Evacuation plans: the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men (Part I)
[NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series.]
Not too long after the Paradise fire, commenter “Cicero” wanted to know why the people of Paradise left town so late:
I am not clear how close the wildfire was to Paradise the town at its start. But I am concerned with what seems to be a commonplace: denial. Why this wait until the last minute? Followed by the rightfully frightening last-minute escape along with so many others?.
It’s a good question. At the time I didn’t really have a good answer, mostly because there hadn’t yet been news on how evacuation orders were issued. But now we have a lot more information.
The reasons were complicated and distressing, some perhaps avoidable and some not. This was not a town that was unprepared, because town officials and many citizens had long known it was also a town that was vulnerable. Whether it was uniquely vulnerable I don’t know, but it definitely was especially vulnerable. And this was also a fire that was so unusually fast-moving and destructive that it truly may have been impossible to have avoided mass destruction as well as a significant death toll (the toll of dead and missing has been rising, and the missing may number above 600 at this point, although it seems some of the people on the list may not remain there).
And yet all the preparations and plans made by the town of Paradise were inadequate to the actual events of November 8, 2018 as they unfolded. You may have heard the old saying that generals plan for the last war rather than the new one they will need to fight, and this was at least somewhat true for the planning efforts in Paradise as well. But it’s also true that in the relative calm of the planning stages, certain contingencies seem impossible.
Until they occur, that is.
And certain solutions may not be available because the problems are intrinsic in something basic about the situation.
For example, Paradise is a town—like many other California towns in the foothills—that was an old mining town built on a high ridge. The roads leading out—the only ways out—all followed natural paths downward that were relatively narrow. This was because of the given of the area’s geography. Paradise wasn’t like a town in most flatter places, where there can be a great many ways to get out, and broad highways can be built. And in the case of Paradise, some of the roads out were closed early by the fire, and the main road was clogged with what amounted to a goodly portion pf the population of 27,000 trying to get out all at once.
Town officials had actually foreseen that possibility and tried to prevent it from happening, but their plans didn’t work for a number of reasons. First and foremost was the speed of the fire in reaching the town. In addition, the “last war”—a fire that had occurred in the outskirts of Paradise 2008—had taught them some lessons:
…[L]ocals knew there was no room for complacency. A decade ago, the Humboldt fire destroyed 87 homes at the edge of town, and a week later dozens of fires set off by a lightning storm threatened the community. One person died.
Residents trying to flee the 2008 fires were caught in massive traffic jams, flames burning on both sides of the road as they sat trapped in their cars. They clamored for local officials to come up with a plan.
The solution created by Paradise city leaders was a plan that evacuated sections of the city at a time, said Phil John, chairman of the Paradise Ridge Fire Safe Council.
They adopted protocols to convert two-way streets into one-way evacuation routes during times of crises. And some 70 people participated in a recent drill, rehearsing an evacuation down the town’s main thoroughfare. All of this work “saved literally thousands of lives,” John said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”
“There’s just no way to prepare for what happened,” John said. “Unless you had some kind foresight to say there’s going to be a big fire and it’s going to jump the creek and it’s going to burn down the whole town.”
Which is what happened.
“I think their plan would have worked for the 97th percentile fire,” said Bill Stewart, co-director of the Berkeley Forests program at UC Berkeley. “It would have worked if they had six hours to move, instead of two.”
That would have been enough of a problem. But it wasn’t the only problem. The transportation infrastructure was old, but as I already stated, geography dictated the way it went:
The town, on a ridge at 1,700 feet above a canyon cut by the Feather River, is basically at the dead end of two roads, the four-lane Skyway slicing west to Chico, and two-lane Highway 191, known locally as Clark Road, dropping south to Oroville. There are only four exit routes running south — all are in fire corridors.
In the 1960s, when Paradise’s building boom began, those roads would have served a population of some 8,000 people.
On Thursday, they were the primary escape to safety for more than 26,000 people on the ridge.
