LA is burning...again
A large, fast-moving and growing brush fire broke out Tuesday afternoon in Pacific Palisades, prompting mandatory evacuations affecting tens of thousands of people and highway closures, including people who abandoned their vehicles to flee on foot.
More than 13,000 buildings and 26,000 people are in the evacuation zone, which has been labeled "under immediate threat," according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
As of 3:25 p.m., nearly 1,300 acres had burned, according to Cal Fire.
Full article HERE from Fox News.
As of 8pm last night, it was up to 3000 acres and 0% contained. Here was the 'overview' from CalFire.
The Pacific Coast Highway was closed, Malibu and a number of 'high end' housing areas are also under evacuation orders, and apparently a number of people 'panicked' and left their cars sitting in the middle of the road in the Palisades area, preventing fire vehicles from getting through... Sigh...
And if this goes further south and gets into Santa Monica, hoo boy... THAT will be ugly!
The winds are supposed to pick up overnight, so who knows what tomorrow will bring?
And they don't know 'what' started the fire yet, and are pulling assets in as fast as they can to fight this fire, including the National Guard. Oh, and Xiden et al have already okayed $$$ to 'help' fight the fire.
Funny how that happens when the movers and shakers are threatened...
But this is also endemic of the issues in CA with the lack of cutting trees, undergrowth, etc. which just gives these fires more fuel and the canyons up there make it hard to damned near impossible to fight from the ground, leading to lots of water bomber use in VERY dangerous situations (trying to get down into the canyons with aircraft other than helicopters is problematic with the turbulence, tightness of the canyons, etc.
I feel sorry for those folks, and I pray for the firefighters and others putting their lives on the line out there.
I think this is going to drive even more insurers out of California when the huge claims from this one start coming in. What this may also do is force CA to do their own fire insurance statewide, which is going to be expensive for both the poor homeowners and the state, as inevitably, more of these fires are going to happen.
It is just so ludicrous that they have degenerated or retrograded the land management so amazingly far since escaped from L.A. back in the 1970.
Of course, one could see that signs of what was to come even back then, which was why we ran like hell to join one of my sisters in San Antonio when we did.
I still have a lot of kin in that state, and I have no idea how many of them are doing.
And some of them think that *I'm* nuts for living in Oklahoma.
Sigh.
interesting that Biden has promised that the money will be there to help the poor Californians, but when the people of western North Carolina were wiped out by a hurricane, there wasn't any money to be found....