In my head, this feels like Hurricane Katrina - namely the way it keeps unfolding over many days, and will change a city forever.
I found Kevin Drum's article about the history of international burns informative: https://jabberwocking.com/why-dont-we-do-more-prescribed-burning-an-explainer/
The fires and big and scary.
But it is easy to blow them out of proportion. The number of structures that have burned was, as of yesterday morning, about 12,000. As I understand it, "structures" includes garages, pool houses, gas stations, etc., not just houses. For context, there are about 3.5m households in LA County. So even if each structure was a house, this is about 0.3% of homes in the county. Rebuilding will take time, and for a couple of years the market for semi-secluded mansions on the Westside will be tight. But it is eminently doable.
How does this compare in scope to, say, Katrina?
Wiki has Katrina killing up to 1800 people, obviously much worse than the fires and doing $125 billion in damage - equivalent to $202 billion today, so same rough size.
80% of New Orleans was flooded and they ordered the mandatory evacuation of the entire city - obviously nothing close to that has happened to LA.
From 2018 and 2007 respectively
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/08/16/wildfires-california-burning/
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n22/mike-davis/california-burns
5/6: Oh my god. I forgot that that many people died.
But in terms of square footage, is 80% of N.O. similar to this same acreage? How do the number of homes compare?
9.1: We might as well just wrap the the thread there.
In SoCal specifically (though the East Bay is similar) one of the big problems is just that the hills and canyons shouldn't have residential development. Yes there's lots of things that are making the situation worse (climate change, water, etc.), but at the end of the day, hills and canyons in SoCal are going to catch fire reasonably often. People should live in the flat parts. [Insert saiselgY infill rant here.]
Land area comparisons are misleading because Pacific Palisades is 23 sq. mi. (land area) and only 23k people, so about 1.6 people per acre.
Altadena is more: 43k people, 8.5 sq. mi., 8 people per acre.
Katrina also permanently reduced the population of New Orleans by about 30%.
Tho of course pre-Katrina New Orleans was about 500K, while LA county is something like 9.5 million, so there's a huge difference there.
Climate change seems mainly to be a magnifier of the current fires: rainy season is late, preceding months have been dry even by LA standards, winds stronger than historical average, etc.
I have no idea if the water involved in water rights and the implied distribution between personal, agricultural, industrial, vehicular, etc. has any practical bearing on the water needed to fight fires. I've read that these particular fires are absurdly difficult to fight because of the high winds blowing embers further.
Much/most of the area that has burned in LA has been undeveloped - in ordinary times, it looks like this:
https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/santa-monica-gm903100950-249085931
If you want to compare to Katrina, I think you'd want to compare to all of the areas of Louisiana and other states that were affected by the hurricanes, not just the area of N.O. proper.
Much/most of the area that has burned in LA has been undeveloped - in ordinary times, it looks like this:
https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/santa-monica-gm903100950-249085931
If you want to compare to Katrina, I think you'd want to compare to all of the areas of Louisiana and other states that were affected by the hurricanes, not just the area of N.O. proper.
one of the big problems is just that the hills and canyons shouldn't have residential development
This seems fair - just have the flat bits covered in houses and make the rugose bits into parks (with big firebreaks around them).
Would there be a case for making all of LA into one enormous Venice Beach by a huge canal-digging programme?
Much/most of the area that has burned in LA has been undeveloped - in ordinary times, it looks like this:
LA is quite a Third World city in its land use, in this respect: there are just huge tracts of land that aren't built on, they aren't parks as we'd think of parks, they're just... unused jungle.
I think they use it for filming westerns.
18: I can't remember the last time I saw something described as rugose that wasn't also squamous.
18 Yeah, they could divert the Columbia and the Fraser so they'd have enough water to fill the canals.
21: I am trying to break "rugose" (and indeed "squamous") out of its Lovecraftian confinement.
22: I was thinking use seawater, like the existing Venice Beach canals.
I would kind of rather die in a fire than bullshit about what California shoulda/coulda/woulda done to end up in a different place right now, but I can share a couple of de-paywalled articles about homeowner's insurance in the state:
from Jan 8, San Francisco Chronicle:
In 2019, the year after electricity lines sparked the deadly and destructive Camp and Dixie fires, Wara consulted with the California Senate as they worked to establish the California Wildfire Fund. The fund would be used to pay back residents who lose their homes and property in future utility-caused wildfires. As part of that work, legislators needed to know just how costly wildfires in the state could get.