County emergency plans, updated in 2013, set the risk of wildfire as “critical”…The document described mass evacuations as “challenging … due to limited egress availability of roads. Mass evacuations during a fire event clog roads and add to the frustration of evacuees.”
Still, the town has drilled residents on the importance of leaving, mailing out maps of the evacuation routes, along with reminders to pack up important records and other belongings and to make plans for pets.
But Paradise had other problems, too. Quite a few residents were old or disabled, and many of the dead and missing appear to fit that description. Some residents were rugged individualists who lived off the grid, alone and out of touch. Cell phone service was poor in the town, too, so a lot of people didn’t have cell phones or didn’t have good reception, and therefore ordering evacuations or alerts by text wouldn’t have been possible for many. In addition, there had been a number of evacuations in the past that had been false alarms. If there was denial on the part of some residents, it probably rose from the fact that they had grown used to fleeing for what seemed like no real reason, at the behest of nervous officials.
This time, though, the officials probably should have been more nervous and ordered an evacuation sooner. But that’s 20/20 hindsight. And maybe it’s not even 20/20, because if they had done that, perhaps an even worse traffic jam would have occurred, with even more casualties, because the entire town really would have emptied out at once.
[NOTE: Part II can be found here.]
Of obvious interest:
“But what would we do if it weren’t for the government?”
Make Do…
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/kanye-wests-private-firefighting-force-good
NY has only 4 days of food… you can completely bottle it up and starve everyone with only a few points… oh well… figure that out yourself… there are lots of places like this anywhere there are hills and mountains… i can name dozens… but i can only name one in which the destruction of less than 8 key points would kill everyone…
The local population was about 27,000. So far, a death toll of something like 200-300 seems likely (hoping that half of the people on the missing list are okay somewhere). That would mean 99% of the people got out alive, which isn’t actually a bad record for a fire that consumed the town within two hours of igniting. Horrible, every one of the losses, but it could easily have been much worse. Even if the toll reaches the 600s, that’s a 2% mortality in an extremely fast-moving and very hot fire. I have no doubt that the evacuation planning did save many, many lives.
If you’ve looked at Gerard Vanderleun’s page (American Digest), he’s got a lovely story about orchard owners, all of whose family survived. They’ve lost the house and barn, but not the orchard, because the owner had cut a fire break around it and kept it clear, and the trees were green, not dry.
In some areas (parts of Magalia for sure), cellular is non-existent (there is no cell phone signal at all) …regardless, I dunno if this would have helped get 27K people moving any faster or congestion any less, or prevented the large number of fatalities (some/many that have yet to be discovered). Bodies are being recovered in cars (last night, there were 6 – AFAIR – from a single vehicle). Many had bare’ on an hour’s warning.
…as Kate says, it’s remarkable that plus 99% thankfully made it out (driving through fires).
(And as for that nurse/medic who turned his pickup around and went back through the fire to return to the hospital, to help? Words fail me.)
I’ve noticed in this interactive GIS map (based upon the actively ongoing survey of the area) where single houses have “no visible damage” (I’m quoting), in neighborhoods that are otherwise completely destroyed.
I really want to know why those houses, surrounded on four sides by devastation, made it.
Drop and cover — such towns need bomb/ fire shelters.
How did Dorothy’s Aunt Em survive the tornado?
Tornado cellar.
Basements cost more money. If fire is the big fear, one day in the basement should be possible — but smoke is a huge issue. Maybe even more expensive to get air filters good enough (water pipe style?).
All CA townships should be reviewing disaster fire plans, and how the townfolk might survive a huge fire.
Arson is coming. Lots of arson. ISIS is already supporting terror cells and telling them to commit arson.
It’s going to be terrible.
More cement buildings are needed, too.
I’m reading about how residents plan to return. I hope they have a better plan to stop the fire with firebreaks but I wonder if California will allow that.
In the Bel Air fire of 1961, where my in-laws home was destroyed, a neighbor across the canyon submerged himself in his pool as his house burned and his car exploded.
