Crazy fires in Los Angeles

platinum87 said:
You cannot understand that while climate change is real, it is not the cause of the fires here, this is where you have succumb to the rhetoric and are unable to think rationally.
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Jesus, people like yourself having the vote is why trumps going to rape the usa again - possibly to the point of world conflict if he gets his way. I cannot fathom how a human mind works with such bizarre views of the reality around them.

Thinking rationally is tracing back root causes siting evidence. Did a magic gremlin chanting 'I'm the embodied form of global warming' manifest in the countryside around LA, carrying a petrol can and a lighter start the fires? No, no it did not - which answers your daft point.

Did the entire global shift in climate over the past 100 years, irrevocably set up the circumstances under which LA bush fires would extremely likely happen quite often ? Yes, yes it did.

Could the bush fires have happened if humans didnt exist at all and hadn't burned trillions of barrels of oil into the atmosphere ? Of course they could.

However, because we did do that, the % chance of it being so hot it almost certainly contributed to bush fires is undeniable - so high the insurance industry wasn't willing to bet a few billion on it - again, moral leeches, but they aren't stupid, evil yes, stupid, no.

What you're not even trying to understand is, its a % game, the chance of this happening in the next 5 years is say, 90% likely, because climate change has created the environment for it - if humans didnt exist, it maybe 25% likely................you're not grasping that its not black and white, its a contributing factor, ergo by definition, it exists.
 
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dlockers said:
Why don't they just turn it up then?!
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Because the pipes aren't designed for more pressures? (they'll have some spare capacity, but push too hard and you start losing a lot of water through nearly bursting valved and pipes as ones that were close to failing give up, and existing minor failures get worse)
Because the pumps can't cope with more pressure? (they have a maximum pressure rating and maximum flow rates they can cope with before either they max out, or worse, they burn out).
Because there isn't enough water to increase the pressure?

IIRC there was a warning yesterday about the water quality telling people to boil it as they were trying to increase the flow rate, but and this is something that is pretty important to note, the same water that is being used to put out the fires is normally used for daily activities such as washing, drinking, and cooking, to increase the amount of water available to use in the fires you need to pass more through the water treatment plants, that means unless you've got a lot of very expensive excess capacity there you're going to be lowering the water quality which is both a short and medium term problem for public health (once the fires are over if they lower the quality too much they'll need to flush the pipe network to clear out any bacteria etc that made it into it).

Water supplies to a city tend to be based on average usage and small localised peaks such as a fire at a couple of buildings, the potential need to run thousands of full bore fire hoses at once is not something even the best run cities with plentiful water supplies tend to be able to do, as each fire hose can be using the equivalent of hundreds of residential properties with their taps fully open, and even if the primary incoming supply can cope with that, the actual street pipes can't if you need those hoses too close together.
This ignores the problem of actually moving water up hundreds of meters at a time, or the losses in water as properties burn down with water then being released through damaged pipes, or the damage that the fires might be doing to the water infrastructure (either direct damage to pipe and pumps, or cutting power to pumps).


To cope with this sort of fire scenario the city would like have needed many times the normal capacity for water, including a very large ready reserve of instantly available additional water and to be massively over provisioned for normal use.
Guess what, people tend not to like to pay for that sort of extra "wasted capacity", let alone the disruption that would be required over years as basically you either dig up every single existing pipe and valve and replace them, then knock down commercial or residential properties to build a load of pumps, or you spend almost as long but causing even more disruption as you lay in an entirely new separate "fire supply" system that is only used every few years at most.
Then of course you have to maintain these new, bigger and higher pressure pipes and valves that need a higher level of maintenance than the lower pressure versions.
 
Werewolf said:
Because the pipes aren't designed for more pressures? (they'll have some spare capacity, but push too hard and you start losing a lot of water through nearly bursting valved and pipes as ones that were close to failing give up, and existing minor failures get worse)
Because the pumps can't cope with more pressure? (they have a maximum pressure rating and maximum flow rates they can cope with before either they max out, or worse, they burn out).
Because there isn't enough water to increase the pressure?

IIRC there was a warning yesterday about the water quality telling people to boil it as they were trying to increase the flow rate, but and this is something that is pretty important to note, the same water that is being used to put out the fires is normally used for daily activities such as washing, drinking, and cooking, to increase the amount of water available to use in the fires you need to pass more through the water treatment plants, that means unless you've got a lot of very expensive excess capacity there you're going to be lowering the water quality which is both a short and medium term problem for public health (once the fires are over if they lower the quality too much they'll need to flush the pipe network to clear out any bacteria etc that made it into it).

Water supplies to a city tend to be based on average usage and small localised peaks such as a fire at a couple of buildings, the potential need to run thousands of full bore fire hoses at once is not something even the best run cities with plentiful water supplies tend to be able to do, as each fire hose can be using the equivalent of hundreds of residential properties with their taps fully open, and even if the primary incoming supply can cope with that, the actual street pipes can't if you need those hoses too close together.
This ignores the problem of actually moving water up hundreds of meters at a time, or the losses in water as properties burn down with water then being released through damaged pipes, or the damage that the fires might be doing to the water infrastructure (either direct damage to pipe and pumps, or cutting power to pumps).


