Can't Beat Dumb - Yes, Fires Can Be Put Out With Saltwater... A Case Could Be Made For Reverting California Back to A Territory And Putting It Into Receivership

So much corruption and incompetence - the Constitution guarantees that each state will have a "republican form of government" - and crooked banana republics aren't models of republicanism...

and water trucks can save buildings, the trick is to not let the fire get started in the buildings in the first place:

and they need forest management - with prescribed burns -

but the LA and Cali governments misappropriate taxpayer money - to the tune of $101 million in the case of Newsom:

“An analysis of California's 2024 Budget Bill, which covers its budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year, by the state's Legislative Analyst's Office concluded it slashed $101 million from seven "wildfire and forest resilience" programs.

The California Analyst's Office is an impartial body that analyses the economic impact of proposed laws and is overseen by the state legislature's Legislative Budget Committee.

Cuts included a reduction of $5 million in spending on CAL FIRE fuel reduction teams, including funds used to pay for vegetation management work by the California National Guard. This left the total available for this scheme at $129 million.

An additional $4 million was removed from a forest legacy program aimed at encouraging good management practices from landowners whilst $28 million was slashed from funds provided to multiple state conservancies to increase wildfire resilience. …” https://www.newsweek.com/gavin-newsom-cut-100m-fire-prevention-budget-before-california-fires-2012980

- and these crooks grift for more:

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin could take a lesson in corruption and incompetence from these crooks in California…

All you really need to do is to look at a map, and you can see that the high-density housing - even for the ultra-rich - seen in so many places, but especially in LA, which is an area especially susceptible to bush fires, given the primarily desert-like soild and mesquite scrub and eucalyptus trees and other highly flammable vegetation…

and

and if you look closely, you’ll see lots of roofs with asphalt shingles, and then at examples of accumulation of fuel - dried out brush (here on Las Pulgas Canyon Road):

and on the other side, this:

And note that this is hilly, even mountainous terrain, with fuel accumulations in the valleys and canyons, and the extreme fire hazard is blatantly obvious. If someone were to offer to give me a house in one of these places - I’d take it, and put it right back on the market and buy a house in a place where firestorms would not be so much of a risk.

They’ve known about this in Los Angeles for over 60 years:

for more dramatic footage see the source of the above graphic:

And some pretty old-fashioned guidelines from Southern California (my bet, from the 1960s):

“Site Layout: The first strategy is to get a hundred feet of distance and incombustible material between you and the wildlands using patios, driveways, or low-growing fire-retardant plants. You can be attacked from any direction, but an up-slope running fire is by far the most dangerous and so deserves special design attention. When you lay out your site invest in driveways and turn-arounds that are wide enough to make it easy for firefighters to bring their heavy equipment in close to your home. They know how dangerous it is to try to back a fire truck out a narrow driveway if they have to leave in a hurry. Make it easy for them to get close to and around your home.

1. Ignition Resistant Roofs: The most insidious problems are the cracks and openings in Spanish tile roofs that make it easy for the wind to drive brands and embers inside your attic. You can fire-stop individual tiles in an existing roof, but for new roofs choose tiles or other fire rated roofing materials that are designed to interlock tightly and are installed over a fire resistant cap sheet. If you are building a flat composition built-up roof, talk with an expert about how much gravel or ballast to install to protect the asphalt from burning brands.

2. Ember Resistant Exterior: Beautiful, climatologically appropriate homes built of stucco, face brick, tile, adobe, concrete block, or metal siding can be designed in any architectural style you wish. Devote special design attention to the underside of overhangs (roof soffits, cantilevered balconies, decks, and underfloor areas) because here is where flames will be trapped and temperatures will be the highest. Provide double layers of protection and structural integrity here. If you have a particularly severe exposure, your architect can design a firewall, a more technical solution sometimes used in large urban buildings.

3. Window Protection: Windows are the weakest link in defending your building, but there are clever ways to protect them. Radiant heat alone from the fire can shatter glass or ignite combustibles inside your living room, without the flames actually reaching your house. Single glazing is particularly vulnerable; a better choice is double glazing with tempered glass on the exterior. However the safest solution are roll-down metal fire doors built into the roof overhangs or side recesses, and released automatically by fusible links. They will protect windows and sliding glass doors even if they are left standing open. Fold-down panels or shutters on sloped rails can also be designed to close and latch automatically. For non-operable windows, there are many kinds of wire glass or fire safety glass that holds together even though cracked by the heat. These are good alternatives to plastic bubble skylights.

4. Doors: Solid core wood doors are usually rated at 20 minutes of fire protection, but instead for extra safety consider a metal core door that can be faced in any material you like, and for added safety use a metal jamb. Garage doors are especially dangerous, so consider a metal panel door with an automatic fusible link closure. Be sure it is especially tight fitting because if the wind can slide a burning brand under the door all is lost.

5. Louvers and Vents: Houses have lots of other holes in them that need to be protected. Large vents in the attics and under-floors, that are so essential for comfort in Southern California homes, can be protected by fire dampers with fusible links like those built into the heating ducts of all large public buildings. An alternative is the code minimum of ¼" metal wire screens, but some experts recommend even tighter mesh. Check that all your bathroom, dryer, and kitchen vents have automatic back-draft dampers and fire-rated assemblies where they penetrate the exterior skin of your building. All metal sleeves and hoods should cover plastic plumbing vents where they penetrate your roof. Continuous roof ridge and soffit vents are very effective as attic ventilators, which makes them extremely difficult to protect from wind-driven sparks and embers.

6. Special Equipment: Sprinkler heads on the roof or protecting patios and decks can turn themselves on automatically with a valve that is opened by a fusible link. Design your system so that once the firestorm has passed over your house it can put out all the spot fires on the roof and next to your walls. Assume that at the worst possible moment your house will probably loose both electric power and water pressure, so you might consider a portable generator that will automatically power exterior lights and pump water out of your pool. Design your house so that exterior lights and the aluminum ladders you set up to the roof will be visible from the street to encourage the firefighters to choose your house to defend.

All of these products and materials are available in standard architectural catalogs, nothing here is exotic. A home built using these simple precautions not only has a better chance of surviving a wildfire, but imposes much less financial burden on government and provides much greater safety for the lives of the people who live in it and the firefighters trying to protect it.” https://energy-design-tools.sbse.org/FIRES.pdf

If you think even just a little bit hard about it, it’s pretty obvious that the high-density housing shown should be prohibited - just looking at images of the results of these most recent fires should make that apparent, a chain reaction fire took place:

And even so, some houses and buildings were left unscathed, not even a scorch mark - next to blackened ruins.

So, like COVID-19, there’s nothing novel about any of this, appropriate urban planning policy could have been made and enforced, and this disaster could have been prevented or at least mitigated in large part. Doing the same thing, over and over again, every 20 years or so since 1961, and expecting different results, is, according to one eminent scientist, the definition of insanity.