Been away from this site for a while—I don’t do social media—but I look in here sometimes.
I’m a Colorado firefighter, and I retired 3 yrs ago from full-time saw work doing “fire mitigation,” removing fuel around homes to prep them for wildland fire. Others in my rural department deploy on fires all over the west. All this to say that we study fire behavior in this part of the country, study it and understand it quite well.
Slowp is correct, there’s no way to prevent or stop the kind of fires burning in LA. Only way that could happen is if every structure were concrete with a steel roof and every last bit of vegetation had been scraped from the ground in advance. When embers are driven by 80 mph winds, there’s no hope of doing anything better than getting residents out of the way.
The LA fires are being compared to the Marshall Fire that we had here in Boulder County, Dec. 30, 2021—look it up. Late morning there was a small shed on fire—pics & video from the highway. But 100 mph winds pushed embers so that fire whipped through several towns. Within about 12 hrs 1,000 structures were burned to the ground including a multi-story hotel. The miracle was that only two people died in that one.
You cannot put firefighters in front of such conflagration. Water pumped from several engines is great when you’re fighting one building or two on fire. But when each of those blazes is igniting every neighboring structure and sending an ember blizzard (the actual term we use, because it’s accurate) to every flammable thing within a mile . . . Besides propelling embers, the wind also preheats everything in its path, preparing it for ready ignition.
It’s pretty sad that this thing is being politicized. There’s nothing political about fire driven by 80 mph winds in dry country.
OT
