Is the iconic Hollywood sign still intact?
The Hollywood sign is at the top of Beachwood Canyon and west of Griffith Park, nowhere near the Sunset Fire, which would have to cross Hwy 101 and go around the Hollywood
Reservoir to reach the sign. Those letters have been replaced at least twice, anyway, and were originally a gaudy promotion for a housing development.
Stranger
A long time ago, I found myself alone in a gas filling facility with thousands of cylinders and tanks in various states of being processed, refilled, stored, tested(?), etc. I think this one did mostly medical gases so primarily oxygen and a lot were several hundred liter cryo portables with frosty tops.
It was a nonstop cacophony of tiny venting sounds, really spooky, echoing, random intervals, from all directions, behind my back, pssht. Pst. Click. Ssswisss. It was also a constant reminder of how much energy and possible danger was piled around me: no way they’d find any of my remains or effects or vehicle if that O2 volcano went up. Or I could be frozen to death. Or oxygen toxicity.
Thanks! 
The older split rim truck tires were very dangerous. A friend in high school had his leg broken when the locking ring went flying.
Later OSHA requirements mandated the split rim truck tires had to be in a metal safety cage before working on them.
I didn’t realize car tires would pop in a fire. I’ll think about that if I ever near a burning car.
It’s more of a party favor than an explosion, but if that carcass comes apart or a sidewall blowout flings a wheel cover at you it can do some real damage to anyone standing nearby. Those semi-trailer retreads are super dangerous if they come apart while moving but I’ve never seen one let go in a fire. I have seen the aftermath of aircraft tires ‘dieseling’ upon landing and they can actually carve into the fuselage or do serious damage to the enpenage if they hit right but of course you shouldn’t be standing on a working runway.
If a car is burning vigorously enough that the tires are about to let go, you either need to be wearing bunker gear and an SCBA rig, or get the hell back because it will be putting off toxic fumes and enough thermal radiation that you won’t need to comb your eyebrows for a month. I helped extract a semi-conscious driver from a car with an engine fire once, and even though there was no visible flame at that point it was already throwing off enough heat to be uncomfortable. The entire front of the car was consumed but the fire abated before moving through the passenger compartment, and the brigade arrived before it could breach the gas tank. In general, just stay away from burning cars and even moreso for BEVs.
Stranger
Nitpick. The tire is the rubber part. They are not split. The split devices on older trucks were split wheels, not tires. Split wheels were/are dangerous. Split tires don’t exist.
Split wheels are still commonplace on small & large aircraft. Despite being kinda rare on trucks these days.
Thank you for the correction. I misspoke.
Just reprising this for a follow-up thought. Was there much coverage or obvious presence of BEVs going up? Given California’s general embrace of EVs, I would have expected there to have been a goodly number of EVs that got caught up. Maybe one charred hulk is much the same as another, but the way it gets there is going to be a bit different. And possibly spectacular.
The energy available to the conflagration is probably similar in any total loss. Some data I have seen suggests that the energy intrinsic to an EV’s battery in thermal runaway from the components is about the same as it holds at full charge. So maybe not vastly different to a tank of fuel in an ordinary car. But the reaction is far from the same.
Just a thought. Would be interesting to know.
Actually received training a few months back on how to handled BEV calls. Generally, unless the car itself is already on fire, the odds of something happening to the battery are fairly slim. They are built to be very durable.
The issue is if one or more cell in the battery is cracked, thus starting a metal fire. Metal fires are very, very difficult to put out (they showed us video of someone how had a Tesla battery fire, and the department just pushed it into a lake it was parked next to, and it continued to burn underwater for hours).
It’s a thing that is still new enough, and the fires have been rare enough, that there is no standard approach as of yet.
I guess it’s a good thing then that Tesla Powerwalls are not that common yet.
A few years ago, 2015 or 2016, I think, I saw David Copperfield’s show in Las Vegas. It featured an impressive pyrotechnic effect, so I went up to him afterwards and asked, “Do you bleve in magic?”
Not directly related to the LA fires, but on the subject of exploding cars, this frame capture shows the aftermath of a police chase. I’m not sure but I think they may have used stop sticks, but in any case several tires blew out in the perp’s vehicle and it eventually began sparking like a firework, starting a fire in the area of the left rear wheel, presumably the combustion of whatever was left of that tire. This was also where the filler to the gas tank was located.
Point is, nothing went “boom!”. What happened was that the fire in the wheel well gradually grew larger, and then somehow (I’m not sure of the exact mechanism) spread to the engine compartment. It wasn’t through the interior because the perps remained inside until both front and back were in flames, then decided to exit. Eventually the whole car was engulfed. It was a good illustration of how fire can spread quite rapidly through a car, but there was neither an explosion nor even a sudden increase in the intensity of the fire – it just grew gradually over a period of maybe 15 or 20 minutes. This was its state just before firefighters arrived.
Not entirely the same thing, but effing impressive (and scary) still:
(Exploding water heaters)
and
Also, I wish I had a reason to use the wonderful words Stoichiometry and Stoichiometric in everyday conversation 