So they used a wildfire catastrophe model to predict what the worst possible scenarios would be and came up with three options: a massive fire in the Moraga-Orinda area, the Los Altos Hills or in Pacific Palisades.
The estimated losses from a megafire burning every single home in Pacific Palisades were somewhere around $30 billion, Wara recalled, without factoring in post-pandemic inflation rates and inflated reconstruction costs.
How close a parallel the Palisades Fire is to that scenario remains to be seen. [...]
"We have been acting as if something like the current or the past approach to homeowners insurance was a sustainable strategy," Wara said. "That assumption may no longer be true, after yesterday and today. That will change how home ownership works in California, because insurance is fundamental to home ownership. This is no longer an insurance problem; this is a home ownership problem."
From Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, Jan 10. Less quotable content, but a familiar beat reporter.
Our insurance premium more or less doubled last year. There is more than enough time before the policy renews in April for this disaster to get priced in, as far as I know.
Yeah, these losses are just not treatable in an insurance framework, whether using market or non-market actors.
The political tendency seems to be to shut our eyes, cover our ears and go LA LA LA WE WILL KEEP THINGS EXACTLY THE SAME. Gov. Teeth issued an executive order to waive the California Environmental Quality Act... only as needed to rebuild exactly what was there before. The Insurance Commissioner has been working like crazy to get insurance companies to get back into the fire zone market, albeit at higher rates, and Consumer Watchdog calls him a sellout to the extent he doesn't make policies for every home no matter where it is.
My homeowners insurance went up like 50% last year, for no obvious reason, we don't really have natural disasters here as far as I can tell. Probably somehow a way to make up for losses elsewhere, but it kinda makes no sense. I don't really want to switch insurers though.
My condo's association (common area) insurance tripled in 2023, and we had to settle for less coverage ($100k deductible). Some of it was probably because of circumstances specific to us, but our management told us most of the associations they manage are facing huge jumps as well. I suspect a lot of it is because insurers weren't allowed to properly risk-adjust fire-zone areas, places well out of fire zones like us are paying for other people's bad purchase decisions. (And of course more and more insurers are pulling out entirely because even that doesn't work for them, reducing competition among the remainder.)
Do you still live in We Smoke in Bed Estates? Because I have a fix if so.
I have no idea if the water involved in water rights and the implied distribution between personal, agricultural, industrial, vehicular, etc. has any practical bearing on the water needed to fight fires.
It has none. Trump conflated them and now the Resnicks (pistachio billionaires, in tight with Democratic administrations) are catching flack from that angle, which I enjoy even though it isn't the real problem.
The Wara cited in comment 24 is real smart. I generally trust his analysis. I think he's right. Homes are uninsurable in CA; not only because of the risk but also because of the rebuild costs. The accurate pricing of insurance is something people cannot pay so we're going to have to figure out (if we want people to own houses) some approach that doesn't require insurance for homeownership. California keeps trying to threaten the insurance companies that they have to offer low rates or they can't do business in the state and the insurance companies keep saying "yes please let us out".
I have pretty well collapsed into cynicism: nothing proactive will ever get done through politics. No foreseeable pain will be averted. Every bad prediction will come true, despite plenty of warning. That's my baseline, so you can take that into account for the remainder of this comment.
I have given up on managed retreat. It will not happen through foresight and acceptance. I couldn't get my own father to contemplate it after our cabin burned down, despite the obvious fuel load remaining around the burned cabin. (He didn't re-build, but only because he was no longer physically able to travel to the site.) My brother wants to rebuild. The people that managed retreat would help the most are the people fighting it the hardest, so fuck 'em. Enjoy the foreseeable results of your choices. The UCD professor that studies managed retreat says that people do not rebuild after two fullscale losses within ten years. If they lose everything twice, relatively close together, they don't go back. Anything less and they are determined to re-build.
The only acceptable public commentary is "rebuild, but fire-hardened", which is a large amount of added costs. I had to have fire sprinklers in the two-story ADU I put in. I spent inappropriate money on that ADU; it will not pay for itself. Only people who do that can afford to build expensive defendable houses (stilt houses for flood; reinforced against hurricanes or earthquake; fire-hardened). I wonder when there will be a pathway for the other option: cheap and disposable. Cheap wood frame, expect to lose it in a fire or hurricane periodically. To my knowledge, no one is talking about that. I kinda want a mountain cabin, but if I do look for that, the only thing I could consider is a disposable place.
