Rain

 We finally got our first real storm of the winter. Nothing torrential but a good steady rain stretched out over a couple of days. The snow level dropped down to 3,000 feet which covers a little bit of the city and a significant chunk of the county. To the east, some of the mountains got more than a foot. To the North, Interstate 5 is closed due to snow at the Grapevine.

At this point, I am supposed to focus on the negative, pointing out the dangers of landslides, flash floods, toxic ash, wet or icy roads, and making sure that everyone knows that this doesn't come anywhere near to catching us up for the "rainy" season. All of this is true, but this compulsion to spin what is overall very good news as bad is neither healthy nor informative.

First off, beyond the fact that we desperately need the rain, this gives us all some breathing room before the next wildfire. Even after Eaton, Palisades, and Hughes were mostly contained, we were still in a very dangerous position. The Santa Anas were still blowing and we were one bad wind away from seeing recent events repeat themselves in places like La Cañada Flintridge or the Hollywood Hills.

Given the terrain and the seasonality of the weather, the people who lived here have always had to deal with floods and landslides going back thousands of years. The altitude of the city of Los Angeles ranges from zero to over 5,000 feet. In the county, it's more than 10,000. All that water rushing to the ocean will do some damage. Fortunately, the fire departments of Southern California have some of the best rescue units in the world and most people around here understand the risks.

While looking on the bright side, we should also note that unlike some previous years, this dry spell is limited to our part of the state. Northern California is having a pretty good year. This takes some of the pressure off of the state's firefighting resources.

This was a good weekend.

Getting your takes on California from publications with "New York" in their name may not be the smartest play

The following comment is from David Wallace-Wells. It is part of a conversation he had with Jared Diamond in 2019 published in New York magazine. If anything is more relevant now than it was then.

I’m a native New Yorker and lived my whole life in this environment on the East Coast. And when I see images of those wildfires and when I hear stories of people I know or people I meet, and the fact that they’ve evacuated, the fact that no matter where you are in Southern California, also in parts of Central California and Northern California, you have an evacuation plan in mind. I just don’t understand how you guys can live like that. It must begin to impose some kind of psychic cost.

Diamond does a reasonably good job parrying the silliness, pointing out that it was the psychic costs of dealing with New England blizzards that convinced him to move to Southern California, but he is far too polite to come out and say just how wrong Wallace-Wells gets this.

Though the situation is very different when it comes to earthquakes, the majority of Angelenos do not have and do not need any kind of wildfire evacuation plan. There are obviously exceptions. If you live somewhere like Topanga or have a house in the Hollywood Hills, you very much do need to know in advance what your options are for getting out of harm's way. If you live in or near the foothills, it's a good idea. But most of us do not live in or even adjacent to wildland-urban interfaces. We do need to have plans in place for how to deal with the possibility of heavy smoke or power outages, and when we travel in the state, it's a good idea to check on fire conditions, particularly in the national forests. This is a huge problem and no one in the state or in any mountainous regions of the West can entirely avoid its impact, but most of us are under no real danger of losing our house to a wildfire.

Too much of the national narrative about LA and California in general either originates with or is interpreted by people with no real knowledge of the place. This is always a bad way to approach reporting about an area, but when you're talking about something as big, varied, and complex as this, rampant misinformation is as inevitable as forest fires.

This isn't the first time we've had an issue with Wallace-Wells' reporting.

NYT's cigarettes and cocaine reporting on the LA fires

Here's how we defined a cigarettes and cocaine argument back in 2020:

The basic form goes something like this:

    Our household spending is out of control.

    Between your cigarettes and my cocaine habit, we're spending hundreds of dollars a week.

    You definitely need to cut back on your cigarettes.

The key to the approach is to take two things, related but of wildly different magnitudes, and conveniently aggregate then disaggregate them to reach the desired conclusion.

For years (post Reagan and pre-Obamacare), pundits and politicians pushing for entitlement reform relied largely, perhaps primarily on C and C arguments. Dire projections for the combined finances of Social Security and Medicare were presented to justify severe and immediate cuts in Social Security. Of course, the horrifying shortfalls were coming from the Medicare side of the ledger, but that pea was inevitably lost among the shells.

