> Yes, but this problem has only affected the city like this for the last 2 years or so (to this extent).
As someone pointed out with an infographic on Twitter recently, before the Clean Air Act really began to take effect, the air quality was always like this in California summers, fires or not.
> the article says that insurance agencies can only look at historic risk, not future risk
The article actually doesn't say that, that's a quote from a different article that I linked to above. The article only mentions the increased risk of wildfires and doesn't place any blame on California's regulatory environment at all.
>Oakland Fire is actually totally fine, which is weird.
Remember the Oakland Hills Fire? A direct result of complete incompetence of the Oakland fire department.
Hundreds of homes burned in Oakland. Barely any in Berkeley. (For those not familiar with local geography, driving along the ridge it's almost impossible to tell when you've left Oakland an entered Berkeley; the fire certainly wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.)
You could see the line of destroyed homes right up to the Berkeley border, where the Berkeley FD was able to stop its progress.
Oakland had completely broken infrastructure: Fire took out power, which then prevented any pumping stations to get water up the hill. Oakland had refused to update their fire hose connectors to a standard size, so the Berkeley fire trucks wouldn't work in Oakland even if the water were pumping, and other area trucks (probably a dozen cities sent help) were similarly useless. Trucks FULL OF WATER sat unused at the base of the hills because of lack of communication.
And the ENTIRE FIRE happened because the fire chief violated the department's policy: A brush fire they'd put out the night before the BIG fire was what flared up and caused the tragedy. This was a windy season, and their policy states that any such brush fires should be monitored for 24 hours after they've been put out to ensure that they don't flare up again, because of the dangers of fire when the winds are that bad. Story had it that the fire chief (a crony appointment of a useless mayor) told the crew to come home because it was Saturday night.
So if Oakland Fire is actually good now, it's certainly improved from utterly incompetent. Granted the loss of life wasn't bad considering the size of the fire (7 people died, if memory serves), but my sister lost a good friend to the fire, and therefore to Oakland Fire's incompetence. So maybe I'm a bit prejudiced.
Regardless, that die is cast, and I've left California entirely for the time being.
> Can this level of civil disobedience really be stopped by any Californian authority?
Cambria is only 6,000 people, so, yeah, it probably could.
> To allow a situation to continue that puts dead trees ahead of human life is totally insane.
Except that fire is a standard part of the lifecycle of those trees. So, that town is in the middle of a known fire hazard area. And, given the population age and that there are practically no jobs other than tourism in the area, most of the people probably chose to buy a house there after they made their money elsewhere.
This is kind of like people who get flooded after they build a house in a flood plain.
> If there is a bad enough earthquake [the fire department] will not come for you. The sheer volume of fires and service response calls will overwhelm them.
Wish your comment was higher up.
If you're in the Bay Area: sign up for a NERT/CERT class, buy an ABC fire extinguisher, and know where and how to shut off your gas line. Assume the fire department will not get to you.
> from the UK that the number of people I heard on a ~weekly basis who lost possessions or even lives in a house fire went from effectively zero to more than zero.
The entire city, if you’re asking what started the fire ruptured gas mains caused quite a few.
> Has anything relevant changed since then?
The city is full of Lithium Ion batteries that can burn uncontrollably when crushed or punctured. These fires cannot be extinguished quickly unless special chemicals are used.
> I can’t think of anyone I know who has been affected by holes in the ozone layer. Must be a fabricated government boogeyman designed to force me to buy an inferior fridge.
There are many [1] counties in California that come immediately to mind - but I digress.
I'll readily admit that things have changed - organized crime was indeed a much bigger problem in the past - but I might argue that even then the fault lay not with a lack of enforcement, but the existence of really, really dumb laws (prohibition). I might further argue that what organized crime is still problematic, is also a legislative rather than an enforcement issue (current prohibition, which we euphamize as the 'war on drugs').
Even if it's enforcement that's doing the work of eliminating the effects of organized crime on actual citizens - the potential for harm is way bigger from an organization with a monopoly on violence, a state mandate, and practically unlimited coffers.
> We have fires caused by illegal cooking fires at these encampments.
Be careful about tossing around this kind of rhetoric. I heard the same story about a fire in my old neighborhood in LA. It turned out that the son of the head of Chamber of Commerce started it trying to firebomb an encampment.
> It really looks different from what you see from cars. It's like a haze.. sorta like fog, but more gray. But it's very uniform and everywhere.
Cars can cause it too. Long time Los Angeles residents can attest to that. The fuel efficiency and smog requirements in recent decades have made it much less likely though[1].
> From my point-of-view as a former firefighter, I would say this:
> A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two entrances?
I would think that, you being a former firefighter, you’d know that exits (for regular use and, even more so, emergency exits) are not the same thing as (are generally a superset of) entrances.
The plans for the building [0] show 10 escape stairs with dedicated exits (including the four which also have doors onto the two main entrance lobbies for regular use) and dozens of additional first-floor exit doors.
> One of those details would be the presence of a sprinkler system. IF local building codes require sprinklers in dormitories
State building codes in California have for new construction for more than 30 years (heck, California has, for a decade, required them for new single family homes, too.)
If the resigning architect could have plausibly raised the argument “this building will either get everyone killed in a fire or never be allowed by the fire marshal to be occupied because it flagrantly breaks the most basic fire code requirements”, they probably would have led with that rather than fuzzy social and psychological concerns.
> To give an example, houses in the Bay Area has gray/black roofs.
Those are no longer legal. Title 24 requires a “cool roof” *
When I had my roof re-covered a couple of years ago the roofer apologized and said he had to use a light color. Which wasn’t a problem for me so no apology was needed.
> It also sounds like the mayor didn’t bother to answer a request for temporarily rerouting streams to let the fire department have enough water to respond. Because it wouldn’t be equitable to the other people on the island to let that small group have so much of the limited resource.
That would be true if it really was about other people, but the water rights are tied up in multi-national agricultural and development interests.
What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires
reply