California is about one hundred million acres. Of those, thirty million are mountanous and primed to burn. A big fire year these days is about four million acres burned; most years are more like two million acres. A fire doesn't generally clear out the whole fuel load, so some of it will burn intensely twice. So at this pace, I expect this to be a huge problem for another fifteen to twenty years. After that, it will have at least cleared out the hundred year backlog of fuel supply.
I dunno. Goats would help. Prescribed burns will help. But in my mood of the last several years, I expect it will all have to run its course.
We're several blocks away from the elevated-fire-risk zone on the insurance map, but I can't do much but laugh at that (and enjoy the fantasy-based premium discount). Like a lot of people, I'm sure, I got absorbed in this article about a guy in Pacific Palisades who saved his house, but his master plan required both a pool and a hot tub and we're not going to install either of those things. I'm just waiting for "California fire decluttering" to overtake "Swedish death cleaning" as a trend, as has already happened inside my head.
31 sounds flippant, but it's absolutely not. I'm leaning hard into the awareness that everything can and will burn, apart from the mildly interesting possibility of stuffing a safe up inside the unused chimney somehow.
I never saw Gremlins! Too skittish as a kid, no opportunity when older.
Well, she lost her father on Christmas in a way that was seasonal, relevant to your concerns, horrific, and stupid.
LA is quite a Third World city in its land use, in this respect: there are just huge tracts of land that aren't built on, they aren't parks as we'd think of parks, they're just... unused jungle.
This is true of every city in the Western US. LA is just the biggest so it gets the most attention.
I think Megan is probably on the politics, unfortunately.
I'm hooked on politics and I'm learning to grieve!
(Should be "right on the politics" obvs.)
"I wonder when there will be a pathway for the other option: cheap and disposable."
Japan does a lot of this, right? Seems to work out pretty well for them.
Yes, the Japanese approach of resiliency through impermanence offers a potential way forward. That's a huge mindset change for Americans though.
Yes, although to be clear Japanese buildings are if anything a lot more sturdy than ours. They just expect to quickly replace them to improving standards & their system is geared around it.
I don't have any insight into Japanese building standards, but they seem useful so I'll note a useful thing I saw today that involved a Japanese car. There was a Corolla with no plates parked in front of a business and I would guess that the business would prefer it be moved. The car was covered in bird shit and the ground around the car sprinkled with bird seed.
Maybe you can put laxatives on bird seed? It kind of looked like each spat was bigger than usual.
Acreage and amount of structures burned don't completely go together. The Thomas fire burned 280,000 acres but fewer structures than these current fires, IIRC. Most of the deaths that ultimately resulted from that fire were in a mudslide in Montecito, an area that burned nearly two weeks after that fire started.
The Thomas fire was the largest by acreage in California to that point in history. It held that record less than a year ago.
Sorry, it held that record for less than a year. I think auto-suggest inserted "ago" in my last comment.
And the August Complex fire burned over a million acres, fewer than a thousand structures, because out in the middle of nowhere. One firefighter died, two injured, no other casualties.
I checked and in fact our annual premium didn't double -- it went up by about 66% -- but it went from very roughly "rounds down to $1000" to "rounds up to $2000," which triggers stress-based innumeracy.
According to this article, homeowners' premiums are quite a bit lower in California than elsewhere. ("The average cost of homeowners insurance in California is $1,250 per year, or about $104 per month. That's 35% less than the national average of $1,915." Obviously they meant to say "half as much.") I don't know where they source those numbers, but there is more clearly sourced data in the Chronicle: "This data, sourced from the California Department of Insurance, includes information only from insurance carriers that have raised their rates in 2023 or 2024."
Okay, and from that second link:
While the cost of their premiums may be painful for many Californians, especially as rates rise to take account of wildfire risk, inflation and high replacement costs, California homeowners have long paid less for insurance than residents of other disaster-prone states, such as Florida and Louisiana. In 2021, the average Florida homeowner paid $2,437 for home insurance, according to the latest data available from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. In California, the average homeowner paid $1,403, just under the national average of $1,411.
That looks nothing like the set of numbers in the first link, but it seems that those weren't averages of actual premiums within a state, but a survey of what a particular policy would cost state-by-state.
We analyzed pricing data from more than 100 insurance companies to bring you the average homeowners insurance cost in every state and the largest U.S. cities. Our sample policy was for a 40-year-old homeowner with good credit, $300,000 of dwelling coverage, $300,000 of liability coverage and a $1,000 deductible.