I really want to know why those houses, surrounded on four sides by devastation, made it.
There are quite a few things you can do to make a home fire resistant. The simplest is to have fire resistant material on eaves or no eaves at all. Also, in the Bel Air fire, windows broke and curtains were sucked out to bring the flames back into the house. Flammable outdoor structures are also bad to have.
I saw a human interest story where some guy got his grandparents out with his boat.
If people really want to live out in the boonies, semi off-the-grid, they might want to consider ham radio. A friend tried to talk me into it about 15 years ago because prior to that, the basic 100W license required a written exam AND a Morse code proficiency exam. Then the Feds dropped the Morse code requirement, and the written exam isn’t bad supposedly.
I grew up in New Mexico and we have lots of little towns in the mountains. We have forest fires but we don’t have the Santa Anna winds blowing the fires so you have more time to evacuate.
we don’t have the Santa Anna winds blowing the fires
The Santa Anas are a major factor and they begin at the end of the dry season, which this year was almost all year. In previous years, the winter rains begin about now. Not this year.
brdavis9:
I think I can shed some light on why some isolated homes here and there made it. I saw interviews with a few homeowners who decided to stay back to try to protect their homes. A few were even successful—one guy, for instance, had some sort of bulldozer or backhoe on his property and dug a big circle firebreak around the house, and also used water to wet it down. And he barely made it. My guess is that some of the people who died in Paradise died trying to save their homes. But a few survived and lived to tell about it, and their homes survived too. There were also some people who stayed to protect their homes, tried, saw it was hopeless, get in their cars or trucks, and got out in time and survived.
Paradise is not a rich town at all. For most people, they don’t have the money to modify their homes substantially and make them more fireproof. But I don’t know if that would have mattered anyway in a fire that burned this hot.
Interesting article on building fire-resistant houses at
https://www.finehomebuilding.com/1995/06/01/fire-resistant-details
(Might have gotten the link from an earlier posting here … if so, thanks.)
Notes some steps to take to reduce heat buildup in the house. Otherwise, I’m told, your non-inflammable concrete or bricks or whatever simply create an oven, and everything within can become ash within a matter of moments, even though the building itself is left standing.
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Since Everything Has a Downside™, I don’t see any foolproof strategy for escaping the mayhem resulting from the doings of Man and Mother Nature. But yes, I do worry about our present reliance on infrastructure and transport. I think we live in a finely-balanced system, with too much interdependence. The business about the predictable lack of food in towns and cities in the event of disaster (including major economic collapse) or outright catastrophe is one such worry.
OTOH, until disaster hits, I hafta admit the same factors make our lives a lot more pleasant, and pleasurable. I really appreciate not having to haul water up from the creek in buckets, and not having to worry about whether there are enough potatoes in the cellar to get me through the winter.
It’s a fast moving fire. That’s all there is to it. I may still fall “victim” to it as I’m part owner of a property in the Plumas National Forest. I just got off the phone with my brother, who like me is royally P.O.d at PG&E for starting this entirely avoidable fire. At the moment the fire is, according to the fire map, five or six miles away from our cabin. But who knows? Oroville is the priority, as it well should be.
I put victim in scare quotes because I have really nothing to lose compared to the residents of Oroville. God save them, and the firefighters who have no business protecting my vacation property that I haven’t seen in at least forty years. Which, if the wind keeps blowing the direction it is, is safe.
I don’t know anything precise about when PG&E should shut off the electricity. The safe thing would be to shut down about half the state when the Santa Anas are blowing. Then Californians from north to south could stock up with five days of food and water to get through the power outages, and this would be repeated several times a season. The entire state’s power grid could falter if they shut off enough of it. I’m not trying to make light of this awful situation, but it’s not always easy to see how to bring electric power to people without any risk.
Actually, all Californians should have a week of food and water stashed to survive the earthquake.
Kate:
Can you imagine if they shut off power to half of California every time Santa Anas blow? Ha! There’d be nothing but complaints and lawsuits.