 

 The generalized form of the argument goes like this:

1. Claim about A, usually negative (A is dangerous/costly/unsustainable);

2. Supporting evidence about A and B where B is the source of most of the problems (more expensive, causing more deaths, trending in a worse direction, etc.);

3. More arguments against A.

While the classic C&C example is Social Security and Medicare, another reliable source is LA city and LA county. Countless articles and op-eds about the failings of the city and its government will throw in county-wide statistics to make their case. (Keep in mind less than half Angelenos live in the city).

The NYT is a longtime offender on this front and their coverage of the recent fires does not disappoint.

From Los Angeles Fire Chief Faces Calls for Resignation

Now, as Los Angeles reels under an extended onslaught of wind-driven wildfire, its fire chief is being buffeted by challenges in and outside her ranks, tension with City Hall and questions about her department’s preparedness. The fires, which are still unfolding on the city’s west side and in the community of Altadena outside the city, have so far leveled nearly 40,000 acres and claimed at least 27 lives.

Pay close attention to that number of fatalities. 

Southern California is looking at an extraordinary dry spell with almost no precipitation for eight or so months, well into what is supposed to be the rainy season. Under these conditions, the huge windstorm of a couple of weeks ago was unsurprisingly followed by a number of fires, two of which became major, Eaton and Palisades. Eaton was located in an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County north of Pasadena, making it the responsibility of the county government. The Eaton Fire was significantly more deadly with a toll of 17 out now 28 deaths. 

Interestingly, there has been virtually no criticism of the county fire chief, certainly not a wave of calls for his dismissal. 

There do appear to have been some instances where the response to the fires in the city was mishandled, but as we have said before, the blame for these disasters lies almost entirely in decisions made outside of the mayor's office. The current narrative is a costly distraction, driven by regional ignorance, political agendas (Murdoch organizations have been pushing it heavily), and a juvenile fascination with the travails of wealthy celebrities.

Given recent history, the New York Times meekly going along with Fox News/NY Post spin is hardly out of character and, of course, identifying with the rich and powerful is practically in the paper's DNA.

Birthright citizenship

This is Joseph

There was a recent executive order seeking to limit some classes of birthright citizenship going forward. It seems likely that existing legislation and the fourteenth amendment of the constitution will override this executive order, as it seems quite clear that neither source can be overruled by an executive order. 

The conceit at the the heart of this move: 

Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States:  (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

Obviously, these people are subject to the jurisdiction (i.e., laws) of the United States. The attempt to stretch definitions to get around traditional definitions of jurisdiction are strange. 

Now, I want to make one more argument for why the current law is actually a good idea. It prevents (in a large and complicated country) needing to go back any further than the birth of a person to determine if they are citizens. The documentation of birth via a certificate of live birth ends the discussion. Because, otherwise, this runs the risk of creating a chain of uncertainty. Because the legal status of a person's parents (information that you can well imagine people not having access to) is germane to the determination of citizenship. 

Now because this EO is only forward looking, this problem will creep up slowly. But, for example, how do you know if your great grand parents had at least one citizen? Quick question -- what was your great grandfather's name? How certain are you of their immigration status? As it stands, this questioning ends the second somebody in a family is born in the United States. 

This also cures a second problem. What about records? How certain are we that the records of other people are correct? Remember, based on this EO being born in the US (and having a US certificate of live birth) is not enough and now you need to know your parents status at the time of your birth (and their parents, at the time of their birth, and really once you hit the 1920's things are just very different). 

The DACA group was already a tough call (illegally brought into the country as minors) but this doesn't even begin to hint at the problem of stateless people you can get with this EO.

The good news is that it is likely going nowhere, legally speaking, as the law is pretty well settled here and the new problems are not worth the gains. 

Tinder Bundles

From a commemoritve booklet produced for the community’s 125th birthday, Nov. 3, 2012.