It's still weird that California comes in lower, but not as weird.
California does have particularly strict rules (due to certain ballot measures) about insurers only crafting rates from past experience. They may hold up poorly in times of change like this, but perhaps they function okay in reducing profit margins in normal times.
Got it, thanks. Now I'm just gawking at the survey data. The sample policy costs ten times as much in Oklahoma as in Hawaii? This is not the way the sticker shock usually goes.
Anyway, my sister in Nebraska is really not happy with the insurance bills.
I was just in Denver and there are "Tornado Shelter" signs all over the airport. I guess that's reassuring.
If Colorado is sheltering tornadoes, no wonder Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma get so many houses blown away.
Enough houses get blown away that distant witches have died from house splat.
Count me as unconvinced that houses in California are generally uninsurable. Again, these fires have burned something on the order of 0.3% of homes in LA County. My homeowner's insurance premium, in the Bay Area, is about ... 0.3% of the value of my house. That means if we expected new risks, not previously priced in, amounting to fires of this scale every single year, we could cover that by doubling insurance premiums.
The bigger problem is political: The risk is not anywhere near evenly distributed, and politicians don't want to admit that it will be very, very expensive to insure houses in some places. But I suspect they will eventually, as the alternative will be that no one can get insurance.
The other problem is that rebuilding costs are so absurdly high. That is something we are going to have to fix, and I don't know how. But I do think it is fixable.
Cob. People can build their own houses with cob.
Daniel Swain is worth reading on fires (and weather in general). Also worth following on social media. He's making an effort to post on multiple platforms, and I think you can see all of his BlueSky stuff without a login.
He's not a monocausal simplifier. One point he made recently about climate change is that if you look at recent years in California, it hasn't been just drought followed by rain followed by drought, but a pattern of multiple cycles. There were actually a couple of heavy rain years in the mid-2010s, which were followed by dry years and the massive fires that sort of peaked in 2020 with the orange sky over the Bay Area while simultaneously there were fires in southern California. Then we had another couple of rainy years. There's always going to be fires in these places, but the climate change contribution seems to be increasing frequencies of these dry/wet swings.
Yes, the Japanese approach of resiliency through impermanence offers a potential way forward. That's a huge mindset change for Americans though.
Counterpoint: it is not. I can think of few cultures more accustomed to transience, change, mobility, and more given to building things out of light combustible materials than Americans. You build enormous shacks out of sticks and plasterboard and call it GDP:-) and you know, it has worked rather well for you.
I just want to note that much of Altadena that burned was actually quite flat, including my husband's neighborhood. Also Altadena is historically a home of strong middle-class Black community, apparently one of the first in California, with double the national rate of black homeownership.
Everyone whom I know who was there said the wind was just the worst they had experienced in decades.
I don't think sprinklers would have helped. I think architecture has to change at a much more fundamental level.
Everyone whom I know who was there said the wind was just the worst they had experienced in decades.
The wind sounds absolutely terrifying. I wonder how much it was driven by the fire itself, firestorm-style?
Like a lot of people, I'm sure, I got absorbed in this article about a guy in Pacific Palisades who saved his house, but his master plan required both a pool and a hot tub and we're not going to install either of those things.
That was a really interesting piece, not least because what he did seemed... surprisingly practicable. A few sprinkler heads, a pump, some hoses, some fire retardant. That's not terribly expensive! Yes, you need water storage but it sounds like his pool was almost enough by itself - a big underground cistern would have done just as well and would have been a lot cheaper than a pool (though less fun in non-fire periods).
Belatedly, 13 "Land area comparisons are misleading because Pacific Palisades is 23 sq. mi. (land area) and only 23k people, so about 1.6 people per acre" is pretty startling. The population density of England is 1.75 people per acre.
I can think of few cultures more accustomed to transience, change, mobility, and more given to building things out of light combustible materials than Americans. You build enormous shacks out of sticks and plasterboard and call it GDP
That's not exactly the same as a philosophical priming towards impermanence. It's not like Americans have a light touch with our possessions.
NIMBY is so powerful here USA) because the average American hates and fears change
I think there's a percentage of every population that hates and fears change. What makes NIMBY powerful is the existence of a legal system that allows small groups of people to delay, obstruct or abolish building projects at will. And what makes that happen is two things: first, the idea that people in a small area have a right to veto anything that happens in that area; second, the idea that allowing more people to have a say in how government works at every stage is always a good thing.
