The Firestorm This Time: Why Los Angeles Is Burning (wired.com)

The Thomas Fire spread through the hills above Ventura, in the northern greater Los Angeles megalopolis, with the speed of a hurricane. Driven by 50 mph Santa Ana winds -- bone-dry katabatic air moving at freeway speeds out of the Mojave desert -- the fire transformed overnight from a 5,000-acre burn in a charming chaparral-lined canyon to an inferno the size of Orlando, Florida, that only stopped spreading because it reached the Pacific. Several readers have shared a Wired report: Tens of thousands of people evacuated their homes in Ventura; 150 buildings burned and thousands more along the hillside and into downtown are threatened. That isn't the only part of Southern California on fire. The hills above Valencia, where Interstate 5 drops down out of the hills into the city, are burning. Same for a hillside of the San Gabriel Mountains, overlooking the San Fernando Valley. And the same, too, near the Mount Wilson Observatory, and on a hillside overlooking Interstate 405 -- the flames in view of the Getty Center and destroying homes in the rich-people neighborhoods of Bel-Air and Holmby Hills. And it's all horribly normal. [...] Before humans, wildfires happened maybe once or twice a century, long enough for fire-adapted plant species like chapparal to build up a bank of seeds that could come back after a burn. Now, with fires more frequent, native plants can't keep up. Exotic weeds take root. Fires don't burn like this in Northern California. That's one of the things that makes the island on the land an island. Most wildfires in the Sierra Nevadas and northern boreal forests are slower, smaller, and more easily put out, relative to the south. Trees buffer the wind and burn less easily than undergrowth. Keeley says northern mountains and forests are "flammability-limited ecosystems," where fires only get big if the climate allows it -- higher temperatures and dryer conditions providing more fuel. Climate change makes fires there more frequent and more severe.

Comments

Left out the other stuff.

[gurps_npc]

1) We have been ignoring the fire risk for a long time. Specifically we have stopped all small fires before they get anywhere, which means there are a lot fuel wood stocked up. The smarter thing to do is to let small fires become controlled medium sized fires during the WET season, rather than the dry season when they become huge.

2) We have been putting houses in stupid locations and not requiring appropriate fire prevention measures. There is nothing wrong with building a house in the middle of fire zones. But make it a bunker out of concrete. Yes, it won't look the same as a normal house, so freaking what? A good architect can make a concrete, fire-proof home still look good. Yes it costs more. But less than double, which is what most people will pay.

3) Oh yeah, and stop counting fire smoke from intentionally set preventative fires as 'pollution' while saying that smoke from natural forest fires doesn't count because it isn't man made.