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by takeda 524 days ago
They did prepare though, 3 days before they got units from north California. If nothing would happen they would be attacked for risking safety of

BTW: which locations in the whole Los Angeles (you know how big it is? actually there's no guarantee the fire works be in LA) you should get fire trucks stationed?

There wasn't any rain registered since April, there were unprecedented (last time we had such big ones was 15 years ago) dry, 100mph winds. This means using air support was also not feasible at the time.

We mostly talk about Palisades, but when watching WatchDuty app, fires were constantly popping up in random places.

It was a nightmare, and it is frustrating to see politicizing the whole thing or criticizing that fire men did something wrong.

Why those people aren't volunteering and helping?

There are some things that is impossible to do with what we have.

Much more effective would be for example having all building up to the latest fire code, but majority are of course old.

1 comments

> If nothing would happen they would be attacked for risking safety of

You’ve pinpointed the core issue. Politicians have little incentive to invest in preventive measures because, as voters, we rarely reward that sort of long-term planning. And who’s really at fault? We are. We don’t demand enough accountability for prevention when we cast our votes.

If they successfully prevent fires, nobody notices—and no political points are scored.

It's the same in Software Engineering, lol. If your service just works no one cares. If you instead have a flaky service, but step in to save the day then you become a hero :)

Though I agree somewhat that politicians don't have as much incentive, but this is what regulations are for. Someone said that regulations are written in blood, because they are results of "lessons learned".

It doesn't help that then those regulations are frequently removed to help businesses and the cycle repeats.