All of them are opinionated as to the cause and responsibility for these fires, and none of them will point a finger inward

Saturday, January 18th, 2025

Casey Handmer suggests that the Los Angeles wildfires are self-inflicted:

Caveats aside, my family and I are safe, we evacuated for several days, and due to heroic efforts by professional firefighters and psychotically brave neighbors, my house and most of my neighborhood escaped destruction. We were the lucky ones — by far. In 2019, as my wife and I were house hunting, we inspected multiple homes in the Pasadena area. Every house we looked at in Altadena burned to the ground last week.

[…]

Fire is a self-propagating reaction, in which fuels (typically wood, which is made of many copies of CH2O) react with oxygen to form CO2 and H2O, releasing heat. The rate of the reaction determines the size and speed of the fire. Chemical reaction rates are limited by available surface area, which is why twigs and kindling burn really quickly, while enormous tree trunks burn very slowly.

[…]

A ground fire burns sticks and leaves that have fallen to the ground. A surface fire burns low-lying shrubs and smaller trees, separate from but still close to the ground. In extreme conditions and with the help of bridging fuel, a fire can jump from mostly dead leaf litter to the living crown of the forest – lots of tiny twigs surrounded by plenty of oxygen for combustion.

Remember, the living part of the tree, the cambium layer, is a thin surface between the bark and the core. In extreme heat, the water in the cambium boils, blowing the fire-protectant bark off the tree, creating even more fuel.

When I was a young child in Australia, a crown fire near my home on the New South Wales central coast was so severe running up one hill it not only burned the leaves (many Australian trees can survive this by sprouting more leaves called epicormic shoots) but also the trunk and root system, leaving only smoking holes in the ground.

[…]

Every year, more fuel is added. After a year or two, the seed bed has sprouted and plants are growing. After five years, shrubs are dense enough that walking requires effort and evasion. After 20 years, fallen litter and growth can be so dense that lost hikers may require a helicopter to extract.

The biomass accumulation rate is something like 0.5 mm/year (1/64th of an inch), which doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that 20 years of accumulation is equivalent to coating the entire forest in a layer of gasoline ¼” thick. This is not hyperbole, drought resistant trees including eucalypts and creosote secrete volatile oils to help retain moisture, contributing to their combustibility.

[…]

Let’s take some advice from founding father Benjamin Franklin.

In the February 4, 1735 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Benjamin Franklin wrote that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Mr Franklin was not referring to medicine when he penned the now-famous line. He instead was referring to the importance of fire safety and the need for the city of Philadelphia to be better prepared to prevent and react to fires. In his article, he noted the importance of tending to how hot coals were being transferred in shovels (primary prevention), how chimneys should be cleaned regularly (primary prevention), and how a “club or society of active men” (firefighters) should be formed who can efficiently extinguish fires (tertiary prevention).

[…]

To take just one example, the Black Saturday fires of February 7, 2009 killed 173 people and destroyed thousands of structures, including substantially entire towns.

In an ongoing process of regulatory adjustment and reform, the New South Wales fire service most recently adopted rule 10/50, which gives homeowners the right to clear trees within 10 meters of a home and non-tree vegetation within 50 meters of a home, without approvals. No friction!

In contrast, in the US, well-intended but poorly considered rule changes frequently make it harder to comply with regulations and increase friction, reducing the ability to do the obviously correct thing.

For federal- and state-funded fire prevention efforts, laws like NEPA and CEQA are often weaponized by special interest advocacy groups, resulting in ludicrous outcomes such as the US Forest Service spending 40% of its budget (!) on permitting-related activities.

NEPA, a law passed in 1970, was intended to help protect the environment. Subsequent regulatory interpretation (now in doubt due to Chevron being overturned) has expanded the law from just five pages of text to an overwhelming blizzard of rules that have brought our ability to build things to a grinding halt.

[…]

Remember, after 5 years even dry chaparral scrub has accumulated enough biomass to burn well — and it literally takes longer than that to complete an Environmental Impact Statement review.

[…]

In this analysis, it is quite clearly the law that hazard reduction burns are illegal, since despite their utility being extremely high and their cost almost trivially low (recall that indigenous societies that lack writing and money seem to be able to allocate the necessary resources for their successful execution) they do not occur at anything like the rate necessary to provide actual protection to people and property.

Who, then, governs us? Who is actually making law?

