A fun book and maybe worth looking back into in these dark times ahead. The title comes from a story of a small town fire department being dispatched to a building with smoke billowing out the window. They found a man lying down on a smouldering mattress. After dousing the burning bed, they questioned the man - was he smoking before going to sleep? That sort of thing. His answer is the title of this post.
There's a lot of things this title could refer to. The most apt topic - admitting something truly monumentally ridiculous just to avoid conceding that they may have done something wrong. Even if that excuse is way more wrong. Very relevant for our times now. This post is not that - it's about the LA wildfires.
Wait, those are still a thing? Yes, those are still a thing. 10,000 acres near Bel Air has gone up in flames. And still the reporting on it is likely to not say anything about climate change. These fires are 100% due to climate change, even though there are countless people desperately seeking the one initial cause of these fires.
Wildfires happen. All the time. There are countless different things which might start them. And most of the time, they aren't an issue. They burn themselves out before become a big deal - or firefighting gets dispatched and they get the blaze contained in short order. This is how things normally work - and there are a lot of resources put into monitoring for new fires as well as respond to them as quickly and effectively as possible. This is how it has always gone - tall towers out in the sticks with a person regularly scanning the forest for wisps of smoke - calling incidents in and having aircraft at the ready to be dispatched. The methodology we have used for generations.
But these fires are around LA. The population of Greater Los Angeles is over 18 million people - these fires were going to be spotted very early, and there are massive resources sitting right there, ready to deploy in no time flat. This is why we normally don't get fires threatening large metropolitan areas - the concentration of people automatically makes the area exceptionally well suited to preventing wildfire outbreaks. It takes a very rapidly growing fire - one with access to a lot of high quality fuel - to actually get out of control. And that only happened because of the climate change inflicted drought.
Typically, fires that do major damage to cities are fires that start in the city - because many buildings are exactly the sorts of high fuel density structures that result in out of control fires. Building codes and urban planning have done a lot to reduce this problem - but there are still bad decisions that can result in very bad outcomes. The 2023 Tantallon Fire in suburban Halifax for example - subdivisions built right into the forest had to be evacuated. Not just because they were built into the wildlands, but also because they were built with "dry hydrants" - essentially a pipe that leads out to a lake. In hindsight, these were recognized as inadequate. Also too, these were subdivisions with houses scattered across half a dozen blocks or more - maybe a hundred houses or so - all with a single 2 lane road as a gateway to the main arterial. Suboptimal for getting firefighting crews in and evacuating residents out.
The other threat to urban areas is when remote wildfires grow out of control and then continue growing until they start to encroach on cities. In 2016, the Fort McMurray fires started 15 km away from the city. This one also was enabled by climate change and the drought induced build up and drying out of fuel. Fire crews responded and were spraying within an hour. Under normal circumstances, this would have been another contained wildfire, but that's not how it went.
The Pacific Palisades fire started about 5 km away and fire trucks were on the scene 45 minutes after getting the call. This is problematic - they should have responded faster, but apparently they were already dispatched to numerous other fires happening at the time. Because, as I noted initially, wildfires happen all the time. And as we have seen - the conditions were extremely conducive for wildfires. Perhaps LAFD needed more resources - that certainly seems believable. Still, 45 minutes is not a long time for a forest fire under normal conditions. It should have been contained - and only wasn't because the entire area was a tinderbox full of fuel that had been dried out after literally nine months without rain.
So climate change is 100% the cause of the damage. You cannot prevent all wildfires from happening - they always happen and have always happened. But we've developed methods for containing the threat and respond to the danger - only problem is that those methods were developed in a pre-climate change environment, and they are now woefully inadequate in our more extreme weather world. That's what happened here - and it is going to happen more and more frequently.
Fun fact - preventing wildfires has been recognized as one of the causes of extreme wildfire damage. When you stop all wildfires as soon as you can, the amount of fuel builds up. More trees die or drop branches, which sit on the ground, drying out over time. If these don't burn normally, then they just contribute to the danger when the next wildfire eventually does come close.
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