In fact, there was a small fire in Pacific Palisades a week or so before the one going on now. It was quickly put out before it spread. There is some speculation that it wasn’t fully out and there was a slow burn before the winds spread it. I am not sure how plausible that is.
You are correct. If only they had the same prevailing winds, topography, rainfall, etc., the EXACT same thing could have happened. Dodged a close one there!
Not understanding what you are calling ignorance. This fire is of course causing more damage to humans and the human built environment than others but the specific massively elevated risk in California is well known, a consequence of inadequate and misguided past forest management, the impact of changing climate on it, and huge areas of “wildland urban interface” (WUI)
This isn’t the first major WUI fire in LA county.
The WUI is a very risky area for fires and that risk is increasing progressively with climate change. Yes it is a similar conversation as for barrier islands. How many times do you rebuild in an area that is almost certainly going to destroyed again and likely in the not distant future? And if a real estate investment decreases in value, due to climate change or any other reason, should the rest of us bail out the owners?
Exactly right. The problem is the conflation of suburban areas at risk only with dry weather and extremely high winds vs hillside areas at risk under usual conditions. That is, it’s reasonable to rebuild dense suburban city blocks, but not so much the houses on winding roads in the hills.
An electrical tower in hills covered with brush. They think.
The current theory is that this fire was started in a backyard BBQ.
Agree. Most of Altadena appears to be suburban grid built on flat land, not at the WUI in or near the hills. The Coffey Park neighborhood in Santa Rosa is out in a valley, across a major freeway from the hills, but got heavily impacted by a wildland fire under unusual conditions. There’s a difference between where the risk is known to be high and where the risk is not known to be high.
Much of Altadena in in the hills and adjacent to the brush. Winds sending embers into the rest of the more urbanized area down hill is an expected risk. Here is from an Altadena heritage site before the fire:
Imagine a fire coinciding with one of the occasional mighty winds that roar down the mountain, burning embers can fly a mile or more and ignite multiple fires. When a fire gets out of control in a gale it is impossible to stop until the wind drops
It IS and has been rated a high fire hazard area.
Here is the Eaton fire map, and here is the fire damage map. As noted upthread, the fire is believed to have begun near electrical towers in the hills of Eaton Canyon.
For anyone to maintain that this fire simply involved a flatland suburban grid without acknowledging any relation to immediately adjacent hilly “wild” areas requires an impressive ignoring of obvious facts.
It’s a good thing no one is doing that. All of southern California has high fire risks because of our extended dry season. Areas near undeveloped land have higher risks because that land has poor connectivity. Structures actually in the poorly developed land have the highest risks.
Californians, and the rest of the U.S., need to discuss risks, but it needs to be informed about the differences among the risks. The reason there’s pushback is that those differences seem to be minimized in much of the discussion in this thread.
But by definition there are few of them.
A single house in the midst of a major wildfire will almost certainly be destroyed.
Some fraction of homes in a more densely developed WUI will survive. But obviously the densely developed area will experience more structures destroyed. And the greater human activity there, more power lines, so on, is more probability of a fire starting.
Again 45% of Californian housing is in the high risk WUI. High winds and dry conditions are to be expected, even if this is unseasonably bad.