Altadena is an unincorporated community of Los Angeles County, next to and within the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. It is bounded on three sides by wilderness (the Arroyo Seco, Angeles National Forest, and Eaton Canyon), and on the south by the city of Pasadena. Throughout its history and up until today, as Altadena celebrates its 125th year, this distinct geography has nurtured an independent spirit and given the community a close-to-nature feel. Citizens here have consistently resisted annexation to Pasadena (although that city has taken 46 “bites” of it over the years, seeking tax revenues), and voted down incorporating as a city. Altadenans prefer a looser political structure that still manages to foster an unmistakable identity.

One essential aspect of the California wildfire story which almost no one from back East gets right and a disturbing number of local journalists fail to convey is the tremendous range in risk level from town to town and neighborhood to neighborhood. While smoke is a serious problem for almost all of the area, danger from fire itself is largely limited to wildland urban interfaces. Even within WUIs, the threat varies greatly.

If you look up places like Paradise, Pacific Palisades, and Altadena, you will see that they were all tinder bundles, literally disasters waiting to happen. In some cases not waiting all that patiently. 10 years before the deadly Camp fire, residents of Paradise experienced two major evacuations from two different fires a month apart.

In the aftermath of the Camp fire, NPR did an excellent story on the "next Paradise," which discussed a number of towns as or more vulnerable than that town had been before the conflagration. (In general, NPR has one of the better track records when it comes to Western wildfires.)  There will be more Altadenas, perhaps very soon, but any discussion of how to address this crisis will have to be more accurate and nuanced than most of what we've been seeing.

We're just going to have to ride this one out.

At this point we have to accept that we are in for a rough stretch. This doesn't mean we should give up, quite the opposite. This is the time to get serious about long-term planning and redouble our commitment to setting things right, but other than trying to minimize the damage, we have to accept that in the short term things are going to get ugly.

I'm talking, of course, about the fires in Southern California (what did you think I was talking about?). There is no serious rain in the forecast at least until early February. The tinder that fills our forests will only grow drier over the next couple of weeks while we continue to see warnings of Santa Anas. If we get through this winter without another major fire, it will be more luck than we deserve.

Perhaps the most maddening aspect of all of this is the missed opportunity. We just came off of two wet years. We had plenty of opportunities for aggressive controlled burns that could have been executed with minimal risk and would have significantly reduced the danger we now face. Now, any fire would be courting disaster.

The press has been less than worthless with institutions like the New York Times going all starry eyed and maudlin about the misfortunes of the rich and famous while badly misrepresenting the story, ignoring the people who actually lost everything (if you're spending more time on Pacific Palisades than on Altadena, you're part of the problem) and letting the real culprits off without even a harsh word.

Things are better in the northern part of the state where they have seen some pretty good rains this winter. If they are smart and responsible, the people in charge will be taking advantage of these conditions to set some good fires to clear out some of the fuel while they still have the opportunity.

Fire and Ice

Things remain extremely dry here in Southern California with no snow or rain in the forecast for the rest of the month. Hopefully, we'll see more precipitation and cooler temperatures soon.If not, last week could just be the first wave. Elsewhere in the West, potentially even more dangerous conditions are in the forecast.

The arctic air that chilled Colorado all weekend continued Monday, bringing heavy snow and strong winds with it.

The National Weather Service issued a wind chill warning for the central mountains, southern Colorado, the Front Range and the Eastern Plains Monday, saying wind speeds above 50 mph could lead to temperatures of at least 20 below zero. The warning was in effect until Tuesday.

 

Which got me thinking about André de Toth's sadly under-recognized Day of the Outlaw featuring Robert Ryan and Burl Ives at the top of their games, with strong support by Tina Louise (who really should be remembered for more than that TV show). Unforgettable last half hour.

It's available free with ads from Pluto.

At least they didn't say it was more important than 9/11 or the Civil Rights Movement

I talked yesterday about how most of LA was getting back to normal but how the demographics of the fires (or more accurately, of one of the fires) fed the perception of the whole town lying in smouldering ruins.

