California's Wildfires: Livestreams from Burning Homes and Dire Text Messages - Sometimes Erroneous (msn.com) 66
As the ecological disaster continues, CNN reports the Palisades Fire near Malibu, California has burned at least 22,660 acres, left 100,000 peope under evacuation orders, left at least 11 people dead and "destroyed thousands of homes and other structures." From the last reports it was only 11% contained, and "flames are now spreading east in the Mandeville Canyon area, approaching Interstate 405, one of LA's busiest freeways."
But the Atlantic's assistant editor wrote Friday that "I have received 11 alerts. As far as I can tell, they were all sent in error." My home is not in a mandatory evacuation zone or even a warning zone. It is, or is supposed to be, safe. Yet my family's phones keep blaring with evacuation notices, as they move in and out of service....
Earlier today, Kevin McGowan, the director of Los Angeles County's emergency-management office, acknowledged at a press conference that officials knew alerts like these had gone out, acknowledged some of them were wrong, and still had no idea why, or how to keep it from happening again. The office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but shortly after this article was published, the office released a statement offering a preliminary assessment that the false alerts were sent "due to issues with telecommunications systems, likely due to the fires' impacts on cellular towers" and announcing that the county's emergency notifications would switch to being managed through California's state alert system...
The fifth, sixth, and seventh evacuation warnings came through at around 6 a.m. — on my phone.
At the same time a Los Angeles-area couple "spent two hours watching a live stream of flames closing in on their home," reports the Washington Post, and at one point "saw firefighters come through the house and extinguish flames in the backyard." At around 4:30 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, the camera feeds gave out and the updates from their security system stopped. About four hours later, [Zibby] Owens's husband got an alert on his cellphone that the indoor sprinkler system had gone off and the fire alarm had been activated. They do not know the current status of their home, Owens said on Tuesday.
Real estate agent Shana Tavangarian Soboroff said in a phone interview Thursday that one set of clients had followed their Pacific Palisades home's ordeal this week in a foreboding play-by-play of text alerts from an ADT security system. The system first detected smoke, then motion, next that doors had been opened, and finally fire alerts before the system lost communication. Their home's destruction was later confirmed when someone returned to the neighborhood and recorded video, Tavangarian Soboroff said.
Soboroff also lost her home in the fire, the article adds. Burned to the ground are "the places where people raised their kids," Zibby Owens wrote in this update posted Friday. But "even if my one home, or 'structure' as newscasters call it, happens to be mostly OK, I've still lost something I loved more than anything. We've all lost it... [M]y heart and soul are aching across the country as I sit alone in my office and try to make sense of the devastation." [I]t isn't about our house.
It's about our life.
Our feelings. Our community. Our memories. Our beloved stores, restaurants, streets, sidewalks, neighbors. It's about the homes where we sat at friends' kitchen tables and played Uno, celebrated their birthdays, and truly connected.
It's all gone... [E]very single person I know and so many I don't who live in the Palisades have lost everything. Not just one or two friends. Everyone.
And then I saw video footage of our beloved village. The yogurt shop and Beach Street? Gone. Paliskates, our kids' favorite store? Gone. Burned to the ground.
Gelson's grocery store, where we just recently picked up the New York Post and groceries for the break? Gone...
The. Whole. Town.
How? How is it possible?
How could everyone have lost everything? Schools, homes, power, cell service, cars, everything. All their belongings...
All the schools, gone. It's unthinkable....
I've worked in the local library and watched the July 4 parade from streets that are now smoldering embers...
It is an unspeakable loss.
"Everyone I know in the Palisades has lost all of their possessions," the author writes, publishing what appear to be text messages from friends.
"It's gone."
"We lost everything."
"Nothing left."
"We lost it."
But the Atlantic's assistant editor wrote Friday that "I have received 11 alerts. As far as I can tell, they were all sent in error." My home is not in a mandatory evacuation zone or even a warning zone. It is, or is supposed to be, safe. Yet my family's phones keep blaring with evacuation notices, as they move in and out of service....
Earlier today, Kevin McGowan, the director of Los Angeles County's emergency-management office, acknowledged at a press conference that officials knew alerts like these had gone out, acknowledged some of them were wrong, and still had no idea why, or how to keep it from happening again. The office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but shortly after this article was published, the office released a statement offering a preliminary assessment that the false alerts were sent "due to issues with telecommunications systems, likely due to the fires' impacts on cellular towers" and announcing that the county's emergency notifications would switch to being managed through California's state alert system...
The fifth, sixth, and seventh evacuation warnings came through at around 6 a.m. — on my phone.
