Greg Pierce
speaker
28 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Greg Pierce’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yeah, I'm in Los Angeles. I'm OK. Everyone I know is safe. A close relative lost their home and plenty of people were evacuated. and facing much worse things than me. But yes, I am in Los Angeles.
I can't say that I had that thought independently. And I guess in some ways, I think, you know, it's a little bit of a boring story, but what the public officials have been saying, though, is true.
by my judgment and everyone i've talked to who actually knows about the topic which is that urban water systems aren't equipped to fight wildfires of this nature but when i first heard or actually saw the smoke plume as i was coming to ucla that day i didn't know that it was going to be such an intense fire and that our you know ability to fight it would be so poor
Yeah, it's pretty simple in a way, which is that the water system in the Pacific Palisades, which is the city of Los Angeles' water system, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest and certainly among the most technically powerful Competent water systems in the county, if not the state, is not set up to fight wildfires.
The fire hydrants and the fire flow are really there for everyday fires, structure fires, whatnot. And that capacity to fight wildfires is not something that I'm aware of that any water system in the world has, especially when they grew this quickly, this fast.
That's not to say that if some things had not been different, that the water would have lasted a bit longer and gone a bit further. But it certainly wasn't going to stop a fire of this nature in its tracks and probably wasn't going to even make a big dent. I understand that's a kind of a frustrating or non-intuitive answer for folks, but that is the reality.
And again, it's been confirmed by everyone who seems to know about the topic. First of all, part of the reason why the water pressure runs dry is that, I mean, rationally, individual homeowners are leaving on their hoses and other things trying to water their own place. So the pressure is dropping because a lot of the private property around is trying to water.
But when firefighters run out of water, the pressure runs low, they go to private pools, because there's a lot of private pools in these areas, which tend to be quite wealthy. And they started to drive tanker trucks up with water to try to fight the fire.
But if they don't have water, they need to get off the ground for their own safety, get out of that area, because there's nothing they can do, and just rely purely on aerial approaches and dropping water. other types of wildfire retardants or foams.
Yeah, and it is the, I mean, you've heard the really big frustration of the fire agency and agencies that they are entirely reliant on the water systems to provide the water. It's not like the firefighters have their own reserve of water. So they do show up and hope, pray it works. And in this case, it didn't work as well as anyone would have liked.
But again, I think in some ways that was to be expected if we were realistic about it.
Yeah, I do get the intuition, but they're missing several things.
Most important, traditionally, although you could say maybe none of this should matter because it's an emergency, is that saltwater's corrosive, so it damages sort of the infrastructure and the vehicles that pick up the water for future use, and it damages the environment and the ecology when you drop a bunch of saltwater on landscapes and leads to other sort of toxic cleanup effects.
Another aspect of this was the unusually strong wind event That occurred, and so asking people to go fly helicopters or I guess maybe planes and try to pick up water from the ocean in those conditions, you're putting people at great risk directly. And that also made fighting the fire
actually for aspects that don't involve water, like aerial fighter fighting, dropping wildfire foams on the fire, which are incredibly important in hilly areas like this, nearly impossible in the early hours of the fire. But yes, in some other ways, again, just our systems, our water systems and our power systems were not built to fight wildfires encroaching right in our urban areas.
So in order to think about really being robust to fight them or really think about not rebuilding in certain areas, but to do that build back, build back so resilient that we could actually fight a fire of this nature. We're just talking about, no one knows the exact number, but five to 10 times more expense. So it probably can be done, but it'll just be incredibly expensive.
It's really just a lot more and sort of, we would say, positive redundancy in three aspects. One is the actual water supply, the raw water. I mean, there's a lot of misinformation about how water from Northern California to Southern California would have made a difference. It wouldn't.
But just having more water in that specific area that happened to have the extraordinarily bad luck of having a reservoir offline is a big factor. As well as the infrastructure, and you heard a lot about fire hydrants. There's not super clear evidence around the fire hydrants performing poorly, but certainly having top of the line and more fire hydrants, as well as tanks, holding tanks.
This isn't very exciting stuff. You need all of that. But the biggest thing is...
probably improvements some of which aren't technologically feasible at this moment around how to move water around and that's really about power and how quickly you can move water around a network and there are some core sort of physical limitations we still face with moving water quickly up hills that we have to i guess burst through as it were if we really want to make systems like this work in hilly areas
Showing 1–20 of 28 · page 1 of 2
Next →