins and ashes.

This is also a perfect opportunity to update the local building code to make the houses et al far less flammable. The typical Mexican construction (masonry building with tile roofs) is pretty good, and adding measures against wind-driven embers getting inside plus drench pipes fed by a gasoline-powered pump drawing on the swimming pool will make survival of wildfires the norm.

Most likely, this new code will be imposed by the insurance companies over the objections of the State of California.

What's left is to allow controlled burns to clear the underbrush, just as the local Indian tribes have done for millennia. This policy change must come from the State.

The same thing applies to Smoky the Bear.

This search for the guilty is a mug's game. Under Santa Ana Wind conditions, there will always be multiple ignition sources, most being natural.

Joe Gwinn

The problem isn't ignition sources. There will always be ignition sources. The problem is the insane flammibility of overgrown forests and dense flammible housing.

Lots of the post-fire pics show rows of burned-out houses with green trees alongside.

It's crazy when one ember will set fire to a thousand houses. And fires jumping streets.

Why do people have houses with flammible roofs and flammible sides and flammible attics and gutters full of leaves? Why have gutters at all?

One answer is govenment incompetance, stupid building codes and subsidized fire insurance.

Very true. I certainly wouldn't want to be Karen Bass when the embers finally settle as it looks like she's going to be the focus of the blame whether it's her fault or not.

Why bother. When the vegetation is tinder-dry and the weather is windy it's very easy to start a wildfire, and the cops know that they are expected to find a careless illegal immigrant that they can blame for it.

Lightning strikes seem to be responsible for starting most forest fires, but politicians do like to have people to blame.

Why bother. Most wild-fires are started by lightning strikes, but politicians who don't like immigrants are happy to believe that they are started by illegal immigrants, and some of the police force is happy to give them what they want.

Presumably those people kept their tress watered.

Firestorms are nasty. The Allies started a few in Germany and Japan during WW2.

The spelling is "flammable". Gutters full of leaves is just sloppy maintenance. Most housing regulations don't let you put up houses with flammable roofs and sides - the Great Fire of London in 1666 meant that London at least got rebuilt in a way that made a recurrence less likely.

It is the sort of answer that Cursitor Doom or Donald Trump would invent. It's not to be taken seriously, even after the spelling has been corrected.

Cursitor Doom does like his implausible theories. California didn't vote for Trump, so he has an interest in being rude about it's politicians.

The useful answer will be rather more complicated and less attractive to right-wing politicians, who find it easier to communicate nice simple fairy-stories.

Houses set houses on fire:

Those houses - right on the beach! HTH could they possibly have been destroyed? They've got the ocean on one side and a freeway on the other and there doesn't look like there was much vegitation going up that hill behind, plus the FD had a limitless water resource right on the site! Tidal waves and earthquakes, yes, I can see how they'd be at grave risk from either, but fire??

Correction: Not much *charred* vegetation going up the hill. It's so weird how some things were left untouched. As an aside, what are the odds all those individual house plots will now be replaced by towering apartment blocks?

If even one house had flammible grass or gutters full of leaves, and one ember ignited it, it exploded into flame and the radient heat set off all its neighbors sequentially.

Pretty dumb. Times a few thousand.

The assumption seems to be that when this happens, a fire truck will show up and hose things down before all the houses burn up. But that solution doesn't scale.

The proposition that radiant heat generated by one burning would set off an adjacent house is pretty dumb. Fire codes are written to make sure that houses aren't vulnerable in that way.

John Larkin makes a dumb assumption, then gets critical because the people who write building codes haven't acted on that dumb assumption.

In that case, what spread the fire?

Burning embers have been known to do the job. In high wind, more massive burning chunks of vegetation or debris can spread a fire pretty effectively.

In Australian bush fires, some people chose to stay and defend their property. It can work, but it can also be a fatal mistake.

Airborne embers I would guess.

That shouldn't be allowed to happen, but the breeze was offshore when that seaside strip burned.

Sloman snipped my link of course. He does that when reality interferes with his theories.

There are many pics of the LA fire, and of Paradise and Lahaina. Houses set houses on fire, leaving rubble and green trees. The fire codes, and especially enforcement, were criminally stupid in all those cases.

Our cabin in the mountains is not very flammible from radiation or grass fires or from embers, and the local enforcement of defensible space rules are brutal. Steel roof, no gutters, no attic with vents, first floor is concrete blocks.

There's a forestry department that inspects every property and issues periodic reports too.

Humans have known about fire for dozens of years by now.