[Roosta]

Property can be rebuild, people cant !

Stay safe everyone.

[Xploit Machine]

[kellyhound]

Death toll doubles to 10 as arson arrest made after new Kenneth wildfire erupts.

A number of citizens detained a suspect in the West Valley area, close to where the flames are burning from the latest blaze, amid reports they were carrying a “propane tank” or “flamethrower”.

Investigators with the Los Angeles Police Department are looking into whether that individual was responsible for starting the fire.

[ezeemonee]

Just crazy. Drove past the back side of the mountains from the fire Tuesday night and the wind, ash, and trash getting blown around the freeway were nuts. People were crashing just from the wind and some dude almost side swiped me in the wind. Had to run the gauntlet again Wednesday night on the way back from San Diego but the wind was less but fires were much larger. I could see houses burning on multiple hills. smh

[pervM]

LAFD Assistant Chief in a nutshell.

If the hiring practices in the LA Firefighting department are this terrible, one has to wonder if this level of incompetency also extends to wildfire prevention measures as well?

[houseoftechno]

Originally Posted by pervM ↗

LAFD Assistant Chief in a nutshell.

If the hiring practices in the LA Firefighting department are this terrible, one has to wonder if this level of incompetency also extends to wildfire prevention measures as well?

[Captions for deaf]
1. We should deploy firefighters of the same sex and race as the victims.
2. Expecting a firefighter to carry you out of a burning structure is sexist.
3. People who need to be rescued from structure fires deserve to die as punishment for not preventing the fire in the first place.

[kellyhound]

For residents of this devastated Los Angeles suburb, the arrival of these men in uniform is too little, too late.

"We didn't see a single firefighter while we were throwing buckets of water to defend our house against the flames" on Tuesday night, said Nicholas Norman, 40.

"They were too busy over in the Palisades saving the rich and famous's properties, and they let us common folks burn," said the teacher.

But the fire did not discriminate.

In the upscale Pacific Palisades neighborhood, the first to be hit by the flames this week, wealthy residents share the same resentment toward the authorities.

"Our city has completely let us down," said Nicole Perri, outraged by the fact that hydrants being used by firefighters ran dry or lost pressure.

Her lavish Palisades home was burnt to cinders. In a state of shock, the 32-year-old stylist wants to see accountability.

"Things should have been in place that could have prevented this," she told AFP.

"We've lost everything, and I just feel zero support from our city, our horrible mayor and our governor."

Not prepared
Multiple fires that continue to ravage Los Angeles have killed at least 11 people, authorities say.

Around 10,000 buildings have been destroyed, and well over 100,000 residents have been forced to evacuate.

So far authorities have largely blamed the intense 100 mile (160 kilometer) per hour winds that raged earlier this week, and recent months of drought, for the disaster.

But this explanation alone falls short for many Californians, thousands of whom have lost everything.

Karen Bass, the city's mayor, has come in for heavy criticism because she was visiting the African nation of Ghana when the fire started, despite dire weather warnings in the preceding days.

Budget cuts to the fire department, and a series of evacuation warnings erroneously sent to millions of people this week, have only stoked the anger further.

"I don't think the officials were prepared at all," said James Brown, a 65-year-old retired lawyer in Altadena.

"There's going to have to be a real evaluation here, because hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people have just been completely displaced," he told AFP.

"It's like you're in a war zone."

Republican president-elect Donald Trump has fanned the flames of controversy, blaming California's liberal leadership and encouraging his followers to do the same.

But the highly politicized attacks by Trump -- who made false claims about why fire hydrants ran dry -- have also frustrated some survivors in Altadena.

"That's textbook Trump: he's trying to start a polemic with false information," said architect Ross Ramsey, 37.

"It's too early to point fingers or blame anybody for anything," he told AFP, while clearing ashes from the remains of his mother's house.

"We should be focusing on the people who are trying to pick up their lives and how to help them... Then we can point fingers and figure this all out, with real facts and real data."