At some point I’m planning to write a post about the lawsuit against PG&E for the Camp Fire.
Well, yes, Neo, that’s the point. They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
To investigate some planning options for towns, look at the building code for individual structures. In a residential occupancy, under current codes, you have to cover the inside walls and ceilings with Gypsum Wallboard (GWB, or Sheet Rock). The thickness has to be 1/2 inch having a 1/2 hour burn through time. In critical areas, the requirement goes up to 5/8-X rock with a 1 hour burn-through.
The strategy is to keep the heat out of the vulnerable stud wall space for long enough that the fire department can arrive on scene. The same strategy, a delaying barrier, can work for the whole town.You cut the land up into a patchwork of protected zones with clear areas bulldozed which are too wide for a fire to jump. Remove the fuel, no fire, it’s magic.
Another building code protection requires that electrical conductors run in fire protection sheathing and are protected by circuit breakers which open the circuit when enough current flows to potentially cause a fire.
There are commercially available transmission lines which are similarly protected. They are superconducting, self quenching, and installable underground. These can be expensive, but guard against electrical fires and also EMP. They are installed in Korea and are manufactured by American Superconductor.
So if you were a scout, try to remember: Be Prepared!
William Graves,
I had no idea! Thanks very much for the info. That would alleviate a good deal of my electrical-infrastructure worry, as well as those that follow on from it.
“Actually, all Californians should have a week of food and water stashed to survive the earthquake.”
Everyone needs that. It’s why I fill my bathtub at the first hint of tornado season. Now I’ve got water. And yes, insects and other detritus will infect it. Which is why I maintain at least two ways to purify it.
And canned/preserved food? Check.
My younger brother in Chico is hosting a family from Paradise. It used to be two, but one has moved on. I called him to touch base, and we had a few good belly laughs.
This might seem inappropriate to some people. But me and mine prefer to push the laugh/cry limit beyond the realm of what is allowed in polite society.
Happy Thanksgiving.
PG&E is threatened with bankruptcy over this fiasco.
Everything points to a high voltage power line breaking loose and dropping.
This line was left energized for FIFTEEN MINUTES — if some accounts can be believed.
Every second it was down, the line was spewing megawatts of energy into pre-heated — super heated — air.
Think of 10,000 arc welders cutting loose.
This super-heated blast of air is the PRIMARY reason why the fire got rolling so insanely fast.
Steve57 – the Instapundit has mentioned the WaterBob during tornado & hurricane seasons. It is a 100-gallon plastic container that fits in a bathtub. The advantage is that it keeps the dust and bugs out.
I figured out what I would do in various emergency situations (tornado, earthquake, severe storm, and wildfire). Yes, I actually wrote out the possible situations and my reactions. I decided that, in most situations, I would shelter in place. I’ve gradually built up supplies/plans for 3 days, a week, a month, etc. I don’t camp anymore, but I have camping gear still available. I have water and filters, food and ways to cook, etc. I have solar panels with battery storage to be able to recharge phones & tablets. I have radios and lights that are crank-driven, so no need for batteries. I have a go-bag list to be able to know what to grab within 5 minutes.
It may seem strange to plan out different scenarios, but after doing so, I feel calmer when something happens. I am surprised when people don’t anticipate a storm. The time to prepare is before the storm season starts. And there is a season for fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms etc, in all parts of the US.
BTW – a good company is BioLiteEnergy – they have a small camp stove that can use twigs, and the excess energy charges a battery that you can use to charge a phone or light. They have a wide variety of lights and solar panels. I have their mini lights as a sub for flashlights. They may be a bit more expensive, but they also do good work in Africa with their products.
brdavis9 on November 16, 2018 at 4:59 pm at 4:59 pm
“I really want to know why those houses, surrounded on four sides by devastation, made it.”
MikeK on November 16, 2018 at 5:13 pm at 5:13 pm said:
There are quite a few things you can do to make a home fire resistant. The simplest is to have fire resistant material on eaves or no eaves at all. Also, in the Bel Air fire, windows broke and curtains were sucked out to bring the flames back into the house. Flammable outdoor structures are also bad to have.
