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Wildfire Devastates California Town of Paradise (apnews.com)
A number of readers have shared this report: Tens of thousands of people fled a fast-moving wildfire Thursday in Northern California, some clutching babies and pets as they abandoned vehicles and struck out on foot ahead of the flames that forced the evacuation of an entire town and destroyed hundreds of structures. "Pretty much the community of Paradise is destroyed, it's that kind of devastation," said Cal Fire Capt. Scott McLean late Thursday. "The wind that was predicted came and just wiped it out."
McLean estimated that a couple of thousand structures were destroyed in the town of 27,000 residents about 180 miles (290 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco, where residents scrambled to flee. The extent of the injuries and specific damage count was not immediately known as officials could not access the dangerous area.
McLean estimated that a couple of thousand structures were destroyed in the town of 27,000 residents about 180 miles (290 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco, where residents scrambled to flee. The extent of the injuries and specific damage count was not immediately known as officials could not access the dangerous area.
You sure about that? My general understanding is the natives used control burning to manage wildfires, something NIMBY white people can't figure out.
can we now call it Paradise Lost?
You sure about that? My general understanding is the natives used control burning to manage wildfires, something NIMBY white people can't figure out.
Yep, certain environmentalists brought this upon themselves. Smarter ones know that controlled burns are necessary time to time for safety and for the long-term health of the ecosystem in those areas.
You sure about that? My general understanding is the natives used control burning to manage wildfires, something NIMBY white people can't figure out.
You're absolutely right. They did use "controlled" burns for a long time.
And yes, towns built in forested areas will burn, not if, but when.
However, assigning a racial component to your comment is ridiculous.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Climate Change is affecting all of us, right now.
The increased intensity of the fires in the west in the last 10 years or so is just an example.
As is the increasingly extreme weather we are seeing worldwide.
But go ahead and keep thinking you are safe and sound, somehow protected from how the planets climate and weather are changing.
Your politics can't save you.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The original people of California didnt live there because they learned the cycle of wildfires made the area UNSAFE FOR HABITATION.
Pre-Europeans, that part of CA was part of the Maidu territory, I believe-- the Konkow people, I would guess.
Why do you think they didn't live in that particular part of the mountainside?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
the tube now delivers 5 pages of 5 year old stuff from bangladesh... so i know whats going on there sort of..
So if it was in Marin it would be important enough to be on the site? Class is the key?
FWIW, I don't think either would belong on this site.
I'm sure we won't hear a peep from 45. He hates California and hates the reality of global warming and its effects. He has hardly mentioned any of the devastating wildfires we've had out here in the past 2 years. He only cares about his egotistical agenda.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
So this is terrible news, but why is this on Slashdot?
A big part of what's making these wild fires so bad is that California cut funding for controlled burns and other forest management techniques you need to do during a drought.
I saw this in my city too. We cut the sanitation budget, including the funds for the guys that go around clearing debris from the storm drains. Sure enough first really big storm floods the whole city.
I've said it before and I will say it again: The government doesn't waste nearly as much money as people think. When you start demanding substantial cuts this is what happens.
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There's nothing "divine" in it. The lesson is that CA politicians should be doing some long and hard introspection about the inherent stupidity of their policies and priorities and the beliefs that generate them instead of throwing rocks at the Feds. CA wildfires are preventable. Just not when you are enrolled in a clown college ideology.
Glass houses. Rocks.
like New Orleans before it (yes, there are ways to build levies that would have prevented the Bush Jr era flood, the Dutch have them). The news to me is we let a town burn down in 2018 when we have technological means (controlled burns and the like) to stop it.
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That was the Chinookan people to the north, not the Aztlan to the south. The Aztlan used human sacrifice, a far less efficient method, to manage wildfires and weather.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I guess we could believe that or we could go with an scientific view.
The largest and more intense California wildfires happened decades ago, even the areas where these fire are happening now had previous fires.
What has changed is we have stopped controlled fires, earlier this year California was going to start again with them so will see how much that helps.
The other problem is that people are spreading out and going out in the wilds more. This has resulted in more fires and fires that do more damage.
Or better yet build the town with materials that aren't combustible.
But that would eat into property developers profits. GOD Forbid!