The second piece of information you need in order to understand how this story has been reported is that one of the two major fires, the Palisades Fire seemed to target the richest and most famous people in Southern California. This is not entirely a coincidence. Wealthy celebrities are attracted to the spectacular views and relative isolation found in the Santa Monica Mountains. People like Ben Affleck pay a considerable premium to live in these beautiful tinder bundles. The median home price for Pacific Palisades is somewhere around $4 million and the outliers raise the mean considerably.

Many, perhaps even most of the Hollywood's elites were either in or adjacent to the Palisades Fire. These people tend to take themselves and their problems very seriously in the best of times. You can imagine how they react to an actual conflagration.

 [Emphasis added]

How the 2025 Oscars Could Save Los Angeles (and Themselves) by Steven Zeitchik

How in the midst of the wildfires‘ unfathomable tragedies, [awards shows] could heal our soul like Barbra Streisand at the Emmys after Sept. 11, or unify our disparateness like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s posthumous win did at the Grammys in 1971, or even channel our rage like Michael Moore at the Oscars at the start of the 2003 Iraq War.

A well-designed Academy Awards on March 2, with some tasteful tributes from victims and a no doubt powerful acceptance speech or two, would be exactly what Los Angeles and the country need — the national Thanksgiving dinner that, at their best, awards shows can manage to be.  

...

The Academy has just said that the Oscars will continue as planned but without some of the run-up glitz, like the Nominees Luncheon (and amid several Academy governors losing their homes in the fires). It’s clear they’re still figuring out the shape and tone of this year’s show. But if they were simply to go forward with the usual list of presenters and acceptances under more somber lights and some time roped off for a tribute, it would feel … not exactly tone-deaf, but certainly like a missed opportunity.

 Brief side note. The combined death toll of the widely covered Palisades Fire and the far deadlier Eaton Fire (not a lot of movie stars in Altadena) is currently 25. In 2018, 86 people died in the Camp Fire. As far as I can tell, no one at the Academy at the time mentioned the need for a national day of healing.

Mundane Monday

I had lunch outside on Monday. Airnow.gov said that the air quality was good so I took the opportunity to enjoy the sunshine and walk down to a neighborhood restaurant not far from my place with a nice patio facing the sidewalk. It was a beautiful, chilly day. Things felt back to normal.

People I encounter are still talking about the fires, of course. They compare notes on the damage wrought by the windstorm and what the air quality was like in the days after, conversations of people who shared and interesting adventure, the sort you hear after a typical Los Angeles earthquake. There is a small amount of anxiety about the next fire – – conditions in Southern California remain very dangerous – – but no sense of trauma, certainly nothing like what the coverage would suggest.

There are two essential pieces of context absent from the stories that have been dominating the news. The first is the sheer scale of this place. Los Angeles County (and, as is usually the case, county is the appropriate unit here) has over 10 million people and covers over 4000 square miles. A considerable portion of that is forested. For those living next to those wooded areas, or worse yet nestled in them like Pacific Palisades or La Cañada Flintridge, these fires can present a serious and immediate danger and there have been some real tragedies, but for the vast majority of us the impact of the past few days has been limited to wind damage and smoke.

The second piece of information you need in order to understand how this story has been reported is that one of the two major fires, the Palisades Fire seemed to target the richest and most famous people in Southern California. This is not entirely a coincidence. Wealthy celebrities are attracted to the spectacular views and relative isolation found in the Santa Monica Mountains. People like Ben Affleck pay a considerable premium to live in these beautiful tinder bundles. The median home price for Pacific Palisades is somewhere around $4 million and the outliers raise the mean considerably.

Journalists love talking about the travails of the rich and famous; they love showing pictures of desolate wreckage and burned out buildings. The past week has given them lots of the sort of things they look for and has made for some very happy editors, but the picture that the rest of the country has gotten has been wildly inaccurate.

Tuesday afternoon a week ago I watched heavy metal lawn furniture get picked up and thrown in a pool. That night the power went out, perhaps due to the huge tree that came down half a block from my apartment, the trunk of which I had to climb over to get to the one isolated restaurant that still had the lights on. (I have no idea how they still had power. Everything else was dark for miles.) For about four days after that the air had that distinctive orange-brown-purple bruised color. Other than some drives to the store, I stayed inside my apartment, occasionally checking to make sure that nothing unlikely had happened with the evacuation zones.

