news

Happy to help! And sure, if you can call this an insight I'll share it.

My biggest takeaway from this incident, so far, has been that since southern California is hotter, drier, and windier than any time in living memory - undeniably because of human-made climate change - this was inevitable. And once this round is over, it will happen again, and probably soon.

Local authorities need to have the guts to attack this problem head on before then. Climate change is here to stay, so while global efforts to mitigate the effects must switch into high gear yesterday, locally they need to start planning now for at least a 3-tiered approach to the problem.

First, engineer away as much of the risk as possible. This means burying every power line they can. Those that must remain above ground should be under constant upkeep to prevent spark-producing events and the forest from growing close to the lines themselves. Sure campfires and other individual actions (like setting off fireworks) can also cause fires, but the state already pushes hard to keep those under control and can easily ramp up educational campaigns and enforcement.

Second, more practices that effectively reduce the abundance of tinder-like fuel sources (in this case, dry brush) need to be implemented. Indigenous people from the region (Chumash and Tong-va tribes, for instance) have a long history of successful forest management and those practices should be studied and used to enhance what is currently being done (the indigenous tribes should be given a leadership role in this, if they want it, IMO).

Finally, it's not that easy (as far as I know) to make sure buildings and infrastructure are both fire- and earthquake-resistant in the region. And even if it is straightforward, it's not practical to retrofit every structure for fire on the scale needed, much like retrofitting for earthquakes has been a thing for 50 years and is still not complete. So what is to be done in the near term? Things like having industrial scale, automated fire suppression systems installed to douse homes and other infrastructure on the edge of communities near fire-prone areas could buy valuable time for firefighters and residents. Creating a low-fuel buffer zone along those edges and controlling land use in it could be a valuable addition to that approach.

But yeah, I am pessimistic that any large-scale, coordinated project like I just described would ever make it through our dysfunctional government processes intact. The track record is abysmal (see high speed rail and the unhoused crisis, for example). It'll probably end up being a patchwork of half- and quarter-measures implemented here and there, with poorer communities getting no preventative support whatsoever. I'd love to be proven wrong.