LA Wildfires
This next Sunday I will be preaching on how the mother of Jesus got involved in dealing with the wedding where they were about to run out of wine. I think it gives us an example of how we can get involved in current problems facing us today.
I imagine many people are wondering how they can get involved in helping out assisting with the wildfires in LA. Not all of us are firefighters, no. However, we can assist providing funds through international aid societies, though.
Here is an item that came across my news feed this morning. American animal shelters are beginning to take in extra animals from LA shelters to help them make room for the animals that have survived the fires. You might be able to help this way be adopting an animal from your local shelter which will make room for an LA animal. Check with your local shelter to see if they are participating. Encourage them to bring in these animals, if they aren't.
There may be other ideas on how we can help with the recovery from the LA fires. I am open to hearing other ideas.
Note to administrators: please keep this in Purgatory because it is one of the message boards people frequently check. Since the LA fires are on ongoing tragedy, I think it is appropriate to keep this in Purgatory at least for the time being.
I imagine many people are wondering how they can get involved in helping out assisting with the wildfires in LA. Not all of us are firefighters, no. However, we can assist providing funds through international aid societies, though.
Here is an item that came across my news feed this morning. American animal shelters are beginning to take in extra animals from LA shelters to help them make room for the animals that have survived the fires. You might be able to help this way be adopting an animal from your local shelter which will make room for an LA animal. Check with your local shelter to see if they are participating. Encourage them to bring in these animals, if they aren't.
There may be other ideas on how we can help with the recovery from the LA fires. I am open to hearing other ideas.
Note to administrators: please keep this in Purgatory because it is one of the message boards people frequently check. Since the LA fires are on ongoing tragedy, I think it is appropriate to keep this in Purgatory at least for the time being.
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If you live in Wisconsin, call up Sen. Ron Johnson and tell him you won't vote for him next time if he votes against disaster relief for California, which he's threatening to do.
Excellent suggestions, Ruth. I do note the article does encourage fostering an animal as a way to help those who will need time to recover from the fires.
The biggest culprit is climate change, and we all know who is behind that (we are). But there were likely missed opportunities as well. Ruth might know better than me, but it appears that the Palisades fire may have been rekindled from an ember left over from a previous fire about a month previously.
It is a shame this thing blew up as fast and as furious as it did, but those Sana Anna winds are very strong. I remember them when I lived in California. Nothing like what they are experiencing now, though.
Fred Rogers, who had a long running children's show on PBS once said:
There are so many helpers coming into LA to help with the fires. The Spokane area, which I am a part of has sent six strike teams of firefighters which consist of 41 people per team, we have also sent mental health first aid teams, experts in zoology and animal care. I can imagine some of the volunteer construction labors will go down during the recovery.
It will be a long haul,
Because with 1.5 degrees and rising, whatever has to be done, has to be done. And we won't be passing that figure again for at least 300 years.
One house in LA that survived: https://uk.yahoo.com/style/picture-fascinating-story-behind-one-205136785.html
And another: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cy9lqx1e940o
As far as firebreaks are concerned, there are some in remote areas of the county, but it is very difficult to put them in the middle of a city. Besides, firebreaks are very ineffective in high winds that are blowing glowing embers over a mile distant.
No building is completely fireproof, some are more resistant to fires than others. Even in concrete houses if a spark gets under the eaves, it can catch the underside were there may be wooden supports. If an ember gets inside a house, the furniture, wallpaper, paint, will burn. Many of the older houses also have shake roofs or asphalt roofing. Those go up fast.
I know in Kern County, where I lived, remote houses had to have enough water in storage to fight a house fire for an hour. But those rules probably were not in place for inner city dwellings.
I am sure in the rebuilding of the city, there will be more stringent laws enacted and enforced.
Looking at it from a distance, and having lived in relatively "safe" parts of the world *knock on wood*, it's easier to compare the situation to living in a floodplain. You don't build houses in floodplains because whatever you build is going to get destroyed. I guess now we're going to have fireplains?
But if people have enough money, I guess they can overcome any number of natural obstacles. Just wonder where the servants are going to live. People like that always need servants.
It's just a dangerous place to live. Heaven help those who live there.
