Horrible.
And meanwhile in Malibu, the locals are berating LACoFD for not saving their mansions.
Really? I hadn’t heard that.
I had heard that many of these mansions went up in flames.
Tell them to thank the Sierra Club for keeping the mental in environ-mental.
The rich and famous will be on TV asking the rest of the country, and the taxpayers, to rebuild their mansions.
We get the same thing up here. Cal Fire cannot go to the store in Middletown in uniform because people are angry they did not save their homes 3 years ago.
People do not get it, you can have all the manpower and every piece of equipment in the world but if that wind is blowing right and it is single digit humidity, it’s done. Those cars you see upside down in the road did not blow up. Exploding cars are a rarity. Generally speaking, the wind in these fires is strong enough to flip vehicles.
I perspire a lot, soaking my clothes, but when I ma on one of these fires, I am dry, my perspiration evaporating as fast as it comes out. I let 3 dry chemical extinguishers go on a corner of a barn that had just started; it did nothing to slow it. The barn was white with chemical and it was burning.
On top of that, people build like idiots. Looking at the satellite and the images on the news, I did not see one structure in Paradise that was defensible.. If you have a wooden deck, standard vents, a wood pile within 100 feet of a structure, palm trees, wood chip landscaping, wooden fences up to your home, leaves in the gutters or valleys, landscaping tight up against the house it is a loser and the crews will pass it up for one they can defend and you cannot blame them; it is their lives.
Add to it that a flame cast from 2 foot tall grass on a back fire I saw lit cast a 14 foot flame. I saw 3 foot high juniper bushes cast a 130 foot flame. At its peak, the Camp Fire was consuming 80 football fields a minute. You are not saving any structures in that and you are dang lucky if you save yourself.