Yeah, there was a really unfortunate path dependence in the US with Jane Jacobs and Ralph Nader. Jane Jacobs was completely right that the building projects she was opposing -- highways through dense, functional neighborhoods, were crazy and bad and should be stopped. And the story of community organizing successfully to stop crazy bad projects was a foundational myth for public interest organizers. Unfortunately, it was also a handbook for anyone who wants the moral high ground to stop anything at all, and most building projects aren't crazy and evil.
And Ralph Nader as an early rock-star environmental advocate who happened to be a litigator, who drove the idea of litigation as the strongest tool for environmentalist. You can't make anything good happen with litigation. The best you can do is stop something bad. But again, the aura of environmental impact litigation makes every lawsuit look morally righteous.
Both of those names as stand-ins for the broader movements using the same methods, but they were both individually very successful and influential in a legitimately beneficial way (at least at first).
Jane Jacobs was completely right that the building projects she was opposing -- highways through dense, functional neighborhoods, were crazy and bad and should be stopped.
It is truly extraordinary how popular this lunacy was. I remember hearing about the Edinburgh Inner Ring Road plan when I was a wee boy and it sounded like something from a deranged nightmare. "We're just going to demolish these eight streets of Georgian terrace houses, fill in this pond, knock down half the mediaeval Old Town, and lay a six lane motorway right through the middle of this park." Fortunately it was stopped!
re: 73
They did actually do quite a bit of that in Glasgow. Especially the big trench that was dug through Cowcaddens and Charing Cross. There's still bits of unfinished stuff floating about 50 years after they abandoned parts of the project.
They did! And a lot of other cities too. Edinburgh was unusually lucky.
It is hilarious how late in the day and how casually people found out about the Ringways Plan for London. You can actually see where the radial route down the A1/Archway Road/Holloway Road axis would have passed near me because the planning blight left a trot of shops that look like they're falling down on one side and a strip of land hived off Highgate Wood on the other that the City later realized it could put some council housing on now the motorway wasn't going to happen.
Of course my home town completely bought the dream, created a giant trench surrounding the city centre, and rebranded itself "the Motorway City of the 70s"...
because the average American hates and fears change
An activist told me that everyone wants their town frozen exactly how it was the day after they moved there.
Yep. In Heebieville, I-35 runs smack through the middle of town, about 3-4 blocks safely into the poor side. I live in one of the chopped-in-half neighborhoods.
Actually it's hard to say. It feels true, because the two partner neighborhoods have the same vibe, but I-35 looks like it was built in 1946, and I'm not sure when these were platted.
79: I-35 itself seems to have been built in the late 50s, but it followed the path of an existing bypass that does seem to have been built sometime in the 40s. So the larger right-of-way would have been established then even if the full big interstate was not completed yet.
Jane Jacobs and her ilk saved Greenwich Village, but the Bronx got wrecked. It went from a borough full of nice middle-class housing to a symbol of the worst urban poverty and dysfunction after Rober Moses' highways cut it up.
lb is entirely correct re: environmental impact litigation - resource-specific statutes (clean air act, clean water act, etc.) and the dirty-dirt statutes (cercla, rcra, tsca) have substantive standards that can be enforced via either citizen or regulator suits. here a moral halo for citizen suits seems warranted - noble enviro group sallying into the lists to enforce the clean water act standards against dastardly polluter in the face of regulator in action.
but nepa and the state little nepas (ceqa is the most elaborate and frequently litigated) require process without specifiyng the standards. ceqa is substantive in that feasible mitigations are required to be imposed as enforceable conditions of approval - in practice many federal agencies implement nepa similarly.
generally the ceqa petitioner's playbook is to kill a project via litigation through delay (capital gets tired of waiting, or the credit cycle evolves so that once the project is ready to go the financing no longer pencils and the approvals expire before the financing comes back into feasible territory, or some variation). the gold ring for the ceqa petitioner is the imposition of a feasible mitigation measure that makes the project commercial unviable.
the legislature and governor will probably never undercut the two biggest drivers of ceqa litigation: a squishy judicially created division of the standard of review for procedural vs. factual issues that provides a petitioner-friendly court an opportunity to deliver petitioner wins on a very wide range of issues - this issue is inherent in how usa courts conceptualize administrative law; and the availability of attorney fees for a prevailing petitioner, but not a prevailing agency or project applicant. the latter has created an entrepreneurial bar, and they in turn have cultivated a pool of returning customers - labor unions.* both invest very heavily in lobbying the legislature and governor.