If you say the same for floods, earthquakes tornados etc, the world would be uninhabitable.
I see, you still haven't learned the rules of debate. Let me give you a quick refresher of one fundamental rule: Whoever makes a claim is responsible for providing evidence. Like this.
Now, you've seen my request for evidence, and even found time to reply. Yet, your reply did not provide the evidence requested — probably, because you don't have any... Ergo, your claims are unsubstantiated — and likely false.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Or better yet build the town with materials that aren't combustible.
But that would eat into property developers profits. GOD Forbid!
Every material used to do this would be required by the State of California to say they cause cancer.
From doing their job and clearing out the deadwood. Plenty of dry timber.
Nothing of importance was lost.
in other news, the sun rose this morning -- probably due to climate change as well.
Forest fires are a thing, and they'll always be a thing. Not maintaining firebreaks around property, as well as letting underbrush accumulate due to fire suppression is more likely the real cause here. (Basically it's better to have a great many small fires, than a handful of very large ones)
And ffs save the climate change attribution for things that are actually caused by it -- the broken record talk has the tendency to weaken the argument, and gets ignored out of hand.
Yeah, and entire town is destroyed by fire ruining thousands of lives. NBD AMIRITE??!!
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Hilarious, thinking your "rules of debate" will save you from climate change. As if rules of debate even matter on some shitty backwater internet forum.
So if it was in Marin it would be important enough to be on the site? Class is the key?
I'm not sure about "class," but apparently the fire makes the news simply because it's a town, not, say, an apartment building
Yes, I'd say magnitude makes a difference. A house burning down doesn't make slashdot. An apartment building burning down doesn't make slashdot. A dozen other wildfires in California didn't make slashtod. Why should this one? Are we interested in fires now?
that's the real trouble liberals have. Yes, there are cases where logging companies have misused forestry policy to cut trees that didn't need cutting. But that doesn't make make the funding cuts for fire safety any less real.
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The increased intensity of the fires in the west in the last 10 years or so is just an example.
Or the lack of proper land management. Controlled burns? Clear cutting fire breaks?
As is the increasingly extreme weather we are seeing worldwide.
This I can see.
But go ahead and keep thinking you are safe and sound, somehow protected from how the planets climate and weather are changing.
I don't live on a flood plain, nor a wildfire zone. I notice weather change over the years, but I'm not stupid enough to live in an area with historical risk factors such as these.
Your politics can't save you.
Politics actually gets in the way of fixing problems, so yes :(
Unlikely. If it cost more to build houses there, they'd just charge more for the houses. Or not build them at all....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Climate Change is affecting all of us, right now.
The increased intensity of the fires in the west in the last 10 years or so is just an example.
No one event, even a wildfire, is really attributable to climate change. Climate change is a long term thing.
In the long term, climate change is exacerbating drought in central California. But it is an effect that manifests over decades, and it is only one of many, many effects that are exacerbating wildfires in CA. (To be fair, many of these other effects are also human related.)
In this particular case, a wildfire in the area isn't even all that particularly notable; it's just the fact that it hit a city that gets it in the news. Otherwise, it's just one more wildfire in an area with wildfires.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Cut it down then compost it. Zero waste, large firebreaks, problem solved. If there's fuel near your structure, remove it. That simple, but people crave the pretty.
Alternate option, suck up the loss in square footage and build firePROOF, not merely resistant, structures. Reinforced concrete is wonderful stuff and dome structures can also be storm proof. Repeating unwise choices won't get different results.
This is how you solve the problem:
https://www.npr.org/2015/08/26...
Note the steel building next to the dome. No eaves to trap flammables and sparks bounce off. Not suited to protecting humans but fine for equipment.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
What I'm saying is that 45 could at least bring the tragedy up, tell the people of Paradise that their country will do what they can to help... in times of devastation it is comforting to know that a leader is taking time to at least ACKNOWLEDGE what's going on. He is not, and has not.
Well, maybe that's fair. Obama did: https://www.chicagotribune.com...
Donald, on the other hand, seems to be more interested in cancelling regulations: https://observer.com/2017/10/t...
He is tweeting, though! He says environmental laws are the problem! https://newrepublic.com/articl... But environmental laws are not the problem https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/07...