Experts in urban water supply said the hydrants ran dry because of a host of factors, including spiking demand that made it difficult to quickly refill them. Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other areas of Los Angeles County rely on a patchwork of municipal systems that are designed to battle house fires, not massive wildfires consuming blocks at a time.

“The way fire departments are set up is to fight a fire at a house or maybe two houses or a block,” said Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire expert at Arizona State University. “They’re not set up to fight a fire that’s an entire neighborhood.”

Several experts dismissed Trump’s claim that Newsom could have averted the tragedy by transferring water from Northern California. Southern California’s reservoirs are actually above historical levels, “a best-case scenario for emergency response,” according to Ashley Overhouse, water policy adviser at Defenders of Wildlife.

“There is no connection whatsoever between California’s water policies and the water available for firefighters in Southern California,” Peter Gleick, senior fellow and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, said of Trump’s claims. “They’re unrelated issues.”

“Tanker trucks on hand, more backup power in places they need it, probably more water sitting in reservoirs, having more of these tanks and spot checks on these hydrants — all of these things could make a difference,” said Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group. “How much of a difference, I don’t know.”

In order for water to be piped uphill to hydrants in Pacific Palisades, it is collected in a reservoir, pumped into three million-gallon, high-elevation storage tanks, then propelled by gravity into homes and fire hydrants.

DWP spokesman Bowen Xie said the agency had filled its 114 water storage tanks before the blaze, but after the Palisades Fire erupted on Tuesday, water demand quadrupled in the area, lowering the pressure required to refill the three local storage tanks.

By 4:45 p.m., the first of the three tanks ran out of water, said Janisse Quiñones, DWP’s chief executive and chief engineer. The second tank ran empty about 8:30 p.m., and the third at 3 a.m. Wednesday.

“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades,” she said at a Wednesday briefing. “We pushed the system to the extreme.”

High demand and lower water pressure were also plaguing firefighters in Altadena, an unincorporated community north of Pasadena. Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, whose district includes the area, said the number of blazes across a wide swath had made firefighting especially challenging. She visited firefighters on Wednesday and said that, while they didn’t seem to be running out of water, “there’s never enough.”

On the darkened streets of Altadena on Wednesday, there were not enough engines to extinguish embers drifting from one burning house to the next. Explosions echoed as houses ignited and the fire spread. Residents who had defied evacuation orders used whatever water they could find to douse their roofs.

For veteran fire captain Freddy Escobar, the problem boils down to an urban water system that is not equipped to handle brush fires that once were seasonal and now burn across much of the state year round.

“We need more resources, more firefighters, more engines,” said Escobar, who is also president of the Los Angeles firefighters union. “What we’re doing is not sustainable.”

Marty Adams, former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, echoed those concerns. He said the agency’s water pump-and-storage system, like others nationwide, was designed to meet fire protection standards based on the water needed to battle fires at several homes or businesses, not wildfires that consume whole neighborhoods.

==========================================

When Mayor Karen Bass unveiled her budget plan for 2024-25, she called for a 2.7% reduction in spending at the Los Angeles Fire Department.

Her proposal, unveiled in April, sought $23 million in cuts to the department, with much of it focused on reduced equipment purchases.

But while her citywide spending proposal was being reviewed, Bass was also in closed-door negotiations over a major boost in pay for the city’s 3,300 firefighters. Those pay hikes — four years of raises and an array of other financial incentives — were not finalized until several months after her budget went into effect.

The City Council approved the firefighter raises in November, adding more than $53 million in additional salary costs. By then, the council had also signed off on $58 million for new firetrucks and other department purchases.

Once those two line items were added, the fire department’s operating budget actually grew by more than 7% compared to the prior fiscal year, according to the city’s financial analysts.

The issue of fire department spending, boring and burdened with specifics in normal times, is now a critical issue in Los Angeles following the massive destruction caused by a wildfire in Pacific Palisades, which continues to burn. The Eaton fire, which has destroyed swaths of Altadena, is outside L.A. city limits.

While the L.A. fire department’s annual operating budget has been growing overall — and is on track to exceed $950 million — the agency also has had to scale back some of its operations.