The answer is a handful of unelected specialists in bureaucracy. The key decision makers within the US Forest Service, CALFIRE, the BLM, the CCC, and their symbiotes at the Sierra Club, The John Muir Project, the Center for Biological Diversity and so on could fit quite easily onto a single Greyhound bus. You don’t know their names. They never appear on TV. They are unelected. Their position is often based on seniority rather than merit. They are effectively unfireable and thus unaccountable to anyone, not even the duly elected Governor. Generally speaking their salaries are far from exceptional, particularly in the public service and non-profit space. They’re not doing it for yacht money and it’s a fair assumption that for most of them (as well as most of us), a career in the upper echelons of business or private industry would be unattainable. Generally they are well-intentioned first order thinkers whose local ideological gradient and surrounding incentive landscape dictates their actions with eerie predictability. All of them are opinionated as to the cause and responsibility for these fires, and none of them will point a finger inward.

[…]

Since 1988 under Prop 103, the Californian insurance industry has been heavily regulated. In practice, this means that insurers can calculate risk premiums but, like regulated utilities, need government permission to raise rates. Raising rates is politically unpopular, so insurers tend to cancel policies they can no longer justify, many of them in the areas that just burned. Insurers are in a bind, because their risk is driven up by government inaction on risk reduction, and their ability to recover costs is crushed by that same government. They leave the market. The CA state government’s response is to form a publicly funded insurer, which recently was barely solvent with about $200m in reserves, or about $20,000 per lost structure. This is not going to cover losses, to put it mildly.

[…]

Mayor Bass zoomed back from her trip to Ghana to attend a series of agonizingly embarrassing press conferences, her city anxious to hear how she would lead them beyond this crisis. Her response: price controls on rentals and construction.

[…]

Not to be outdone, Governor Newsom dropped an EO on “predatory real estate sales”. This is just weird. In a situation where tens of thousands of people are still evacuated, and thousands more are now homeless, fires are still burning, and the incandescently stupid regulations that led directly to dozens of destructive fires including these ones still stand, apparently the problem worthy of a press conference is people offering to buy ruined houses – in a state where rebuilding will probably take years. Any landowner can always say “no”.

Speculation has swirled as to whether this is an attempt to make wrecked neighborhoods harder to depopulate, since both Pacific Palisades and Altadena are relatively high income communities full of the sorts of taxpayers who have been fleeing California in recent years.

Or perhaps the land changing hands without approved new construction would lock in lower Prop 13 land tax revenue than the state was counting on.

[…]

As for Los Angeles, we can easily predict future fires in areas that haven’t burned.

Comments

  1. Gaikokumaniakku says:

    Pretty far off topic, but this looks like the kind of military science that would interest you :

    https://www.dot.studio/en/notes/case-study-under-whose-command/

  2. Isegoria says:

    Interesting, Gaikokumaniakku:

    Under Whose Command, a new platform for command chain analysis in Myanmar, is the culmination of a year–long collaboration between DOT • STUDIO (our agency) and Tony Wilson and Tom Longley at Security Force Monitor (SFM) — an NGO situated at the Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School.

    The project addresses a difficult but critical problem: military command structures are fluid, making it challenging to determine who was in charge at a specific time and location. Meanwhile, identifying perpetrators and commanders has historically been key to pursuing justice, notably since the Nuremberg Trials, where establishing command responsibility played a pivotal role in prosecuting war crimes.

  3. T. Beholder says:

    The great big non-secret. For example:

    https://www.americaunwon.com/p/why-los-angeles-burned

    Of course, on top of the same clowns Australia has Eucalyptus, that is living firebombs. Oh wait, some geniuses in California had those imported long ago. Nevermind.

  4. Lucklucky says:

    Why he talks about trees and vegetation, I look at the post-fire pictures and see a lot of tree and bushes with vegetation and some even green near hundreds of houses burned to the ground.

  5. Jim says:

    Australia’s sale of eucalyptus to California is undeniably one of world history’s international relations’ funniest japes.

  6. Isegoria says:

    Palm trees, pepper trees, and eucalyptus trees are all foreign imports to California.

  7. T. Beholder says:

    Lucklucky says:

    I look at the post-fire pictures and see a lot of tree and bushes with vegetation and some even green near hundreds of houses burned to the ground.

    Yes. A tree quite often will have only cooked leaves (which regrow) and singed bark in all but the worst fires. Unless it’s dried up through and through or very diseased.

    Which is why Smokey The Dopey Bear approach actually helps little, and in dry lands only makes things worse.

    While a mild fire uses up fuel, so the next natural or unnatural fire happens in what little trash accumulated since then, and will also be mild.

    Things like dry densely growing evergreens, but then they don’t grow densely in arid zones. Such things are bound to happen when big airflow flips, but that’s a horrible mess no matter what.

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