He says that water is the problem! https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/07... Although turns out water is not the problem: https://abcnews.go.com/Politic...
Climate change? I never said anything about "climate change". All I care for is Divine Wrath — and though His ways are unknowable, not following rules of debate is likely to bring some...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It's not racist because the poster was denigrating white people.
At last report 70000 acres have been decimated, an uncounted number of structures (including more or less the entire town of Paradise) and I'm sure there have been human deaths; yet you say this is all 'unimportant' somehow?
It's not where *I* live therefore it's unimportant
That's what you sound like; again: was that your intention?
Perhaps you'd like to consider walking back your comment before someone gets the wrong idea about you, friend.
There's a reasonable justification for a cultural component though - by the time the US was colonized by Britain, the British no longer had any wild forests, and hadn't for a long time. The cultural knowledge of how to live within nature had long been lost, replaced with colonialism and unsustainable environmental exploitation. And really, that applies to virtually all of the early colonizers - lumber was one of the chief exports of the American colonies. U.S. cultural was from it's inception a colonially amplified version of European's bent toward domination and exploitation.
Meanwhile, the Americas lacked any significant surface metal deposits to enable a transition out of the stone age, which shaped how many other technologies developed. They also lacked any animals larger than dogs amenable to becoming domesticated beasts of burden - neither elk nor buffalo are easily broken to the plow, and both are far more dangerous than Europe's pre-domesticated horses.
So, in the Americas humans were environmentally restricted to stone tools and manual labor, which made outright domination of the environment (and their neighbors) far more difficult, and led to the development of cultural practices that focused much more heavily on understanding and working with nature rather than forcibly bending it to their will. Both in the short-term, and the long - certainly Europe had little to offer to compare to the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy (one which we based much of the U.S. Constitution) philosophy that the consequences of decisions should be considered unto the seventh generation. It's not by accident that early Europeans discovered American forests lush with fruit and nut trees - the natives had already been care-taking them for millenia.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Where's the shit lord moron from a day or two ago who claimed CA doesn't have many disasters?
There's a reasonable justification for a cultural component though
"cultural component"... sure.
That argument could easily be made.
But we weren't discussing culture.
Perhaps you should go back and read the posts again.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
You mean England, as Britain didn't exist as a political entity when colonisation began. Scotland still had wild forest.
If you're living in a teepee and there's a fire, you just run for it and don't worry about your stuff. Modern cities are rather more complex to rebuild.
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this is the problem with America today. When a tragedy takes some effort to avoid we just throw up our hands and say "Welp, nothing we can do about it".
It's like Gun Control. The stuff the left is suggesting ("assault weapon" bans and banning high capacity mags) won't work. There was just a case of a 61 year old guy with dementia who got shot by cops coming to take his guns (literally pried from his cold, dead hands). But then we've got the right wing saying it's OK for a guy with a long history of beating his wife to be armed to the teeth. It's a really, really hard problem to solve. But we mostly just give up, and when we do do something there's so much fighting over it that we do the wrong thing.
We as a country need to agree that problems can be solved and tragedy can be averted. That old man didn't have to die, and neither did the latest round of 12 shot at a bar. That town didn't have to burn down, and New Orleans didn't have to drown. We put a man on the moon, we can keep one old man from being shot by cops and we can keep towns and cities from being wrecked.
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Excuse me sir, but your comment really makes you sound like a selfish, raging asshole; was that your intention? At last report 70000 acres have been decimated,
A total of 7,299 fires have burned an area of 1,548,814 acres in CA so far this year, and there's almost two months yet to go. So, the 70,000 acres in Paradise are worth reporting but I guess the other 1,478,814 acres weren't?
an uncounted number of structures (including more or less the entire town of Paradise) and I'm sure there have been human deaths;
None reported in the news.
yet you say this is all 'unimportant' somehow?
One fire among many. It's important, but no more important than the Mendocino Complex fire in July (459,123 acres), or the Carr fire, which burned from mid July through August 30th.
It's not where *I* live therefore it's unimportant That's what you sound like; again: was that your intention? Perhaps you'd like to consider walking back your comment
Nope.
before someone gets the wrong idea about you, friend.