It was an interesting week, representative of the recent experiences of most Angelenos, but fallen trees and smoky air are not the sort of footage that goes national, which is why I also spent the week fielding calls from friends and family seeing how I was doing.

I'm fine. It is still too dry, still too windy, and the next fire might be closer, but for the moment I am doing just fine.

AT&T Archives - The Viewtron System and Sceptre Videotex Terminal (1983)

Seriously, though, "when there's a real demand for specific functionality, it will express itself as soon as (and sometimes even before) the technology is viable." https://t.co/ju8MrPG88c

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) April 21, 2024

I have a longtime fascination with technological prototypes, early attempts and failed alternatives, but I'll admit this one was new to me.

Viewtron was an online service offered by Knight-Ridder and AT&T from 1983 to 1986. Patterned after the British Post Office's Prestel system,^[1] it started as a videotex service requiring users to have a special terminal, the AT&T Sceptre. As home computers became important in the marketplace, the development focus shifted to IBM, Apple, Commodore and other personal computers.^[2]

Viewtron differed from contemporary services like CompuServe and The Source by emphasizing news from The Miami Herald and Associated Press and e-commerce services from JCPenney and other merchants over computer-oriented services such as file downloads or online chat. Intended to be "the McDonald's of videotex," Viewtron was specifically targeted toward users who would be apprehensive about using a computer.

You'll see a lot of finger pointing in the coverage of the fires but almost no real coverage of the mistakes that got us here.

I apologize for the all the reposts, but this has gotten very relevant.

Monday, December 28, 2020

The handling of the Western mega-fires is another reminder we live in a solution-phobic society

We've had some nice showers recently. We're supposed to get more tomorrow (Monday) with winter storm warnings promising snow in the mountains. It is, of course, welcome. The West always needs water and we've had a fairly dry fall which in recent years has meant fire season threatened to stretch into the winter.

But while the rains are bringing a respite from the mega-fire, they are also a tragically wasted opportunity. Despite a virtually absolute scientific consensus as to the steps we desperately need to be taking, almost nothing is being done and very few people seem to care.

Writing for the LA Times, Bettina Boxall has an excellent account of the depressing details.

When COVID-19 blew a hole in California’s spending plans last spring, one of the things state budget-cutters took an axe to was wildfire prevention.

A $100-million pilot project to outfit older homes with fire-resistant materials was dropped. Another $165 million earmarked for community protection and wildland fuel-reduction fell to less than $10 million.

A few months later, the August siege of dry lightning turned 2020 into a record-shattering wildfire year. The state’s emergency firefighting costs are expected to hit $1.3 billion, pushing the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s total spending this fiscal year to more than $3 billion.

The numbers highlight the enormous chasm between what state and federal agencies spend on firefighting and what they spend on reducing California’s wildfire hazard — a persistent gap that critics say ensures a self-perpetuating cycle of destruction.

 ...

Fire scientists have long called for a dramatic increase in the use of prescribed fire — that is, controlled burns that trained crews deliberately set in forests and grasslands during mild weather conditions.

They have urged federal agencies to thin more overgrown stands of young trees in the mid-elevation Sierra Nevada and let nature do some housekeeping with well-behaved lightning fires in the backcountry.

They point to the dire need to retrofit older homes to guard against the blizzard of embers that set neighborhoods ablaze in the most destructive, wind-driven fires.

Yet year after year, state and federal funding for such work remains a pittance compared to the billions of dollars spent on firefighting. 

...

[Jessica Morse, deputy secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, which oversees Cal Fire] cited an August agreement between the state and the U.S. Forest Service in which they each committed to annually treating 500,000 acres [a fraction of what researchers say we need to be doing. -- MP] of California forest and rangelands by 2025 with a variety of fuel-reduction practices, including prescribed fire, thinning overgrown woodlands, timber harvest and grazing.

Yet this memorandum of understanding is non-binding and includes neither money nor staffing.