* **
I saw this article last week, and it supports what Mike said.
https://www.finehomebuilding.com/1995/06/01/fire-resistant-details
Fire-Resistant Details
Studying the houses that survived the 1993 Laguna Beach fire storm yields lessons in building to withstand the heat
By John Underwood Issue 96
“Imagine this: A brushfire, blistering and intense, breaks out on a dry, windy day and races up hills and down valleys, devouring trees, cars and houses. By the next morning the flames are gone, and the heavy clouds of black smoke have washed away to sea, leaving a clear view of charred trees and hundreds of seared foundations. Yet somehow, a few houses still stand, vivid against the backdrop of ruin.”
Sorry – just saw Julie already linked this one.
Blert:
I haven’t seen the data you refer to and would be pleased if your post the reference. I do physics and have a couple of points.
1. You’re right that a downed conductor will arc if it has a grounded conductor to arc to. The support tower would presumably meet this requirement.
2. Air breaks down at about 100 KV/inch (order of magnitude) at sea level, which wouldn’t be a problem in this case (Paschen’s Law).
3. When you get a discharge, it comes as a series of short rapid arcs. Without a streak camera, they appear to be a single continuous discharge. This is true of lightning and arcing to anything of significant capacitance. With a streak camera, you observe a series of lesser discharges. I have personally made this observation. Once the plasma channel is established, subsequent discharges follow the existing ionized path.
4. I don’t understand why an automatic disjunction of the circuit wouldn’t have occurred. Do you believe someone buggered the breaker interlocks? Hoping the answer is NOT that there is no automatic equipment?
5. Equipment exists which is safe from this failure mode, but I’m unaware of more than one testing contract from Dept. of Energy (US) to evaluate its effectiveness. I think the contract was with Edison and Chicago.
Thanks,
Bill
There is a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking going on. The fact of the matter is that engineers and administrators make decisions that involve weighing risk to human lives against cost all the time. There is not enough time and money in the world to design and build our infrastructure and our machines to be 100% safe against any threat. Somewhere along the line, somebody has to say, “Ok, that is good enough.” In doing so, sometimes they get unlucky and someone dies or property gets destroyed.
Speaking as someone who made such decisions, I can tell you that responsible people do not make them lightly and that their failures haunt them.
Investigations of such incidents by professionals are important. They help us learn from our mistakes. But witch hunts by outsiders looking for scapegoats achieves nothing and often compounds the tragedy by destroying the lives and careers of innocent men and women.
TommyJay on November 16, 2018 at 5:37 pm at 5:37 pm said:
If people really want to live out in the boonies, semi off-the-grid, they might want to consider ham radio. … the written exam isn’t bad supposedly.
* * *
I passed it, and I am by no means a radio-tech-geek; did it to keep up with my scouts.
It’s a good idea, but a lot of the Paradise population apparently was elderly and probably not interested in learning new tricks.
If I were disabled and living in a high-risk environment, I think I would seriously consider it.
During the Great Alaskan Earthquake, only communications to survive the event was at the home of a ham radio operator. The guy was part of the MARS network and had emergency power.
If those people move back to Paradise and rebuild they had better figure out a way to protect themselves without evacuation. Fire breaks and some concrete structures to be refuges, maybe. The fundamental problem is that crazy people run California. My son is a firefighter and he pointed out that the state spends ten times the fire budget on the train to nowhere. Fire breaks and clearing brush are not happening. There are no new reservoirs while the population has doubled since the last one was built.
The problem with protecting power with fuses or whatever is that at the other end a short looks a lot like the load. Those lines carry enough current to heat significantly.
There are ways to do it. Looking for arc noise in the line might be possible, but the intensity of the noise signal probably drops off rapidly, and it probably can’t make it through transformers. Maybe the best shot is the monitoring and control (‘SCADA’) network. But power transmission has never been my specialty.