Lots of people have many silly ideas.
Natives mostly didn't live in teepees until the Europeans drove them out of the lush areas onto the plains. Pretty much everything in the popular image of Natives is based on the plains Indian cultures created in response to European invasion. Teepees, warrior-culture, buffalo-hunting, etc. were all minor features in pre-European Americans.
And their stuff cost them just as much life-energy to accumulate as our stuff does today - we have all sorts of stuff because it's mostly made by machines and metal tools, which both greatly reduce the cost. They had to make all their stuff all by hand using only bone and stone tools.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Done. The only racial references I see are "NIMBY white people" and your response, and white people anywhere in the world are all pretty much guaranteed to have their cultural roots in Europe. While modern Americans of any non-native ancestry can go a step further and attribute a great deal of their culture specifically to Britain (and Spain, in the West and South), whose colonial influence heavily dominated the socio-political landscape of the early colonies, and continues to strongly dominate the national culture.
Both race and culture flow along family lines. To the point that pretty much everything commonly ascribed to "race" is actually cultural rather than genetic, aside from skin color and a few hair and facial features. Pretty much nothing else has any strong genetic basis.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Fair enough about England - but how much truly *wild* forest did Scotland have? I honestly don't know. Not a whole lot of total land area there to begin with, and I'm reminded of a friend's description of her time in Switzerland - lots of forests, but you can't even take a shit under a tree without someone walking past.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
They can't cut it down or do controlled burns for various legal reasons.
They can't cut it down because in order to do so they have to prove beyond the shadow of doubt that no endangered species would be harmed or lose their habitat as a result.
They can't do controlled burns because a controlled burn can't meet California's emissions requirements for forestry management. It took 14 years to get a permit for the last controlled burn.
All of the recent wildfires would not have even happened if the forestry commission were allowed to conduct routine controlled burns.
Don't you have a country bar to visit with your smoke bombs? Why are you still on here?
The corageous undocumented guest workers are lighting fires to drive the privileged white oligarchs out of land that rightfully belongs to brown people from South America. Once the last white cracker has been burnt to a crisp can we finally establish the new liberal tollerant on the west coast on New America.
Kill whitey. End the Trump oligarchy. Let's burn California to the ground
You shouldn't drink so much coffee. It causes cancer.
an uncounted number of structures (including more or less the entire town of Paradise) and I'm sure there have been human deaths;
None reported in the news.
OK, the news has now reported five deaths. I withdraw that statement.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-camp-fire-20181109-story.html
What an odious small-souled git thou art, XXongo.
There is no such thing as a firebreak large enough to stop a wildfire. The fires we had in PNW this summer jumped across the Columbia river in an area where it's half a mile wide! When you have a big fire in dry, windy conditions, there will be burning embers flying in the air for miles. Clearing your yard is just not going to make a difference. Trees are less likely to catch on fire than a wood structure anyway, because of the water content in living trees. Fireproof materials may well be the only "solution", but it's not really affordable.
If there's fuel near your structure, remove it. That simple, but people crave the pretty.
You are ignorant as to how far a large fire can spread across a fuel gap, and likewise ignorant of what it is to be "fuel". No I do not crave pretty. I also don't crave the fact that my neighbour's house is 10m away from me, none the less I know that during hot dry and windy conditions if his house is on fire there's no amount of land clearing and composting that will save my house, which is precisely why fire departments aim a hose at the things that are not currently on fire while also fighting the fire.
Exactly. Paradise is (or I guess was) just a tiny village out in the middle of nowhere. Nothing of value was lost.
Now if this were a fire raging in Los Angeles or San Diego, then it would be a big deal. Nothing in NoCal is big or important enough to warrant concern.
Or that you shouldn't have let the number of dead trees in the forest reach a record level. Don't keep huge amounts of fuel right next to the things you care about...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Acres burned were dropping until the 1990s (when climate change was, you know, happening). Then harvesting of timber in California dropped dramatically in the mid 1990s, and we see an uptick in fire coverage - mainly driven by California.
Coincidence or causation? Well, given that California has a record amount of dead trees out there, it's not a big leap to say that reduced harvesting is a problem. And given that lots of people in CA believe logging dead trees is bad, we shouldn't be surprised at the fuel - and subsequent fire - increase happens.