To cope with this sort of fire scenario the city would like have needed many times the normal capacity for water, including a very large ready reserve of instantly available additional water and to be massively over provisioned for normal use.
Guess what, people tend not to like to pay for that sort of extra "wasted capacity", let alone the disruption that would be required over years as basically you either dig up every single existing pipe and valve and replace them, then knock down commercial or residential properties to build a load of pumps, or you spend almost as long but causing even more disruption as you lay in an entirely new separate "fire supply" system that is only used every few years at most.
Then of course you have to maintain these new, bigger and higher pressure pipes and valves that need a higher level of maintenance than the lower pressure versions.
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Wowza man, I meant turn the GRAVITY up. I will digest the rest of the post because it is probably interesting though.
 
Combat squirrel said:
Jesus, people like yourself having the vote is why trumps going to rape the usa again - possibly to the point of world conflict if he gets his way. I cannot fathom how a human mind works with such bizarre views of the reality around them.

Thinking rationally is tracing back root causes siting evidence. Did a magic gremlin chanting 'I'm the embodied form of global warming' manifest in the countryside around LA, carrying a petrol can and a lighter start the fires? No, no it did not - which answers your daft point.

Did the entire global shift in climate over the past 100 years, irrevocably set up the circumstances under which LA bush fires would extremely likely happen quite often ? Yes, yes it did.

Could the bush fires have happened if humans didnt exist at all and hadn't burned trillions of barrels of oil into the atmosphere ? Of course they could.

However, because we did do that, the % chance of it being so hot it almost certainly contributed to bush fires is undeniable - so high the insurance industry wasn't willing to bet a few billion on it - again, moral leeches, but they aren't stupid, evil yes, stupid, no.

What you're not even trying to understand is, its a % game, the chance of this happening in the next 5 years is say, 90% likely, because climate change has created the environment for it - if humans didnt exist, it maybe 25% likely................you're not grasping that its not black and white, its a contributing factor, ergo by definition, it exists.
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The chance increase due to global climate changes is not relevant as i have been saying, that is a human environment, humans manage it, the chance of a big fire like this should be 0% if managed properly.

You can read but due to your emotional state being unstable you cannot finish sentences which leads you to jump to conclusions having zero understanding of the underlying reasons for these fires.

Only climate rhetoric which has blinded you to everything else, just the science.
 
Uther said:
The police are arresting looters dressed as firefighters now. Humanity eh.
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Yeah I saw some twitters post (might have been posted in this thread actually) of "firefighters" carrying things out of peoples houses and the X poster saying what heroes they were for saving peoples irreplaceble personal belongings, I had my suspicions!
 
platinum87 said:
The chance increase due to global climate changes is not relevant as i have been saying, that is a human environment, humans manage it, the chance of a big fire like this should be 0% if managed properly.

You can read but due to your emotional state being unstable you cannot finish sentences which leads you to jump to conclusions having zero understanding of the underlying reasons for these fires.

Only climate rhetoric which has blinded you to everything else, just the science.
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Now your logic is flawed - you're saying if humans managed it they could have stopped the fires? - Yes correct, if we had 5000 people out in the area, constantly on the look out, cutting down trees and removing shrubs every 100m - yeah sure, but how do you do that state wide for thousands of square miles, most of the people of LA would have had to be involved.

You are simply not getting that climate change is relevant - in fact, I'm not even sure what your aim is here other than to disagree with me.

Me replying is simply to help you out, to understand the errors in your logic.

Had climate change not been a thing, you wouldn't need every human in the area to keep watch to try and prevent it (obviously not plausible), but climate change IS a thing so its hugely increased the chance of whats happened, happening, AGAIN ergo its a factor, ergo it played a role, you even admit climate change is real, although you wrongly try and make a false statement that it had nothing to do with anything here - frankly you cannot possibly know - you can possibly know it was a factor from the tens of thousands of scientific studies on the matter - & chatting to a guy on a forum that literally has an ocean science degree in which study of climate change in the atmosphere was a MAJOR part - what are you qualifications ?

Its time we did away with opinions in society and followed the facts.
 
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Combat squirrel said:
Now your logic is flawed - you're saying if humans managed it they could have stopped the fires? - Yes correct, if we had 5000 people out in the area, constantly on the look out, cutting down trees and removing shrubs every 100m - yeah sure, but how do you do that state wide for thousands of square miles, most of the people of LA would have had to be involved.

You are simply not getting that climate change is relevant - in fact, I'm not even sure what your aim is here other than to disagree with me.

Me replying is simply to help you out, to understand the errors in your logic.

