Greg Pierce
Appearances
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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.
Today, Explained
The politics of 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.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
But again, I think in some ways that was to be expected if we were realistic about it.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
Yeah, I do get the intuition, but they're missing several things.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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
Today, Explained
The politics of 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.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
This isn't very exciting stuff. You need all of that. But the biggest thing is...
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
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
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
Yeah, that's a question a lot of people were asking who were honest about this. But yes, it appears the politics, you know, I'm not insensitive to the personal loss, had personal loss in my family through one of these fires. But the politics are dictating that apparently we're going to try to rebuild back everywhere.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
I do want to make it clear, though, I think we can do, you know, maybe 50% to even 200% better with some expensive but not crazily expensive adjustments that would help us fight the typical fire better. But if a wildfire of the same nature or worse occurs, which is not outside the realm of possibility, then yeah, we're looking at a 5 to 15 times more expensive system. And we could do that.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
We could pay for that. But that's a societal choice. And there are all sorts of sort of trade-off questions and societal value questions there that are really difficult to sort through.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
Oh, absolutely. And you've already seen the politics at the city level, at the state level, and the federal level play into this.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
Well, I don't think it was anyone's fault that there wasn't enough water because, again, from what I've been told and seen, that wasn't really possible. And no one, I can tell you for sure, no one was really talking about this a week ago or calling out that this area needed more water or that Los Angeles Department of Water and Power wasn't well equipped to fight this fire.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
So I think they're going to find things, already things have been found that could have been done better. But I think the finger pointing there is largely political and was started at the city level and just escalated.
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
But in terms of finger pointing about what could be done in the future, I think that's more about how we've allowed people to get comfortable and not really anticipate that the climate change stories that we've already seen elsewhere hadn't quite experienced here with respect to fire were going to come to bear here, as well as us not wanting to pay for things that
Today, Explained
The politics of fire
Once they occur and hit us really hard, we wish we had paid for, but I'm not sure we'll even be willing to pay for again in two years when some of this has settled down and people who weren't directly personally affected and lost their homes, or worse, forget about this.