the role of the construction unions is key to understanding why all the housing reform legislation is riddled with one-off, baroque ceqa provisions tied to, e.g., prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements.
the one ceqa-specific reform that in my experience has some promise if it were imposed across the board is the streamlining statute, requiring both trial and appellate court litigation to be concluded within 9 months of the lodging of the record (and the deadline for lodging the record itself is super short). currently it is limited to projects of statewide importance (and some additional requirements) where the governor approves the streamlining and the legislature doesn't oppose. downsides - it puts a real burden on the courts and the project sponsor has to pay $$$$ in non-recoverable court costs (although for some projects this pencils super well against carrying costs for the typical 18-24 months *each* at the trial court and court of appeal - and this is with a statutory calendar preference). streamlining eliminates the delay tactic, and practically signals to the courts not to dick around with the project. the latter signal would of course be diluted if streamlining were available more widely.
*not just construction unions, service worker unions are also very active with this strategy, although they do love a referendum.
78: Interesting, I think of smaller cities of having been insulated from this trend, but maybe I just happened to have only lived in cities which weren't heavily affected. Here we only just got an interstate in the last 10 years (and it goes basically on the outside of town, though there is now suburban sprawl on the other side). In my hometown Lincoln Highway goes along the north side not really cutting through anything, and I-83 completely bypasses the city, again not really cutting off much (though there is a *lot* of suburban sprawl beyond it, but I'd guess a lot of that postdates the highway, since people want to live near the highway).
My farm is just off the Lincoln Highway.
The NYS statute corresponding to CEQA is SEQRA, and has many of the same problems.
Something that I think doesn't come across well to people who don't do this for a living is how difficult it is to do a fullscale environmental review that can't be nitpicked to death in litigation. A wildly important issue for any project (I know NEPA and SEQRA, I'm guessing on CEQA) is if you can do a preliminary assessment that it has essentially no negative environmental effects -- for NEPA a Finding Of No Significant Impact (pron. Fonzie), for SEQRA a Negative Declaration, which means you don't have to do further review.
Once you're obligated to do a full Environmental Impact Statement, that is both a significant burden in itself, and it is very subject to attack as flawed or insufficient. So your project is delayed by months or years to do it at all, and then more years of litigation.
Count me as unconvinced that houses in California are generally uninsurable.
I never said that. Just so large a share as to be financially impossible to subsidize our way out of. Estimates of CA homes in the wildland-urban interface range as high as 45%. Even if WUI isn't the same as being in imminent risk, we're talking about millions of homes at a minimum.
the wind was just the worst they had experienced in decades.
It was just unbelievable. On Tuesday afternoon (hours before the fires started) it had seemed like the winds were dying down, and I went to play tennis. The court is fairly sheltered -- it's below street level, with walls all around -- but the winds picked up and sprayed the ball around and it was basically impossible. (Yes, I lost.) But I didn't realize how insane the wind was until I emerged from the court. A tree had fallen on my car, and several strangers stopped in the windstorm to help me dislodge it. Getting home was terrifying - the streets were littered with branches and whole lanes were blocked, and flying debris kept hitting my car.
much of Altadena that burned was actually quite flat
Yes, it's like a flat sheet, tilted up towards the mountains. It's not hilly in the same way that a lot of the rim of LA is.
Altadena is historically a home of strong middle-class Black community, apparently one of the first in California, with double the national rate of black homeownership.
It's irreplaceable. Many people lived in homes that had been in their families for generations.
Today the skies look very clear, and the weather app says that the air quality is "good," but the Eaton fire is still burning just a few miles from here. I can't figure out how worried I should be about pollutants that aren't measured by AQMD.
My apologies, I was making a general point about Southern California, that does still apply to the vast majority of the burnt areas this week, but you're absolutely right that in Altadena specifically the fires did significant destruction in relatively flat parts (mostly, but not entirely, within the first few blocks blocks from the hills). Keeping development out of the hills and canyons would help a lot, but fires would absolutely still be a major concern in California.
(Though I'm a little confused about one thing, the altitude maps do look relatively flat, but doesn't Altadena's etymology literally come from it being the "alta" (i.e. high elevation) part of Pasadena?)