As far as firebreaks: I wonder if it’s possible to use high explosives, perhaps in the form of line-clearing charges, to open large firebreaks areas?
steve57, Happy Thanksgiving to you, and enjoy the family belly laughs. Nothing wrong with celebrating life.
My resident electricity expert says this was most likely a distribution line, not a high voltage transmission line.
Watched the Santa Anna winds blow fire across I-15 in the San Diego wildfires several times and that means it jumped an 8-16 lane wide freeway. Until you see it move that fast you don’t realize what constitutes a meaningful firebreak.
Whether the downed line arced at 5000 degrees or 500 degrees doesn’t matter — it just needs to arc hot enough to light something that is dry enough. And, the heat of the initial fire has no relationship to how big or how hot the resulting fire will be.
Also, a downed power line will arc to the earth itself (or some nice, dry enough, plant) and can set any “tinder” on fire.
Thanks for allowing comments.
The fire triangle consists of fuel, oxygen, and heat. 60 years ago all of these towns had active sawmills and lumber operations removing fuel on a regular basis. Regulators have essentially outlawed any fuel management. This, imho, is the major component. The other reasons listed here are very valid, but we need to manage our forests better akin to how our native Americans managed them for centuries.
It appears from this article that the 4 lane escape route was narrowed down to two lanes (or maybe 3) through town.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/15/2015-paradise-downtown-street-project-reducing-4-lanes-to-2-may-have-created-dangerous-evacuation-bottleneck-during-campfire/
Defund Prog (1984) Ed in CA, tech normal republic Constitution values. It will cost less. Use savings to bolster fire protection and flood protection. The opposite of 1984 style thought, which is the base of all CA problems.
As to the needed width of a firebreak, a lot depends on the ability to begin defending the protected side. With something like Santa Anna winds, just about *any* firebreak can be jumped. But, if it gives you time to begin widening the firebreak, or wetting the protected side, or to deploy firefighting against the smaller fire on the protected side, then you have gained an advantage – maybe a decisive one.
Yes, the key is understanding risk. You can’t eliminate it (though some people think you can). But you can manage a LOT of it, and provide yourself a breathing space in life.
As an amateur radio operator I want to heartily second the idea of incorporating radio into your emergency plans. Hams prepare for emergency response on a continuing basis so that when all else fails, communications for first responders and many others (such as Red Cross Relief) can continue. If you take the time to review a book of questions and answers (see http://www.arrl.org/getting-licensed) and then take a simple test, you can get a technician level license, which will qualify you to help yourself and others in case of emergency. It’s just not that hard and can certainly save lives. Please consider it.
Historically, Skyway was two lanes in both directions, though traffic flow became such that Paradise officials likened the road to having a freeway running through the middle of town. The town’s solution was to restripe the road to force traffic to slow down.
This quote from the Watts up article is an example of “modern” traffic “calming” that many small cities are doing. I was on the traffic commission of my Orange County city for years. Local homeowners and businesses complain about traffic speed. It is harmless, although occasionally annoying, to be purposely slowed down to suit the local folks but, in a city with such a fire history, it is insane. The businesses wanted more parking. The city accommodated them at the cost of probably around 600 lives. The parking could have been built off the road at the expense of the businesses. Instead, the city accommodated them and now the city may have killed itself.
I suppose a safety measure of having a clear-cut “green belt” surrounding the town proper was considered out-of-bounds by the “getting one with nature” members of the town?
askeptic:
That’s really not the sort of town we’re talking about here. The layout was haphazard and followed the old mining routes. The town is in a poorer area of California, not a rich one, and money is definitely an issue. The “getting one with nature” group is mostly about hunting and fishing and that sort of thing.
