Summary
Wildfires in Los Angeles have burned twice the size of Manhattan, marking the worst wildfire event in the city’s history.
Beginning January 7, the fires have killed 11 people, destroyed over 10,000 structures, and displaced 150,000 residents.
Major blazes include the Palisades fire (21,317 acres, 8% contained) and Eaton fire (14,000 acres, 3% contained).
Estimated losses range from $52-$57 billion, raising concerns about insurance costs.
Experts link increasing wildfire intensity to the climate crisis.
But they’re going to rebuild anyway KNOWING this will happen again in a year or ten.
Money in it.
The climate industrial complex?
Where I live, in Europe, essentially all buildings are brick and mortar, or some variation thereof. Furnishings will burn, but fire is unlikely to run amok.
We don’t really have any serious earthquakes in Europe though. I believe the building codes in LA make it expensive and difficult to build with brick due to the dangers of brick buildings collapsing during earthquakes.
I’ll be interesting how they desgin the city going forward though, surely they’ll need to have some kind of fire-breaking defences in between suburbs.
Meanwhile the state will do nothing to help any of the displaced, letting them sit in camps and temporary shelters until the shelters close due to lack of funding/public interest and the camps get broken up by police. Then they just go from being “displaced” to “homeless” and it becomes their fault this happened. On the bright side, after they are arrested for being homeless, they can be enslaved as firefighters for the next wildfire to come.
There were a lot of things I didn’t like about living in L.A., but I can’t deny that a lot of the areas that have burned were beautiful. I’m glad I am not there to see them gone.
I wonder if the people who were illegally blocking access to Carbon beach lost their homes.