 

"if people in the paths of these fires is one of, perhaps the major obstacle to the solution, then we need to have a serious debate about where we encourage (or even allow) new housing and development."

 

5 dead as Eaton fire explodes to 10,600 acres — hundreds of structures destroyed or damaged

Evacuations ordered for all of La Canada Flintridge as blaze burns.

 Before we get to the repost, here's a relevant excerpt from another post we did around the same time (emphasis added):

The three areas that have long been in heavy rotation with the California YIMBYs are, in order, San Francisco, Santa Monica and Venice Beach. Trailing the pack, the NYT has singled out La Cañada Flintridge and Matt Yglesias did a post on Beverly Hills. I'm not cherry-picking here, at least not consciously. With the possible exception of some gentrification battles in majority-minority neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, these are all the places that come to mind.

...

While the fixation on San Francisco is odd, the focus on Santa Monica and Venice is simply bizarre. Tiny (covering combined about twelve of LA County’s four thousand square miles), out-of-the-way, cut off by ocean to the west and mountains to the north. Scoring miserably on places readily accessible by public transit (the E line is terrible though proposed upgrades may improve this somewhat). A big chunk of SM is designated a wildland-urban interface. Venice, while safe from fires, is one of the few parts of LA low-lying enough to be threatened by rising sea levels. 

La Cañada Flintridge, in addition to being tiny and isolated, is almost uniquely menaced by megafires with wild-land on both north and south.

Monday, August 23, 2021

It's not just we're going to have more fires; it's that we need more fires.

There is a tendency to treat global warming and Western megafires as one thing when they are two related but distinct crises requiring,  in a sense, opposite approaches. With the climate crisis, we need to do what it takes to reverse the trends toward higher temperatures and ocean acidification. In the West, we actually need more but better fires.  

As Elizabeth Weil explains in her Pulitzer-worthy Propublica piece (which we discussed earlier  here). [emphasis added]

Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

...

[Deputy fire chief of Yosemite National Park Mike] Beasley earned what he called his “red card,” or wildland firefighter qualification, in 1984. To him, California, today, resembles a rookie pyro Armageddon, its scorched battlefields studded with soldiers wielding fancy tools, executing foolhardy strategy. “Put the wet stuff on the red stuff,” Beasley summed up his assessment of the plan of attack by Cal Fire, the state’s behemoth “emergency response and resource protection” agency. Instead, Beasley believes, fire professionals should be considering ecology and picking their fights: letting fires that pose little risk burn through the stockpiles of fuels. Yet that’s not the mission. “They put fires out, full stop, end of story,” Beasley said of Cal Fire. “They like to keep it clean that way.”

Why is it so difficult to do the smart thing? People get in the way. From Marketplace.

Molly Wood: You spoke with all these experts who have been advocating for good fire for prescribed burns for decades. And nobody disagrees, right? You found that there is no scientific disagreement that this is the way to prevent megafires. So how come it never happens?

Elizabeth Weil: You know, that’s a really good question. I talked to a lot of scientists who have been talking about this, as you said, literally, for decades, and it’s been really painful to watch the West burn. It hasn’t been happening because people don’t like smoke. It hasn’t been happening, because of very well-intended environmental regulations like the Clean Air Act that make it harder to put particulate matter in the air from man-made causes. It hasn’t happened because of where we live. You don’t want to burn down people’s houses, obviously.

From this follows some equally obvious conclusions. If wildfires are both unavoidable and a natural part of the life-cycle of forests, if trying to suppress them only delays and compounds the problem and if people in the paths of these fires is one of, perhaps the major obstacle to the solution, then we need to have a serious debate about where we encourage (or even allow) new housing and development.

I don't want to get sidetracked by discussions about fire-adapted communities and wildland–urban interfaces. These are important topics but not the conversation stoppers people seem to think they are. The first is roughly equivalent to social distancing, smart preventative steps but hardly absolute protection. The second brings up images of of isolated mountain villages suggesting developed areas don't need to worry about this sort of thing. The reality of WUIs is more U than you might expect. 