MikeK:
I don’t know what “restripe the road” is about in terms of how it would slow traffic down. However, I am almost 100% sure that it wasn’t any measures like that causing the destruction of the town. The fire raged through the entire town very quickly and destroyed it, and the road configuration and traffic only had to do with the speed and ease of evacuation of people in vehicles. The traffic wasn’t slowed down by how the stripes were done, it was slowed down by the fact that virtually the whole town was trying to get out at once through a 2-lane road that could not possibly have accommodated that volume of traffic. As for loss of life, the vast majority of people who died were killed not on the road and not getting to the road, they were killed in their homes.
the road configuration and traffic only had to do with the speed and ease of evacuation of people in vehicles. The traffic wasn’t slowed down by how the stripes were done, it was slowed down by the fact that virtually the whole town was trying to get out at once through a 2-lane road that could not possibly have
The point I tried to make was that the city had narrowed the road from 4 to 2 lanes to accommodate more parking for the business district. The traffic jam did kill some people and forced others to flee on foot. Look at the image of the road. It was narrowed by building “curbs” that extended out into the previous lateral lanes. The issue I addressed there was the traffic, not the speed of the fire or the homes destroyed. It was just about the evacuation.
MikeK:
Yes, but when you used the term “now the city may have killed itself” that certainly seemed to refer to the loss of buildings and loss of life rather than the evacuation itself.
As you know, even at its widest, Skyway is a 2-lane-each-way road. There is no way on earth the town’s population was getting out of there without bottlenecks. Would it have been marginally better if it hadn’t been narrowed for a portion of its journey through the town? Of course. But a huge bottleneck was inevitable.
The road goes through the town, but the majority of the road is not in the town; it’s the conduit from Paradise to Chico. The majority of the road is 2-lanes-each-way. I don’t know where most of the cars were abandoned, and whether it was in town or on the stretch to Chico later on. In the photo at the link you gave, the abandoned cars don’t look like that’s in town, but it’s really hard to tell. That photo does not represent the cars where they were originally abandoned, either, although I’m assuming it’s certainly very near where they were abandoned. The descriptions I’ve read of the situation is that bulldozers came and bulldozed a lot of the cars to the side of the road.
Most of the dead never even got out of their homes, so traffic jams were not the issue for them. I think the main issue was the warning system (for example, late sleepers who didn’t keep their phones on or didn’t hear their phones or answer them would have died), as well as the fact that a great many residents of Paradise were quite elderly and some were disabled.
As you know, even at its widest, Skyway is a 2-lane-each-way road. There is no way on earth the town’s population was getting out of there without bottlenecks. Would it have been marginally better if it hadn’t been narrowed for a portion of its journey through the town? Of course. But a huge bottleneck was inevitable.
Oh, I agree. My point was just that the Mayor contributed by ignoring the evacuation issue to accommodate local business which may turn out to have been a significant factor.
I talked to my fireman son just now. He has not been home in 10 days. He said the fire was moving so fast, “a football field every 6 seconds,” that evacuation was secondary. He also said there have been very few CalFire people into the town yet. I expect the death toll will be at least 600.
Have you seen the scorched remnants of the truck he brought back?
I live in awe of the truck I brought home with me.
The 2.7 was birthed by the commercial truck division. It’s not fast, it’s not flashy, it just goes. And I love it, It’s a jewel.
https://www.carscoops.com/2018/11/toyota-usa-replace-heroic-nurses-charred-tundra-drove-californian-fires/
I wouldn’t do it myself. My pitch would be, “Our truck will carry you to h&ll and back. It’s not like we are surprised,”
Roads help, but CA doesn’t like roads. A free hand to fight fires in Wilderness areas would help, but they’re sacrosanct. Fuel breaks (fire break with low flammable vegetation) maintained & expanded over existing easements (highway, railroad & power lines) could have a significant impact (especially all three), for the price/year of what’s spent every month on CA High Speed Rail. But there’s zero chance CA will do any of these things – CA is “woke” & don’t feelz like doing that.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/11/one-mile-barriers-to-forest-fires-controlled-burns-and-fuel-breaks-1957-1977.html?fbclid=IwAR10xi2ksvWiwSX-s8ZgAPT_Vlqr8eO5-iS5wcwNtzjwu4vYRl4mXHrjJ3E
Great story, steve57, about the Toyota driver who went back twice to rescue patients. Toxic masculinity, obviously.
