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Southern CA Fires- Extreme Santa Ana Winds


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46 minutes ago, 0xdeadbeef said:

Once it gets to this stage, the fight is already lost. 

The part I'm unclear on is if they actually took reasonable steps to prevent and mitigate this. Fires in California have a long history, so fires in these exact places should have been expected and planned for.   What fire prevention steps did they take during this prolonged drought?   

 

Serious answer: Lots of towns in the West (including mine) have grants available to help fire-mitigate (?) your home.  I think I read that in my town, they'll send out an expert to help you figure out what you can do to lower the fire risk and give you a $5K budget to do it.  I assume that this program is funded by a federal agency which will soon be shut down by President Musk because of its inefficiency.

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56 minutes ago, 0xdeadbeef said:

Once it gets to this stage, the fight is already lost. 

The part I'm unclear on is if they actually took reasonable steps to prevent and mitigate this. Fires in California have a long history, so fires in these exact places should have been expected and planned for.   What fire prevention steps did they take during this prolonged drought?   

I'm sure they did everything they could. None of those men and women want to fight fires like these any more than they have to. Just like here in Austin, they do extensive public education, teaching people (who bother to listen) how to better protect their homes from wildfires, especially those in the Wildland-Urban Interface. Think Cat Mountain/Jester-ish. In So-Cal, given their conditions, they go hard on this stuff, but just like here, they can only do so much, and they can't make people do what they should do - cutting trees and vegetation back from their houses, etc, to improve their chances of minimizing damage.

Edited by wood
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3 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

Serious answer: Lots of towns in the West (including mine) have grants available to help fire-mitigate (?) your home.  I think I read that in my town, they'll send out an expert to help you figure out what you can do to lower the fire risk and give you a $5K budget to do it.  I assume that this program is funded by a federal agency which will soon be shut down by President Musk because of its inefficiency.

This. But most people won't do it if it compromises (in their mind) the 'look' of their property.

Edited by wood
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45 minutes ago, B00M said:

 


what were they supposed to do? Bulldoze and replace all the forests, trees, and grassy areas with sand? Force every house to have some novel fire suppression system? 

if you’re going to ask these questions, what are you doing at your home? Central Texas is very similar if you’re being honest. 

 

Yep. It is. It gets windy around here too, but the biggest difference in our favor is that we don't have regular Santa Anas and eucalyptus trees all over the place. We're lucky compared to them, but yeah, when the conditions are bad here, we all know we're walking a knife edge.

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44 minutes ago, bolverk said:

One big problem with removing trees, brush, et cetera, is that you've then removed what's holding those hillsides together when it finally fucking rains and you get massive mudslides. It's a pickle, for sure. 

You don't have to remove it all to that level. Just create a buffer around structures. Still no guarantees, but it tends to help your odds significantly.

Edited by wood
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4 minutes ago, wood said:

You don't have to remove it all to that level. Just create a buffer around structures. Still no guarantees, but it tends to help your odds significantly.

Thats right. And take down trees over power lines, etc.

For those who think it won't happen in Central Texas, go check out what happened in Tahitian Village in the first Bastrop fire. Now add that to this drought and the growth in population.

Some of those places out near Dripping are begging for a disaster. One two lane road, new developments, and fields/cedar right up to them.

 

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16 minutes ago, Laxtonto said:

Lots and lots of insurers have been refusing to renew/cancel policies over the last 18 months throughout California. Many of these homes that we are seeing be destroyed are not insured. Much of this is tied back to Prop 103 from the late 80s, which limits the % rate increase annually to 7% (since 1988 mind you) there is just no one willing to cover them. Lots of this is tied back to Prop 103 from the late 80s which limits rate increases to at the time prevent unjust increases in insurance premiums (at the time it was more focused on auto and classic casualty/business coverage).

Enter massively escalating home prices in California and the increased risk portfolio due to drought and population density and it was either put themselves at risk or pull out of the market completely. If the year-to-year property value has increased on a policy consistently over 7% and there is a large enough density of policyholders in the region,if you are the insurer, what do you do? The only real option, much like what happened in FL and the gulf coasts, is to start no longing covering these places. It sucks for thousands of people that are facing a complete loss of their homes with no insurance coverage, but on the flip side, as a business, they have to run the math and once that math tells them no, its time to pull out.

Yep, definitely, we’ve been dealing with it. Although I’m not sure many are uninsured - you would go with FAIR, the state insurer of last resort, which to be fair (sorry), will probably be bankrupted by the is. But the point really was that California’s NIMBYist land use policies contributed to this by forcing sprawl. 
 

edit: let’s pile on Prop 13 as well, maybe the fire hydrants would have worked if the Palisades boomers paid their fair share!

Edited by We’reTexas
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2 hours ago, mdmost said:

Sunset fire looks to be in better shape. 

For the person above asking how to prevent this, it's hard to fight something in canyons and hills with very little ability to get into those areas. According to the FD spokesperson on ABC7, aircraft are the best way to fight them but you can't fly helicopters in high winds. The reason they're having luck against the Sunset fire is the winds died down. There will be high winds through Friday. 

Yep. Those canyons around there aren't places where you can do much to stop the fires, esp once they start going vertical up the chutes and chimneys, where the flame spread rate increases dramatically. Homes at the top? Fuggedaboutit.