"The US Forest Service defines the wildland-urban interface qualitatively as a place where 'humans and their development meet or intermix with wildland fuel.' Communities that are within 0.5 miles (0.80 km) of the zone are included."

Here's a shot of L.A.

Lots of yellow here, particularly in areas noted for heated NIMBY/YIMBY debates, such as a big chunk of Santa Monica...

And pretty much all of La Cañada Flintridge.

 Western megafires are an incredibly complex topic, but there are a couple of simple but important points we can make here.

1. We need more good fire, either through controlled burns or by simply choosing not to fight certain wildfires.

2. The more people who live in an area, the more difficult it is to pull the trigger on those good fires.

Housing YIMBYs/fire NIMBYs and the Not-Enough-Fire Paradox

When you get past the fundamentally dishonest framing of build vs. don't build, and focus on the real question of where to build, you immediately run into the hard fact that we need to get our forests back in equilibrium and that can only happen with more fires. This means we can have less development in these areas and/or be more willing to ignore the pleas of homeowners when there houses are threatened (something especially difficult in wealthy enclaves like Pacific Palisades). .

We are in this crisis in large part because of the No Fire In My Backyard crowd and the NYT YIMBYs are literally adding fuel to these fires.

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

If we need to burn off an area the size of Maine, the Mill Valleys are expendable

 

A bit more background on one of reasons the New York Times housing article we've been discussing made me so angry (though in fairness, it is actually a significant improvement over what we've been seeing from the NYT on the subject).

Western mega-fires fall into that distressingly familiar category of dire crises with obvious solutions that people have alarmingly little interest in fixing. There is no real disagreement over what needs to be done (there hasn't been for decades), but the magnitude is stunning. [emphasis added]

Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns [a.k.a. controlled burns -- MP] and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

...

[Deputy fire chief of Yosemite National Park Mike] Beasley earned what he called his “red card,” or wildland firefighter qualification, in 1984. To him, California, today, resembles a rookie pyro Armageddon, its scorched battlefields studded with soldiers wielding fancy tools, executing foolhardy strategy. “Put the wet stuff on the red stuff,” Beasley summed up his assessment of the plan of attack by Cal Fire, the state’s behemoth “emergency response and resource protection” agency. Instead, Beasley believes, fire professionals should be considering ecology and picking their fights: letting fires that pose little risk burn through the stockpiles of fuels. Yet that’s not the mission. “They put fires out, full stop, end of story,” Beasley said of Cal Fire. “They like to keep it clean that way.”

Why is it so difficult to do the smart thing? People get in the way. From Marketplace.

Molly Wood: You spoke with all these experts who have been advocating for good fire for prescribed burns for decades. And nobody disagrees, right? You found that there is no scientific disagreement that this is the way to prevent megafires. So how come it never happens?

Elizabeth Weil: You know, that’s a really good question. I talked to a lot of scientists who have been talking about this, as you said, literally, for decades, and it’s been really painful to watch the West burn. It hasn’t been happening because people don’t like smoke. It hasn’t been happening, because of very well-intended environmental regulations like the Clean Air Act that make it harder to put particulate matter in the air from man-made causes. It hasn’t happened because of where we live. You don’t want to burn down people’s houses, obviously.

 

For better than a hundred years, we’ve been setting too few fires and putting out too many. It wasn’t always like this. The indigenous tribes mastered fire as a forest management tool and used it extensively until the European settlers criminalized the practice, thus setting us up for the disaster facing us today.

The result has been a tinder bundle the size of Maine. Clearing it out is California’s second most serious environmental challenge (after global warming) and is the most urgent problem we face, period. Solving it requires a level of focus and political will that our current governor simply does not have (particularly compared to his predecessor). It’s up to the rest of us to keep this top of mind.

There are huge externalities to these projects, almost none of which can be easily addressed though a conventional regulatory framework. I would need to reach out to experts to be sure, but I doubt environmental impact laws even apply here since we aren’t worried about the direct damage the developments cause to the forests; we’re worried about the damage we’ll cause to the forests trying to protect those developments.