You mentioned fire risk to Oroville. Are they okay there? And how about Chico?
The other reasons listed here are very valid, but we need to manage our forests better akin to how our native Americans managed them for centuries.
The first half is correct. The second half is utter bullcrap. It is, in fact, a reversion to “Native American” management methods driven by eco-faith that is partly due to the problem here. The Native Americans didn’t manage the forests. As hunter/gatherers, they simply utilized them. Lacking any significant tooling for lumbering, their impact of the forests was minimal. The notion of Native American forest management is part and parcel of the whole “noble savage” mythos. The Europeans, especially the Germans, have been “managing” their forests quite well for CENTURIES. And yes, Euros also have fires that get out of control. Such fires are also most troublesome in the same sort of areas, semi-arid.l (See big fires in Greece and France this last year.)
San Diego county resident here, been through three Santa Ana fire events (1996, 2003, 2007). In 2007, SDGE (local power company) got “burned” by having one of their back-country lines blow down and start one of the two major fires (the other was started by human error), the fires merged. SDGE got a lot of heat about this, so now they proactively shut off their circuits.
Last week was a fairly big Santa Ana event in SD County, so they shut off power early in the week throughout the back country. I was up all night, monitoring it on their site, sdgeweather.com. They’ve also installed hundreds of weather stations along their lines, so they seem to have really good real-time insight into where the problems with wind are occurring.
It really bothers me that State/local do nothing about prevention. In SoCal, the issue is the scrubby brush that grows everywhere. During the rainy season, I mow over it, and it really doesn’t grow back that much for the rest of the year. A county-wide effort to do that type of mowing would make a difference.
I’ve only seen one controlled burn on Palomar Mountain in the past several years. It seems that they could do those on a more frequent basis.
Finally, we are really not pleased that so much state money has gone to the “bullet train”, Billions (with a capital B). That money could have bought and staffed a fleet of the 747 VLT planes, or the DC10 tankers, or a mix of smaller planes and helicoptors. I realize that air attack is not the be-all, end-all for fire fighting, but it is very irritating to hear that those resources are unaffordable when so much has been wasted (to say nothing of money going to illegal alien programs).
I have a comment in the spam filter, probably, about an article appearing in the WSJ yesterday detailing a joint effort of environmentalists and logging concerns to thin the forests in the Sierras. Too little, too late for Paradise, but a hopeful sign for better forest management.
BikerDad: support for you on the later post:
https://www.thenewneo.com/2018/11/17/evacuation-plans-the-best-laid-schemes-o-mice-an-men-part-ii/#comment-2412391
Barry Meislin on November 18, 2018 at 8:49 am at 8:49 am said:
Slightly off-topic, but worth noting (H/T Instapundit):
https://sacramentocitizen.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/ca-gov-jerry-brown-vetoed-bipartisan-wildfire-management-bill-in-2016/?fbclid=IwAR0Dfef8SgqbW84ShzY5IAuLZcU9OHWmbYiUOsdZLi7nyyOF33ikKFfjM6Q
MikeK on November 18, 2018 at 9:00 am at 9:00 am said:
John Moorlach, the state Senator referred to in that article above is a serious guy and his bill was passed unanimously by both houses of the legislature. Then Brown vetoed it. Moorlach is the guy who, as a private practice accountant, predicted the Orange County bankruptcy in 1994. The LA Times printed an editorial dismissing his warning and the bankruptcy came six months later. The bill would have helped create fire breaks around utility lines. The cause of this fire.
Barry Meislin on November 18, 2018 at 9:48 am at 9:48 am said:
Yes, Jerry Brown (a member in excellent standing of the “Never-Let-a-Crisis-Go-to-Waste Club”):
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/416167-california-governor-on-wildfires-this-is-the-new-abnormal
AKA, no shame. (Moreover, I’m particularly interested in the conflict-of-interest angle noted in the one of the comments to the original post.)