And there's the hurricanes on the East Coast, and the droughts in various places, and flooding and blizzards in the upper Midwest...
I rather suspect that it is possible to build housing that would cope with the normal California fire system once they get past the mistakes of the past 100 years when fires were always suppressed, leading to wildfires now. But normality will be a while coming. And will also require some rivers and creeks to be restored... I gather people are working on it, but it'll take time.
I know. I was wrestling (just a bit, because this is home to me, born and raised) with whether fleeing to California might be worth considering, because of both DeSantis and his ilk, and hurricanes, and, um, no, California seems much scarier now than a couple of weeks ago.
What difference does that make?
The political decisions over the last 50 years to do nothing, or very nearly nothing, to reduce the burning of fossil fuels and destruction of forests, peat lands and sea-grass and kelp forests (all of which are major carbon sinks) is a far bigger influence over fire frequency and intensity than forest management and urban planning - though there are almost certainly some improvements that can be made in how we build in fire-prone regions to reduce the risks of fires starting and slowing their spread when they do, these measures are never going to counter the increased fire risks associated with the long term political decisions to do nothing about climate changing practices.
I sit corrected. Although they overlap by two years.
There are many building methods that can improve the durability of buildings in areas with various disasters. Although hoarding water inside would probably make things worse in the dry places in the west.
Costs now to me in contrast to costs later to someone else are a huge deterrent to change. If insurance companies and FEMA continue to pay out to rebuild in ever more high-risk areas without needed building code changes, we will continue to pay to rebuild areas over and over again. And there are no guarantees that such changes would be able to withstand such large events that we see more frequently now.
Hope so.
And that people rebuild in different places, rather than insisting on maintaining the untenable.
Having the existing infrastructure (buildings, levies, dams, etc.) destroyed once, much less multiple times, is very expensive.
Safe, durable housing is initially more costly. But there is a great cost to losing one's home and its contents. Or one's life. Preventable death is a pretty high cost.
Americans with a taste for large houses and small families may need to reconsider what they want for their dollar, particularly if they are buying or building in disaster-prone areas.
If insurance rates really reflected risk of placing one's home in a particular area, that might help. The mega mansions on Jupiter Island in FL ar uninsurable. A reflection of the owners' incredible wealth. "Wash it away and bury it in sand. I can afford to rebuild on my own."
Good point. Engineers surely have some good ideas, though.
No area is without danger, and it seems likely to me that the natural threats will continue to morph for some time. But the people in the Midwest look at the coasts and shake our heads.
Overall our weather is far less destructive. At least in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan we hardly see decent snow anymore. Heavy snow is something people have been managing for centuries without massive loss of life, limb and property. Life here is not like a Jack London story. There are plenty of places in the US that are beautiful and relatively safe to live.
For now.
Earthquakes, even small ones, are the other regular threat in California. Building methods and materials need to take both fire and quakes into account. Traditional concrete buildings are too rigid for a regular shaking.
Sadly, it's a byword in seismology circles that you can map the incidence of local government corruption by the pattern of collapsed buildings.
I doubt it could be compulsory because existing buildings don't necessarily have space for this. Plus then firefighters would have to hook up to each property's water storage. Better to make sure the city's infrastructure can support fighting large fires.
IMO one of the main things we need to change in SoCal is to build more densely in central city areas rather than sprawl into wildland. We've already paved a huge area; let's just live there.
But it's hard to do. In 2021 a law passed allowing more dense development of land zoned for single-family homes, and cities promptly put in little rules about this that made it virtually impossible to do. January 1 a new state law over-riding those little rules came into effect. So we'll see. Los Angeles and Long Beach (and probably others, but I know about LA and LB) both encourage putting a secondary dwelling on a single-family lot, and people have been building a lot of those since those rules were implemented.
As for the building code, California has the strictest building code with regard to fire in the US, but the stuff that burned was built 40-100 years ago. I wouldn't be surprised to see the code changed in the wildland-urban interface. There's little you can do about existing residential buildings, though. You can regulate new construction, remodeling, and landscaping. You can incentivize people to replace wood decks and fences with ones made out of non-flammable materials; people can get rebates from some local governments for replacing their lawns with drought-resistant landscaping, so I'd do the same with wooden decks. But existing residences you're kind of stuck with.