At the same time a Los Angeles-area couple "spent two hours watching a live stream of flames closing in on their home," reports the Washington Post, and at one point "saw firefighters come through the house and extinguish flames in the backyard." At around 4:30 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, the camera feeds gave out and the updates from their security system stopped. About four hours later, [Zibby] Owens's husband got an alert on his cellphone that the indoor sprinkler system had gone off and the fire alarm had been activated. They do not know the current status of their home, Owens said on Tuesday.
Real estate agent Shana Tavangarian Soboroff said in a phone interview Thursday that one set of clients had followed their Pacific Palisades home's ordeal this week in a foreboding play-by-play of text alerts from an ADT security system. The system first detected smoke, then motion, next that doors had been opened, and finally fire alerts before the system lost communication. Their home's destruction was later confirmed when someone returned to the neighborhood and recorded video, Tavangarian Soboroff said.
Soboroff also lost her home in the fire, the article adds. Burned to the ground are "the places where people raised their kids," Zibby Owens wrote in this update posted Friday. But "even if my one home, or 'structure' as newscasters call it, happens to be mostly OK, I've still lost something I loved more than anything. We've all lost it... [M]y heart and soul are aching across the country as I sit alone in my office and try to make sense of the devastation." [I]t isn't about our house.
It's about our life.
Our feelings. Our community. Our memories. Our beloved stores, restaurants, streets, sidewalks, neighbors. It's about the homes where we sat at friends' kitchen tables and played Uno, celebrated their birthdays, and truly connected.
It's all gone... [E]very single person I know and so many I don't who live in the Palisades have lost everything. Not just one or two friends. Everyone.
And then I saw video footage of our beloved village. The yogurt shop and Beach Street? Gone. Paliskates, our kids' favorite store? Gone. Burned to the ground.
Gelson's grocery store, where we just recently picked up the New York Post and groceries for the break? Gone...
The. Whole. Town.
How? How is it possible?
How could everyone have lost everything? Schools, homes, power, cell service, cars, everything. All their belongings...
All the schools, gone. It's unthinkable....
I've worked in the local library and watched the July 4 parade from streets that are now smoldering embers...
It is an unspeakable loss.
"Everyone I know in the Palisades has lost all of their possessions," the author writes, publishing what appear to be text messages from friends.
"It's gone."
"We lost everything."
"Nothing left."
"We lost it."
Sad stories everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
___________________________________________________
It finally hit me that we might not have a home to go back to and that I was going to be pregnant and homeless. My partner and I started remembering things we had left behind — my grandfather’s chain and a pre-digital picture of my partner and his dad that he’d never be able to get back. Then we watched our neighborhood burn to the ground, live on TV... The following morning, I had a call from my neighbor, who told me that amid the ashen remains of multimillion-dollar homes, our little group of condos had survived. It was then that I started sobbing. We decided to go back home and retrieve a few keepsakes left behind, hoping my press pass would allow us to get into the danger zone.
Driving up Sunset Boulevard, we saw firefighters. “Oh my God,” I said, “they’re here.” Blocked off by trucks, my partner tried to take the back route through an alleyway, only to find another fire engine parked in the way. Taking another run down Sunset, we finally saw our home, now a pile of embers, still burning. We parked and got out for a closer look. A group of firefighters told us they were sorry.
Going around back again, on foot this time, I made it closer and doubled over in pain at the sight — all of the other homes were destroyed too. ____________________________________________
Why don't all rich in LA have roof sprinklers? (Score:2)
Even with a grid independent pump and water storage (pool works) it's a rounding error in the yearly maintenance budget of many of the people whose homes are burning.
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With the kind of heat a wildfire brings, I'm not sure how long a pool full of water could hold off the flames. Obviously longer than NOT using the pool, but with the scale of these things you just can't defend a single home, you have to fight large sections with backburning and such.
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With the kind of heat a wildfire brings, I'm not sure how long a pool full of water could hold off the flames.
A pool and a sprinkler system would work quite well. The wildfire in Palisades was not the kind that creates its own weather and fire tornadoes, but a regular house-to-house. It's just that houses there are tinderboxes.
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>Many of those people are not really rich and have only that one pile of embers and a mortgage that still needs to be paid.
Well, if your uninsured home is all you had and it's mortgaged (Really? Banks allow you to have a mortgage without insurance?)... seems like declaring bankruptcy is appropriate. You're already fucked, might as well take the credit hit and escape a large pile of unrecoverable debt.
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Mortgage lenders require borrowers to have insurance. It is in the contract.