Ah, maybe 87.2 answers my 89.2. Altadena has somewhat unique geography making it both "alta" and "flat."
Thinking of you, jms. Seems wise to limit time outside, but not forgo it completely, I guess?
My very first California memories (age 4) were in Altadena. Everything I read or hear about the Eaton Fire is completely heartbreaking.
That's not exactly the same as a philosophical priming towards impermanence. It's not like Americans have a light touch with our possessions.
Yes. We are extremely attached to the particular combustible shacks that make up most of our building supply. A perfect illustration is Newsom waiving CEQA but only to rebuild burned structures exactly as they were before. That's not what Japan does!
Glad to hear you're okay, jms. The whole thing is heartbreaking.
On litigation delays, our legislature made preliminary injunctions harder to get in the 2023 session. I've had a couple of injunctions cases since then, and I'm not sure how much difference it's really made, but it does seem to me that you can define likelihood of success in a way that makes NEPA/state cases harder to use for project delay.
Unless you're dealing with a shit admin agency, like some I could name, that do bad work, and get their NEPA analyses tossed out, for the same reasons, time after time.
Obviously, you can also legislatively monkey with fee-shifting, bond requirements, and the like, to make entrepreneurial lawsuits a riskier proposition.
the la times published a too short article re urban/suburban fire prevention, https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2025-01-12/sobering-advice-from-two-experts-on-how-to-prevent-similiar-fires-essential-california
so i looked up the experts & found
https://www.elementalfilm.com/jackcohen
and
just makes newsom's asinine ceqa exemption exec order look even worse. at a bare minimum limit the ceqa exemption to those rebuilds that adhere to these extremely sensible measures re building materials! & require all local.govt to enforce annual.veg clearance, with it being done for the property owner & the cost + fine added as a priority lien.
94.1 - financing won't greenlight construction with pending litigation so in the vast majority of cases no injunction needed. even self financed clients, & i've represented among the planet's most comfortably self financed, won't go forward while there's a chance of reversal following a trial cour win.
85 - ceqa exemptions generally benefit from substantial evidence standard of review ( setting aside some issues with exceptions to exemptions), & most eir (ceqa version of an eis) issues also get a sub evid sor. but if a project is not exempt, the decision to prepare a (mitigated) negative declaration aka short form review can be overturned on a mere "fair argument" so that you only go down that path in the complete absence of any litigation risk. notwithstanding that the leg said that a neg dec would be the norm, and eirs the exception. yet here we are & the leg will never fix this.
I am so bitter about needing to remove our beautiful, mature Chinese juniper tree from the side of the house. If you wanted an easy and efficient way to set the house on fire, you could drop a match under the juniper, reach the exposed wood under the roof shingles in 30 seconds, and blow the top off the house in short order. MY TREE.
97: Ooh, we don't get a substantive evidence standard for reviewing an EIS -- it's "arbitrary and capricious". That'd be nice.
You can still be just capricious?
I did a training a while back with a pic of one of Dr. Whoops's goats -- Jean-Luc, if I remember correctly -- standing on a wrought-iron cafe table to illustrate "capricious".
99 - yes, basically do an eir right & petitioners can go pound sand. this plus issue exhaustion intersects nicely with our entrepreneurial petitioner's bar - bc most ceqa litigation is financed by petitioner's counsel if you make it crystal clear they will lose big time you can avoid lawsuits. a dumb way to do things in the small mid & grand scheme but it can be done.
98: i would gladly trade your tree for home insurance. sorry not sorry.
104: She has Star Trek goats, Rocky and Bullwinkle goats, Absolutely Fabulous goats... all the goats.
Certain recent reforms of CEQA (primarily for housing) have focused on the really egregious misuses:
- AB 1633, inspired by the Nordstrom valet lot runaround, which makes it a potential violation for a locality to withhold exemption determination for no good reason. Even that only applies to infill housing & has a sunset date in 6 years.
- Not sure the bill number, but for low-income housing, if the defendant can persuade the judge that "the action was brought in bad faith, vexatiously, for the purpose of delay, or to thwart the low- or moderate-income nature of the housing development," they can be required to post a bond of up to $500,000 to compensate the developer when they lose at last. At the time it actually required affirmative proof that the plaintiff could afford to pay (since amended to require plaintiff to prove hardship to be exempted), but that threshold was also met with one particularly egregious group called Save Livermore Downtown, funded by a lot of local richies, and the judge did impose the bond.