THAT is how you cite your argument. Simple, see?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
citing wikipeida as if it is authoritative means you are retarded and citing a news article saying the exact opposite of your claims is also retarded
"Just another day in Paradise!"
There's more to do also. Make sure vents on the outside of your home are covered with a screen mesh. Often sparks get blown along in the wind and get get inside the attic that way. This is how these big fires spread past fire breaks and into homes during the Sonoma fires.
we put a man on the moon, I think we can keep a town or two from burning down. Seriously, what happened to America's can do attitude? What happened to seeing a problem and then solving it?
As other folks on the forum pointed out, you just need to clear the dead tree matter. It's laborious and expensive, but that's it. It means money, and that means taxes. Probably taxes paid by the folks not living there, since a small town near a forest can't afford to protect themselves. Maybe in 20, 30 years that small town becomes a city. That's what economic growth is. We all support each other and that way the country grows and prospers.
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As of 7:46pm today: 6453 residences destroyed, 260 commercial buildings destroyed. 90000 acres burned.
So that's 6453 families who are now homeless and who have lost EVERYTHING.
If that still doesn't matter to you, if you still have ZERO feelings of sympathy for those people, then you are a sociopathic monster and should be institutionalized.
So dissapointed in this community over this. It was not global warming. Power outage just before the fire, in the location of the fire. High wind condition. A series of canyons to guide the fire. I work on and off in paradise. Most of town is gone. People are dead and you shitheads wanna get political racial and push an agenda.
If you think it was I who brought in a racial component, I direct your gaze farther up the thread.
If you don't think there's a racial component to wildfire management, I direct you to Google.
Is everyone blind or illiterate? The "original people of California" is a racial designation.
Read a book. Natives were managing wildfires and flooding on scales not seen again in the Americas until the industrial revolution was in full swing. It's amazing what engineering can do, but it's also amazing what hundreds of years of cultural knowledge of your local environment can do. Only in the 20th century did we start to learn (to not be racist and) what role "primitive" people played in ecological management.
Is it? Where do they make any reference to the *genetics* of the original people, rather than their culture? The only things I saw any reference to was their cultural practices.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Climate Change is affecting all of us, right now.
No, it's because dead trees and plant matter accumulate because controlled burns aren't allowed, so when a fire does break out, it has all that dry, flammable timber there to feed it.
Your politics can't save you.
No, your politics can't save that argument you made about the fires.
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
As of 7:46pm today: 6453 residences destroyed, 260 commercial buildings destroyed. 90000 acres burned.
So that's 6453 families who are now homeless and who have lost EVERYTHING.
Don't care.
If that still doesn't matter to you, if you still have ZERO feelings of sympathy for those people, then you are a sociopathic monster and should be institutionalized.
You're a fucking hypocrite and your opinion is shit. There are people suffering everywhere in the world and nobody has time to worry (or in your case, cry and whine) about them all.
Now 29. Such a douche. And when it exceeds 50?...
If you think there is only one culture of original inhabitants in CA, that itself is kind of racist.
That would work. I read about one man who lost two houses to forest fires, who then built himself a concrete castle. He actually welcomes in firefighters to use his house as an emergency shelter.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Well, as another pointed out, you can build for most natural disasters now. Even for fire.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
It's as true as imagining there's only one culture of modern Americans. Obviously false, but true enough for the sort of details that will survive a thousand years of unwritten history.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Xxongo douche factor vigil day 5.
6000 structures â" mostly homes â" destroyed, death toll at 48, and (shudder) hundreds still missing or unaccounted for.
Look up gestalt. Thatâ(TM)s the result of a combination of factors, esp. when the group accomplishes something (insight, in this case) beyond individual inputs.
People that deal with fires routinely were struggling to characterize this fire. Photos and video showed daunting escapes. Hospitals and other âwell secured from wildfireâ(TM) structures were evacuated. Public officials trusted the sense of enormity they got from first responders. ... and you herp-derped into it and mocked. Douchity douche douche. Even doubled down on your douchery, going point by point when they suggested maybe you should step back and understand the concern.
Direct Energy Weapon....wake up