And the insurance is separate from the mortgage. Lots of insurance companies are pulling out of California. Thousands of policies were not renewed 4 months ago in the Palisades area. Did they all manage to find new coverage by Jan 1st? Or did they get the state emergency insurance plan?
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Ever since I started listening to what reinsurer actuaries are saying, I'm not calm at all...
If the FAIR plan needs to fall back on backup sources of money to pay out, things might spiral really fast for many more people than those directly affected by the fires.
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Malibu burns down a lot, a lot a lot.
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Like roughly every 20-30 years a lot a lot.
Topanga '93 anyone?
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Also to be clear the reason I have zero sympathy for the rich here is because I know damn well the government will pay to fix their houses like they always do. I've lived in places that have wildfires and where rich people have houses and every 10 years or so they would burn down and like clockwork the taxpayer would foot the bill.
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Sheer luck, it's a canyon next to a wilderness park. The insurance companies saw it coming.
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The regulations are there for defensible space, just no enforcement.
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Hurricanes in Florida, fires in California, tornados in Illinois.
It's not like it's a secret that these things happen, along with approximately where they hit, the frequency, and the severity. If you don't know the risks, it's because you don't want to know.
With fire, you can limit your exposure by building fire-resistant buildings and having a plan for bugging out with your most precious belongings well ahead of a time. If you're rich enough, you have a second home to go to, somewhere far enough away it
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This is the state that mandates Proposition 65 warnings on so much random crap that organizations just post them on the door to avoid being in violation. I mean, technically a bar has to throw up a Proposition 65 warning because they serve alcohol. But apparently they can't figure out how to deliver water to Los Angeles.
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Such is the consequence of putting progressive DEI types in charge of everything.
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I got a notice from the Southern California Gas company. Their Prop 65 warning was a picture of Southern California.
"Pursuant to Proposition 65, the State of California lists
substances known to cause cancer or reproductive harm.
SoCalGas® strives to provide safe and reliable service to
all of our customers. We want you to be aware of these
substances as they relate to natural gas service so that
you can reduce possible exposure. Our service territory
encompasses approximately 20,000 square miles acro
Losing your whole life (Score:2)
Re: Losing your whole life (Score:2)
Even if they do have insurance, "acts of god" are usually specifically excluded from policies unless you cough up a huge premium.
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What constitutes an 'act of god', legally?
Whatever the insurance company can get away with.
That said, it's generally something which happens in nature and not started or controlled by man [uslegal.com]. Floods, snowstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes. For a slightly more detailed description, see this [investopedia.com].
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If these fires are found to be arson, will any insurance cover that?
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In California, the land is worth a lot more than the house, so there's that.
Here in the UK (Score:3, Interesting)
We learnt in the fire of London in 1666 that buildings built out of wood close together is a Seriously Bad Idea. But it's a lesson the USA doesnt seem to have learnt yet. I'm not saying brick or concrete buildings would have prevented the fires but they sure as hell would have mitigated them in the urban areas.
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Japan knows they have earth quakes. The government mandates a certain level of earthquake resistance on buildings. Why does this not happen here?
The USA spends trillions of dollars on military, why is this not something they can assist with? why are fires treated as "natural" in an era of everything being man made. It should be one more battle in the war against nature.
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US culture has different values. Bigger risks are ignored and working to mitigate them at public expense is 'socialism'. Saving a buck now is generally considered worth risking losing ten later.
Until they lose the ten, of course. Attitudes have been known to change, at least temporarily, in affected individuals.
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"why are fires treated as "natural" in an era of everything being man made."
Because before man was there the fires were there and continue to occur with or without human intervention.
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Had this discussion earlier. In a sum codes aren't retroactive. California could have the toughest code but only applies to new construction. Guess the situation that leaves. Right now, all we can do as a society is help those in need BUT demand a change for anyone who wants to rebuild in the same place.
Re: Here in the UK (Score:2)
You can't build with brick in earthquake zones or you'll have what happened during the Northridge quake. Most of the building codes are based around earthquake tolerance.
Yes, we have fires and wind on yearly basis and mistakes were made, but there were excessively, unusually high speed wind gusts that set the two bigeest fires off in a record pace. The winds made it difficult to get helicopters and other vehicles in the air, and in some cases ground support can't get anywhere near either..
Re: Here in the UK (Score:2)
Use concrete and steel then. The skyscrapers survive earthquakes right?
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The skyscrapers survive earthquakes right?