Bass and other officials said the reductions have not affected the department’s ability to fight the Palisades fire.

After the blaze broke out on Tuesday, critics of the Los Angeles Police Department seized on the numbers in Bass’ 2024-25 budget document, arguing that funds allocated for police came at the expense of firefighters. Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X, shared a post that bemoaned “LAFD underfunding.” Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times, has also criticized the city’s handling of the fire department budget on social media and elsewhere.

Bass, who was in Africa when the fire broke out, has sought to counter the budget cut narrative, saying that spending at the department has grown during the current year. She said funding for firefighter raises was part of her budget from the beginning — but was included in an account separate from the fire department budget.

“Money was allocated to be distributed later on, which actually went to support salaries and other parts of the fire department,” Bass told reporters at a briefing on Thursday.

Last year, faced with a serious budget crunch, Bass and the council eliminated dozens of civilian positions in the department, all of them already vacant.

Those cuts have hampered “core functions” in the department, including payroll, community education programs and the equity and human resources bureau, which addresses personnel grievances and workplace equity, according to a Dec. 4 memo by Fire Chief Kristin Crowley.

In her memo, Crowley said a $7-million reduction in overtime variable staffing hours, or “v-hours,” had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.”

According to the memo, the loss of the overtime funding has hindered the department’s ability to test radio equipment, complete pilot training and carry out brush clearance inspections, which are “crucial for mitigating fire risks in high-hazard areas.”

City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, whose office helps prepare the city budget, said that overall fire department overtime, counting all categories, actually increased in this year’s budget by nearly $18 million. In addition, he said the budget reductions did not limit the number of firefighters who responded to the Palisades fire, or how long they worked.

“The fire department is authorized to deploy whatever emergency resources are necessary, and those costs will be covered — as they are every year,” Szabo said.

Bass, appearing at the news conference earlier this week, echoed that message, saying the reductions at the fire department “did not impact what we’ve been going through the last few days.”

Freddy Escobar, president of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112, said he does not fault Bass over her handling of fire department spending. At the same time, he said, “the fire chief does not have the money to staff the resources that are needed” to address the city’s public safety needs.

“Unfortunately, everything was lined up to have a disaster,” Escobar said in an interview. “And it occurred with winds that were 80, 85 miles per hour.”

[Massacreman]

Here's what they won't tell you:

Most of the people whose homes were destroyed will become displaced and probably will have to leave California.

Why?

Let me explain.

California policies have led to insurance companies to pull out, meanwhile the court systems tie up the former homeowners long enough to drain any savings they'd have if they managed to even get insurance. This means they'll settle for pennies on the dollar, losing hundreds of thousands if they owned the property.

But what if they do actually win the court fight? They'll never be able to build a new home on the property. California is notorious for ridiculous hoops for building permits. Getting proper permitting to rebuild a structure alone could take over a year. That's a whole year with no home, probably renting and draining your bank account the whole time you're waiting, if you can even find a home to rent.

This will lead to many people fleeing to less costly areas, probably areas that are purple politically, thus turning them blue while California stays the same way regardless of population loss.

And what about the empty land plot? Well, assuming the individual doesn't want to bother clearing it (which costs money and takes, you guessed it, permits) They'll sell it for, you guessed it, pennies on the dollar.

To who? Your friendly neighborhood superconglomerate like Blackrock, Blackstone, or some rich billionaires like the ones whose underhanded deals caused the water crisis the firefighters are facing there.

I honestly think the politicians didn't know and didn't care about what was going on in the background as they signed all the bills that were bought and paid for by those same massive companies, but it was a series of little things that led to this.

And watch, as soon as the properties are purchased by large companies and/or billionaires, those same entities that fought and bought the politicians to get California to the point where this was an inevitability will fight and buy other politicians to undo those same regulations so it doesn't happen again to their new properties.

Ah, good old crony capitalism at play, where the richest buy their way into politicians doing whatever they want so that eventually they can get even richer!

[IvorySmith]

Bet the new homeless are feeling really silly right about now for making vagrancy a crime.

[kellyhound]

riding around..