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5 minutes ago, Stunns38 said:


ABC 7 showed plenty of trucks there and a water drop. Close to Van Nuys airport.

Choppers mainly. Don't see any airplanes up except for surveillance.

Buddy works on one of the west coast fire fighting contracts. Said they were told today no mobilization down to cali. The rest of the west is dry and they are expecting a really bad spring and summer so get that aircraft maintained.

Edited by InkaUtexas
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31 minutes ago, C-Man said:

The FAIR plan is all some of the properties can get. There are limits. My understanding is that the state guarantees to pay all claims no matter what.

Thanks, appreciate the insight from someone in the industry. We were very close to having to go with FAIR, but were able to avoid. From what I understand, FAIR has like $400M in reserves for claims and the state can charge (try to?) overages to accepted insurers, who can then pass along charges to policy holders. How would that even work out? This sounds like an epic clusterfuck. 
 

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Oh, and just one more thing before I shut up for a while, re: the dry hydrants. Just working large structure fires like, for example, an apartment fire with a whole building or multiple buildings involved, you can have water supply issues if you have too many hydrants flowing in that area. In very general terms, the more hydrants you open up, the less volume and pressure you'll end up with on each hydrant. Now imagine maybe hundreds or maybe even thousands of hydrants opened up all over the place over a broader area, with numerous firefighting agencies all working with them at the same time, literal chaos as you try to chase current fires and new fires popping up all over the place, triaging the fires so as not to waste resources on lost causes, dispatch absolutely swamped with radio and telephone traffic, not enough radio channels so they're all jammed with radio traffic making it very difficult for even the most basic comms, etc ...
I don't envy those folks at all. They're going through the wringer.

I feel for who is truly in charge. No win situation
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1 hour ago, Laxtonto said:

Lots and lots of insurers have been refusing to renew/cancel policies over the last 18 months throughout California. Many of these homes that we are seeing be destroyed are not insured. Much of this is tied back to Prop 103 from the late 80s, which limits the % rate increase annually to 7% (since 1988 mind you) there is just no one willing to cover them. Lots of this is tied back to Prop 103 from the late 80s which limits rate increases to at the time prevent unjust increases in insurance premiums (at the time it was more focused on auto and classic casualty/business coverage).

Enter massively escalating home prices in California and the increased risk portfolio due to drought and population density and it was either put themselves at risk or pull out of the market completely. If the year-to-year property value has increased on a policy consistently over 7% and there is a large enough density of policyholders in the region,if you are the insurer, what do you do? The only real option, much like what happened in FL and the gulf coasts, is to start no longing covering these places. It sucks for thousands of people that are facing a complete loss of their homes with no insurance coverage, but on the flip side, as a business, they have to run the math and once that math tells them no, its time to pull out.

So does this, coupled with the last 36 hours, lead to a Covid like exodus to Colorado, Arizona and Texas?  At what point is enough enough?  Owning a $6MM property is one thing, self insuring it is another.  And what will the next few years bring with mud slides due to the lack of vegetation and brush?  I love visiting Southern California and have easy access to it.  I just can’t imagine living there.  If I owned one of the 50k or so houses, that are going to be a total loss, I would have to make a tough decision as to whether or not I want to rebuild and risk something similar.

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40 minutes ago, henrygandorf said:

signing off from marina del rey. 

i grabbed 3 bottles of bourbon, my wife packed for a month, and we had 2 puppies with us. 

fun field trip but hoping to return in the am. sunset fire somehow went nw which was lucky. 

Y'all stay safe.

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4 hours ago, NorthLoop said:

I'm not sure how the insurance companies will financially recover from this

The insurance industry will get a massive bailout from Congress because rich people are getting fucked too. 

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7 hours ago, wood said:

You don't have to remove it all to that level. Just create a buffer around structures. Still no guarantees, but it tends to help your odds significantly.

That sounds like what they did at the Getty Villa and it seems to have worked. The one planning criticism I have seen that seems to have some merit is the question of whether regular controlled burns were being prevented by environmental regulations might have helped here. 

2 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

predicting a permitting hell ...

 

There is some truth in here in that a lot of rich, influential people are going to get pissed off and seek change, but Carolla got community-noted because the Pallisades actually majority-voted for Caruso and Malibu residents don’t vote in the LA mayoral election. 
 

As others have noted, the problem is just that there are some areas of the country that are prone to periodic catastrophic natural events, and if you build houses there, it is just a matter of time before they become at risk. See all the $10 million houses getting built on barrier islands on the east coast when hurricanes come along. SoCal has ecosystems that evolved in the context of regularly occurring burn cycles over millions of years. If you build a home in a canyon that doesn’t get a lot of rainfall and there are regular seasonal high winds, fires are going to happen periodically. 

Edited by Duane Moore
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8 hours ago, bolverk said:

True, but it's also foolish to allow construction on hillsides in these fire-prone climates due to frequent drought conditions. Are we prepared to have much more stringent land-use regulations in Texas? Who's going to support that proposition?

I don't have any idea if the part of Montana where your little chalet is built on the side of a mountain is also at risk of an eventual forest fire, but it's the same shit. 


Fine, I’ll grow beets. But, I don’t like beets.

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1 hour ago, Message Board User said:

 

Yep saw on my buddy's IG someone had set a homeless camp on fire in a clearly not burning area. Looks like he was able to get police and fire out to it and put out but a drain on resources for no reason. 

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