Every dwelling an a forest-adjacent wildland urban interface has got to be treated as, to some degree, expendable, or at the very least, the people who live there need to accept that they are on their own. When frequent controlled burns fill their neighborhoods with smoke, they shouldn't be able to file complaints. When those fires become uncontrolled (as they sometimes inevitably do), they should not have the option of suing.

It would be different if these upscale forested developments had any real possibility of having a substantial impact on the housing crisis, but we're talking about badly situated and trivially small pieces of land in the third largest state in the country. They arguably cause more problems than they solve and the disproportionate focus on them distracts us from a situation where we cannot afford distraction.

An unquiet night

Fires tear through Pacific Palisades, Altadena, Pasadena and Sylmar; gusts of up to 99 mph reported

For those of you back east, it's important to keep in mind the scale of this place. As far as I know, the fires are in the county but not the city, and the county of LA covers around three million acres, much of it forested. Three thousand acres on fire is a big deal, but we're talking about about a percent here and most of it lightly populated. It could get worse (things have been very dry around here and this windstorm has been fierce),  but for the vast majority of us, the fires are something we see on TV, smell in the air, and perhaps spot as a faint glow in the distance. 

The Santa Anas, on the other hand, have been unavoidable. The National weather service used the phrase “life-threatening and destructive” to describe the predicted storm and it has lived up to the hype. I'm sitting in an apartment lit only by the screen of my laptop. The blackout covers a major part of the county and has been going on for hours with no assurance of power by daybreak. 

A stretch of the 101 is being shut down along with countless smaller roads. Within a block of my place two massive trees came down, one demolishing a car parked on the other side of the street and sheering off the concrete base of a street light. No one was hurt but the road and both sidewalks are blocked and it will be sometime tomorrow when the crews get to it.

So far, I haven't heard of any casualties. There will be a few but hopefully the number will remain small. 

The wind finally seems to be settling and I should probably get to bed.

"and barely concealed hostility toward orthogonality"

 [This is one of those topics I keep meaning to get back to then go five years without mentioning.]

Thursday, January 23, 2020

Rhetorical Orthogonality

I'm about to do one of those things that annoys the hell out of me when other people do it, namely taking a well-defined technical concept and trying to generalize it in order to make some big sweeping statements. So I start with apologies, but I think this goes to the heart of many of the problems we've been seeing with journalism and the public discourse (and also explains much of the difficulty that a lot of us run into when we tried to address those problems).

If we think of orthogonal data in the broad sense as something that brings in new information, it gives us a useful way of thinking about the discussion process. I'm thinking in a practical, not a theoretical sense here. Obviously a mathematical theorem does not technically bring any new information into a system, but in practical terms, it can certainly increase our knowledge. By the same token, a new argument may simply present generally known facts in a new light, but it can still increase our understanding. (You might argue at this point that I'm conflating knowledge and understanding. You'd probably be right, but, in this context, I think it's a distinction without a difference.)

My hypothesis here is that (putting aside literary considerations for the moment), good journalism should be judged mainly on the criteria of accuracy and orthogonality, with the second being, if anything, more important than the first. Instead, we often see indifference to accuracy and barely concealed hostility toward orthogonality. We do see a great deal of lip service toward diversity of opinion, but the majority of that "diversity" is distinctly non-orthogonal, falling on the same axes of the previous arguments, just going the opposite direction.

For example, imagine a disgruntled employee locked in an office with a gun. "He's willing to shoot."/"He's not willing to shoot" are nonorthogonal statements even though they contradict each other. By comparison, "he doesn't have any bullets" would be orthogonal. I'd put most of the discussion about liberal bias in the mainstream media squarely in the nonorthogonal category, along with every single column written by Bret Stephens for the New York Times.

Nonorthogonal debate has become the default mode for most journalists. What's more, they actually feel good about themselves for doing it. Whenever you have an expert say "is," you are absolutely required to find another who will say "is not." This practice has deservedly been mocked in cases where one of the arguments is far more convincing than the other (as with global warming), but even when there's some kind of rough symmetry between the positions, it is still a dangerously constrained and unproductive way of discussing a question.