When I was living in Stevenson, WA in the Columbia River Gorge, the absurdity of watching vast swaths of forest burn down right next to the Columbia River while tankers were being loaded up remotely and driven from miles away (where water treatment was at high enough capacity to support the flow rates) to engage in the futile gesture of aiming water cannons at the blaze, prompted me to ask the Skamania County fire chief WTF??? I suggested a barge (lots of them up and down the river) outfitted with a GE turbine generator powering a monster Tesla turbine (cheap to design, build and maintain and robust against debris/mud/sand etc) to make the fire truck water cannons look like squirt guns. (Yeah, you’d have to anchor it to the shore against the enormous thrust.)
Answer: Can’t hurt the fish. (As though an intake screen wouldn’t be adequate.)
PS: Clearly, Malibu would have the capital resources to create such a shallow water deluge vessel, but since the Maoist “libertarians” managed to destroy capitalism by opposing my suggestion of replacing the 16th Amendment with a single tax on liquidation value of net assets, Malibu’s capital is in a network effect monopoly Fentanyl serenity capable of, at most, listening to Joni Mitchel sing about “The Waves At Malibu”.
Lesbian Mafia
Parasitic Castrators
City of the Fallen Angels
I can only say this of the second to the last time* I interacted with Los Angeles circa 1990:
My girlfriend said to me, “They’re all dead people.” as she and I sat in a Venice Beach cafe.
I had just been sitting there thinking EXACTLY THE SAME THING.
* I did have one last interaction circa 2002 when invited to give a talk on “The Holocaust of The Nation of Settlers” at the inaugural event for a publication that eventually became The Occidental Observer. My host thought he was doing me a great favor by taking me to a posh restaurant. There were maybe 20% whites at most in that restaurant.
What about all those LA backyard swimming pools? Probably quite a few homes could have been saved – and the fire advance reduced – if homeowners had invested in suitable pumps.
Yes but location, location, location. The lot’s value is dependent on its location. If someone builds a toxic waste dump next to your lot, its value suddenly collapses. This was precisely my point: that house stood on a valuable lot one week ago but today it stands in a neighborhood of burned buildings.
Given the permitting delays and the scale of the disaster, those other lots will remain empty for years. The amenities of the Palisades were also destroyed. No one would want to live among vacant lots and no local businesses. The market price of those lots will remain depressed until the entire neighborhood is redeveloped. Finally, because of Prop. 13, the property tax on new construction in the neighborhood would price out most of the former residents. It’s going to be a long struggle back.
Prop 13 was largely a way to make it so that GI generation middle class housing in coastal California could escape being property-taxed into de facto eviction. Don’t want to really piss off guys who actually did kill people by the hundreds of thousands while you’re terminating their bloodlines – at least not until they’re alienated from their boomer children to the point that they buy books like “Die Broke”.
But, sigh, some of them may have opted to pass on their land value to the Boomers who might actually still have 1.2 children per mother.
That may be the real reason for destroying Pacific Palisades. Another reason is that it was 84% white:
Adams quotes Michael Shellenberger:
But don’t be too certain it will long remain a wasteland.
When I was involved with the San Diego Sierra Club, Green Belts were all the rage – and they still are:
Also, hundreds of billions if not trillions of criminal graft has been pouring out of That Unspeakable Thing In DC – and not just over the last 4 years! Watch for any “developments” that take place on that land that some how magically overcome California’s infamous obstructionism.
Possibly a factor. Scott Adams said, “I didn’t know there was a place in the United States that was 84% white.” Adams needs to get out more. Coincidentally, my town is 84% white as of the 2020 census.
Maui had analogous devastating (government-caused) wildfires a while back. Anyone have any insights into what has happened about rebuilding in that high-cost Left Wing enclave? It might be a useful guide about what to expect in LA.
The author of the tweet has a whole string on the advantages of fireboats and the lack of them.
When the guy said NYFD used the fireboats to pressurize the hydrants, the push back was salt is bad for equipment. That type of thinking is why the place is burning. Let it burn because we wouldn’t want to have to flush or replace some equipment.
Salt is also bad for living things in the soil you spray it on. (Along with seawater’s host of other minerals and toxic metals.) Small amounts are tolerable. A good soaking can preclude vegetation for many years.
Google Earth has a temporal sequence of satellite pictures, and the most recent one in which there was clearly water in the reservoir was 2009 (see below). The 23 more recent images in the sequence show empty reservoirs.
Land value - Saline soil land value
Salinization of soil to root depth per depth of ocean water applied
Desalinazation of saline soil to root depth per depth of fresh water applied to leach out sodium
Cost of that depth of fresh water
Rough figures for Malibu
1 ft of ocean water to salilnate soil → 15 ft of fresh water to desalinate
$20M/acre before salination
Rough guess: 20% loss of land value due to salination → $4M
Tier 3 water rate for LA: $6000/acre-foot
The floating cover was created in 2011 and had a small crack, which was the reason given for emptying the reservoir In Feb 2024 or before. I’m not saying it was a good reason.
The floating cover was built to prevent evaporation.
OK, so instead of the reservoir bottom in the subsequent photos, I could have been seeing a reservoir covering instead, and was fooled by the concave shape of the cover. Thank you for pointing that out. The most recent photo is January 2024, so it seems there’s no glimpse of what the uncovered, empty reservoir looks like.
