Kilkrazy wrote:
It's possible (and necessary) to live in all kinds of places with different natural hazards, providing the planning and building takes these into account and mitigates them.

Part of the problem in California is that a lot of the human land use actually works against the natural environment, rather than with it, and increases the hazards.

The planting of eucalyptus trees is only one example.

 Frazzled wrote:

 whembly wrote:
...this is made worst because of the Santa Ana winds.

Be safe Californian dakkaroos!

I don't remember santa Anna's in the winter. When did that start?

 Iron_Captain wrote:
I just read that they have trouble fighting these fires because the Forest Service (which has a large role in preventing and fighting fires) hasn't been getting nearly enough budget for years. They even had to reduce their fleet of firefighting aircraft for example. To me, that seems like a bigger (and more easily fixable) problem than people living in fire-prone areas or planting eucalyptus trees.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The 1991 Oakland Hills fire was partly due to Eucalyptus.

That's not southern California, of course.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The 1991 Oakland Hills fire was partly due to Eucalyptus.

That's not southern California, of course.

 pancakeonions wrote:
It's crazy to think that the worst fire in our state's history is this one, which has just exceed the previous record-holder, which occurred only just last year.

The number of people missing in northern California's devastating wildfire has leapt to more than 600, and seven more bodies have been found, according to local authorities.

The missing persons' list has doubled since earlier on Thursday.

The Camp Fire, the state's deadliest and most destructive blaze, has killed at least 63 people. Nearly 12,000 buildings have been destroyed.

Three more people have also died in the Woolsey Fire, further south.

Some corners of the right-wing internet are already cooking up a grand conspiracy theory to explain the fires in California: airborne laser attacks meant to clear the way for high-speed rail.

Videos promoting the conspiracy theory have earned hundreds of thousands of views on sites including YouTube and Twitter since the fires started. The laser-fire believers have even borrowed rhetoric from 9/11 truthers.

“Forest fires cannot melt steel beams,” far-right social media consultant Mike Tokes wrote in a viral series of tweets, echoing 9/11 conspiracy theorists’ famous and famously mistaken claim that “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.”

The idea that the fires were created to make way for a rail line rests primarily on a graphic that purports to compare the areas damaged by fire with the layout of the California high speed rail system.

“California ‘wildfires’ line up EXACTLY in the same path as the ‘California High Speed Rail System,’” the graphic reads.

In fact, as Snopes points out, the graphic is incredibly misleading, comparing fire advisory areas, rather than actual burned areas, to an outdated map of the proposed high-speed rail. When compared to a current map of the rail plan, the two graphics don’t match up at all.

That didn’t stop Tokes, who has palled around with white nationalist figures like Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, from pushing the idea in a Twitter thread that racked up more than 20,000 retweets.

“WOW: This is highly coincidental,” Tokes wrote. “It appears the CA wildfires line up in the same path as the plans for the California High Speed Rail System.”

The idea of powerful lasers shot being used to create fake wildfires has appeared before, most prominently in a 2017 video that appeared another time California was facing serious wildfires.

In that clip, which has received hundreds of thousands of views, an unnamed narrator “analyzes” a burned-down Arby’s and claims the lasers were fired to distract from the Las Vegas massacre.

“Is this the result of direct energy weapons?” the narrator says. “The answer is most likely yes.”

As proof, the laser truthers offer videos and pictures that show some buildings totally demolished by the fires, while other structures just a few hundred feet away from them look fine. Thus, laser weapons.

“Single homes were burned down with no damage to neighboring homes,” Tokes tweeted. “Can anyone explain this?”

But experts, who say it’s not unusual for wildfires to spare some structures while totally destroying others, can explain this. Daniel Leavell, a forest agent and assistant professor at Oregon State University, told The Daily Beast that fires are driven by a variety of complicated factors, including wind, that can produce surprising burn patterns.

“What you can see on a landscape is that whole areas could be totally unburned,” Leavell said.

Backers of the laser theory have also cited pictures that show metal pooling around scorched cars as proof that lasers are behind the fires. Pictures of the pools of melted metal have proliferated on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, supposedly as proof that a laser was involved.

But, according to Leavell, fires can “most definitely” melt some of the lighter metals used in cars.

“It’s certainly going to melt everything aluminum in its path,” Leavell said.

 angelofvengeance wrote:
I think this image is pretty powerful and horrifying. Found it on twitter.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The BBC reports the list of missing is now over 1,000.

 angelofvengeance wrote:
*snip*

Dennis Dickey and his wife Rita planned to reveal the sex of their baby by setting off an explosive device filled with coloured powder - it started a wildfire that destroyed 47,000 acres and took 800 firefighters to put out, at a cost of $8.2m

 reds8n wrote:
..on the subject of fires...

https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1067715324290744321

Dennis Dickey and his wife Rita planned to reveal the sex of their baby by setting off an explosive device filled with coloured powder - it started a wildfire that destroyed 47,000 acres and took 800 firefighters to put out, at a cost of $8.2m

...

2018 is pretty wild eh ?

 Iron_Captain wrote:

2018 is pretty wild eh ? [
I wonder what sex "orange" indicates.

But seriously, people that stupid should not be allowed to have kids. Setting of an explosive in a tinderbox of dry grass? Jeez, I wonder what could go wrong?

 Overread wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

2018 is pretty wild eh ? [
I wonder what sex "orange" indicates.

But seriously, people that stupid should not be allowed to have kids. Setting of an explosive in a tinderbox of dry grass? Jeez, I wonder what could go wrong?

However if they've never before done anything to do with fires chances are they do not realise how fast a wildfire can get out of control in very dry conditions, esp if there is any wind at all. The speed with which fire can spread in dry grasses with wind is very shocking the first time you see it happen.

Thing is making fire is a skill as is controlling it and its a skill the vast majority of people have nothing to do with. They might like a cig or if they have an older house they might light a fire in a grate, but by and large people just don't deal with fire in a big way.

Heck chances are they might have let off many explosions but in either desert or dry conditions away from longer grasses, or through a wet summer/winter period where the grass was moist enough to not catch aflame so fast and spiral out of control.