Had climate change not been a thing, you wouldn't need every human in the area to keep watch to try and prevent it (obviously not plausible), but climate change IS a thing so its hugely increased the chance of whats happened, happening, AGAIN ergo its a factor, ergo it played a role, you even admit climate change is real, although you wrongly try and make a false statement that it had nothing to do with anything here - frankly you cannot possibly know - you can possibly know it was a factor from the tens of thousands of scientific studies on the matter - & chatting to a guy on a forum that literally has an ocean science degree in which study of climate change in the atmosphere was a MAJOR part - what are you qualifications ?

Its time we did away with opinions in society and followed the facts.
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IIRC most of the area that is burning/where the fires initially got hold were very hilly scrub land with small, fast growing bushes on them.

It would require, as you say a good portion of the population of LA out there every week to just have a hope of keeping it under control as much of it is on steep hills with no vehicular access and high risk of injury so it would need experienced hikers/climbers for a lot of it, and each would only be able to fill a bag they could carry before heading back towards a drop off point and not ability to use any power tools to assist.

And even if they somehow managed to remove that scrub, they'd have likely created a new problem as there would now not be anything on the surface of the hills to help tie the ground together, meaning it's far more susceptible to erosion.

There are some very good reasons why even with property prices as high as they are in that area a lot of land isn't built on, and it's not just because of bureaucracy or "the environment" but the "geography" ;)
 
Werewolf said:
To cope with this sort of fire scenario the city would like have needed many times the normal capacity for water, including a very large ready reserve of instantly available additional water and to be massively over provisioned for normal use.
Guess what, people tend not to like to pay for that sort of extra "wasted capacity", let alone the disruption that would be required over years as basically you either dig up every single existing pipe and valve and replace them, then knock down commercial or residential properties to build a load of pumps, or you spend almost as long but causing even more disruption as you lay in an entirely new separate "fire supply" system that is only used every few years at most.
Then of course you have to maintain these new, bigger and higher pressure pipes and valves that need a higher level of maintenance than the lower pressure versions.
Click to expand...
Water supply is a fundamental problem in the Los Angeles area its a finite resource they even diverted two rivers to feed the city via long aqueducts in the early 20thC as there isn't anywhere near enough groundwater to satisfy demand in a semi desert landscape and what there is is supplied by meltwater from the mountains and the drier the climate gets thats going to dwindle too so the place faces fundamental questions as to its future that they thought they'd solved a century ago

Uther said:
The police are arresting looters dressed as firefighters now. Humanity eh.
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Doesn't surprise me in the least L.A. is a city of two halves the things you see all over the media the parts everyone glamorises Hollywood etc and the bits you don't see central and downtown with grinding poverty and areas you don't venture into after dark
 
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mrk said:

Hmm.
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GK4HPAeW8AALk5Q.jpg:large
 
Blackjack Davy said:
Water supply is a fundamental problem in the Los Angeles area its a finite resource they even diverted two rivers to feed the city via long aqueducts in the early 20thC as there isn't anywhere near enough groundwater to satisfy demand in a semi desert landscape and what there is is supplied by meltwater from the mountains and the drier the climate gets thats going to dwindle too so the place faces fundamental questions as to its future that they thought they'd solved a century ago


Doesn't surprise me in the least L.A. is a city of two halves the things you see all over the media the parts everyone glamorises Hollywood etc and the bits you don't see central and downtown with grinding poverty and areas you don't venture into after dark
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Two halves?

More like 10% are either ludicrously wealthy or decently well off and the rest are peasants since the middle class is either being destroyed or leaving.
 
with the evening c4 report on LA where locals comparing aftermath to a war zone , the comparison with Ukraine, or Gaza (blessed by usa$'s) can't be avoided - kismet ?

the California fire budget cut <20M in the context of an overall budget of ~700M seemed small too, despite the twitter noise;
terminology of a climate refugee also introduced, where such folks after previous Paradise town loss had moved to likes of virginia and then suffered hurricanes.
 
Werewolf said:
IIRC most of the area that is burning/where the fires initially got hold were very hilly scrub land with small, fast growing bushes on them.

It would require, as you say a good portion of the population of LA out there every week to just have a hope of keeping it under control as much of it is on steep hills with no vehicular access and high risk of injury so it would need experienced hikers/climbers for a lot of it, and each would only be able to fill a bag they could carry before heading back towards a drop off point and not ability to use any power tools to assist.

And even if they somehow managed to remove that scrub, they'd have likely created a new problem as there would now not be anything on the surface of the hills to help tie the ground together, meaning it's far more susceptible to erosion.

There are some very good reasons why even with property prices as high as they are in that area a lot of land isn't built on, and it's not just because of bureaucracy or "the environment" but the "geography" ;)
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Yes its not as simple as some make out, certainly not cutting fire chances to zero which is just daft. Like I've mentioned before, the mustard plant has taken over there and while it will die out in dry conditions the foliage stays and just burns like, well wildfire. Plus when everything is burnt and other plants struggle to re grow in burnt land the mustard plant just flourishes in it.

UK struggles with knotweed and can't get rid of it, just imagine if this was growing in the mountains with houses, be an impossible task
 
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