There is no building material that would have prevented the spread of the fire. Steel and concrete structures burn down like anything else. The shell sometimes survives, but the insides will still be a total loss. And then the shell will need to be demolished anyway. Steel and concrete structures resist smaller fires much better than wood, but there are limits that are far exceeded by this type of fire.
Re: Here in the UK (Score:2)
You're missing the point. In urban areas most of the fuel IS the buildings. No flammable structures in the first place, no fire.
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Re: Here in the UK (Score:2)
Has no one over there ever heard of roof tiles? They're made of fired clay or a rock like slate. They wouldnt burn under a blowtorch never mind embers.
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Re: Here in the UK (Score:2)
BS. Wildfires dont get close to blow torch temps never mind double, maybe 1000C tops. Any fire that reached 2500-3000c would be brilliant white and vapourise everything - thered be nothing left at all.
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But it's a lesson the USA doesnt seem to have learnt yet.
On the other hand, would you waste hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional expenses to prevent a tiny chance of fire damage? It might well be cheaper to invest the money saved into fire insurance.
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We learnt in the fire of London in 1666 that buildings built out of wood close together is a Seriously Bad Idea. But it's a lesson the USA doesnt seem to have learnt yet. I'm not saying brick or concrete buildings would have prevented the fires but they sure as hell would have mitigated them in the urban areas.
Here in Australia, we would suggest that comparing a fire in a non-bushfire/wildfire prone country through all but medieval structures probably doesn't tell you much about bush fire impacting modern dwellings at the urban edge.
In Australia the normal construction method is brick veneer with either ceramic tile or colourbond (steel sheet) cladding for roofing. Houses are well separated, typically on 1/4 acre blocks. On the face of it, this should offer very good protection against fire - bricks and ceramic
Re: want to live in LA - find your own money to pa (Score:1)
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Tragedy, but it will get worse (Score:1)
At the very least, as a consequence of these fires, California should update building code to require more fire-resistant exterior construction.
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They'll raise rates alright.
But it won't be based on anything like that; because the new government has people who feel climate change is a total myth, that we don't contribute to it, and anyone who says so is wrong.
They'll just raise rates on all of us. Equally. This may be after they pull out of California entirely.
The insurance companies have absolutely ZERO moral or social responsibility; none. They don't actually even care about the customers, no matter who or what their marketing says. It is a busines
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Already do, but not retroactive (most codes aren't). With that being said there's nothing but economics preventing one from renovating to a higher standard.... or building a new one.
As for again and again...
This [amazon.com] and this. [amazon.com]
Into the (Weeds) Woods - Palisades Fire (Score:1, Interesting)
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He got lucky. Houses next to his were in ruins.
However, he's not too far off the mark. There are multiple reports of a number of shortcomings in the leadership of both LA and the LAFD. We're talking budget cuts leading to layoffs and cuts in training and fire hydrant testing, the Santa Ynez Reservoir being drained for repairs to its cover since February of last year [nbcnews.com], etc. That's 117 million gallons of water which could potentially have been used.
The cherry on top is the LAFD Deputy Chief is on video sa
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Happened in Toronto ages ago - they started hiring women 'who passed the test' even though the best scores were (obviously) from large men.
I could NOT care less if you're male, female, trans, gay, straight, bi, a native or a naturalized citizen. Or an immigrant with a work permit, or whatever else. I care if you can get my unconscious ass out of a burning building ASAP; I care if you were the best applicant they could find at doing that. After that I care if you're the best for saving the building you h
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Re: Into the (Weeds) Woods - Palisades Fire (Score:1)
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He won't get one...the radical right will use that as proof that god is real and protects the right. They will say everyone who lost homes was a left-wing lunatic and got what they deserved. They will echo what Woods says because it fits the narrative they want.
It's about to get totally unhinged. A large portion of the country is about to celebrate this tragedy while those in the government echo it.
It's been fun. I guess. Not really.
Australia vs California (Score:2)
Australian housing roofs are 99% Steel or Tile/Concrete.
70% of Californian roofs are flammable shingle.
Madness!
Most of the fires are from ember attack.
California should look at Australian bush fire building codes. We have lots science behind the codes.
Is there anything cornier than neolibeal tears? (Score:2)
Am I the only one who thinks that guy is a shallow person?
So, good news (Score:2)
So, no rich CEOs were murdered? That is good news.
Let's remember what is important people, it's not you. So, this won't be in the news for long, and a GoFundMe won't raise the billions of dollars required to rebuild homes with individual fire suppression equipment. Also, no-one will spend trillions of dollars fixing the climate so every other building is protected.
This is the first man-made apocalypse in the USA, it won't be the last.