Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "Using Seawater To Fight Fires in SoCal | Why No Water | Fireboats | Seawater Myths!" video.

  1. Look up Santa Ana Winds. Southern California is famous for them. However, this particular wind event was out of the ordinary, coming in January and with unbelievable intensity.
    4
  2. Thank you. There’s also the factor that these fires moved so fast that by the time you got all these saltwater pumps and hoses set up, most of the damage had been done. If we are talking about what should have been done with the benefit of hindsight, what might have solved the water pressure problem is redundant water storage. Im sure you’ve heard about the reservoir that was down for maintenance? I’m not blaming anyone for that. These things happen. The scheduling of repairs was only a bad decision in retrospect because Santa Ana wind events of this intensity in January are an anomaly. But if there had been two reservoirs, you can take one off line for maintenance and the other one keeps you covered. The problem is that before such a disaster, no one wants to pay for infrastructure that might ameliorate damage. It’s only after the house burns down that the homeowner is willing to pay more property tax to support such projects. (At least for a few years, until they rebuild and forget, and then they scream bloody murder about tax assessments.) But I’m not convinced that lack of water pressure was a key factor here in the spread of the fires. The anomalous wind event blew this fire up too quickly. It was going to burn until it hit the Pacific Ocean, as it did. There really was no way to get sufficient assets in place even if they had a plan to pump seawater.
    3
  3. So if there’s a similar fire in the IE, are you proposing that they pump sea water from the Pacific Ocean?
    1
  4. The wind was actually driving the fire downhill, down into canyons and into populated areas. There really was convection behavior you describe wasn’t as much of a factor here. Wilderness area fire strategy is generally to contain the fire, let it burn out, and dump lots of water on it when it approaches populated areas to keep communities from burning. The firemen can concentrate on the houses on the edges. In this case, the fire was everywhere all at once within a few hours. We don’t usually get this strong a Santa Ana in January. And we’ve had little rain in the past 8 years, in fact So Cal has been suffering drought conditions for more than 20 years, with a few wet years here and there. The underlying fact is that we’ve been experiencing shifts in the climate, and our fire season has gotten longer. When I was a kid, fire season was summer to early fall. Now it’s late spring to the middle of winter, and some are saying we now have permanent year around fire season. These January Santa Ana winds were anomalous for both intensity and time of the year. I worry that the anomaly is the start of a new weather pattern.
    1
  5. Salt water was used to as a firebreak. If you check a fire map of the palisades fire, you’ll notice that the fire did not spread further south than Pacific Palisades.
    1