Watching the coverage of the wildfires in LA has left me agog. Yes, wildfires aren’t unusual in California, but that these hit a major city and has destroyed an estimated 12,000 buildings so far is mind-boggling.
Like many of you I find the sheer scale of the destruction almost incomprehensible. What disturbed me were the recriminations for the inability of the fire departments involved to deal with these fires. That those fighting the fires were dealing with the hurricane force of the Santa Ana winds made the idea of being able to contain those fires absolutely ludicrous. As I heard one experienced firefighter who used to work for Cal Fire state it, they were having to deal with a “fire hurricane”. No amount of water or fire personnel or apparatus were going to be able out down those fires under those circumstances. At best they would be able to keep evacuation routes open and even then they were fighting a losing battle.
One of the videos I watched showed a recording from an exterior security camera as fire approached a home and what was seen was perfectly described by the “fire hurricane” label. It was amazing to see just how quickly the embers inundated the home that caused it to ignite. No amount of water would have been able to extinguish the flames.
However, both the state and city level government will need to be held responsible for the severity of the fires. In particular the state’s failure to mitigate the fuel load through brush cutting, controlled burns, and other measures. Building codes which would have required fire resistant construction methods and materials were quashed. Yes, they would have added to the cost of building homes, but what is the cost of rebuilding homes that were burned to the ground by wildfires? (In case you’re wondering, I saw more than a couple of reports showing a small number of homes in some of the burn areas that were unscathed because of the use of those construction methods and materials while homes surrounding them were all destroyed by the fires.)
The extent of the destruction so far is inconceivable. As much as the idea of extinguishing those fires is appealing, we just remember that in the case of wildfires it isn’t a matter of putting them out as much as it is containing them and letting them burn themselves out. Though these wildfires are urban, the same principle applies – contain them and let them burn themselves out. That thousands of more buildings may be lost before this happens is indeed a shame, but unless someone can come up with a more effective way to deal with fires like these, the present imperfect method is what we’ve got.
Once this is all over, it will take months, if not years, for Los Angeles to recover and for the investigations to figure out how to prevent something like this from happening again.
