Elon Musk and others on the Right have decided to blame "DEI" for the California wildfires getting so out of control, or possibly for happening at all.
That part of California has fires every winter. They've got native plants that produce seeds that won't even germinate unless they're been through a fire, so you can't claim it's not normal. And every so often, there's a winter there in which the Santa Ana winds aren't the usual 25 to 35 mph, but much higher.
If there's any kind of white guy special knowledge and skill, or secret science, or for that matter magic, voodoo, prayers, incantations or handwavium that can counter fires being pushed through dry vegetation by winds of 80 mph and up, in a region of scarce water, I'm pretty sure California firefighters would like to hear about it. But there is, in fact, no level of training, staffing or demographic adjustment that amounts to a hill of beans against what firefighters there are facing. What they need is water, far more of it than any fire-hydrant system can deliver, and the way they usually get it is from airplanes and helicopters. You can't fly 'em in 80+ mph winds; you can't scoop up water in winds that high and you can't drop it with any accuracy in winds that high. Wind speeds have fallen a little and they are now dumping as much water on the fires as they can, as quickly as they can, and nobody is downchecking pilots for being too pale, too dark, too butch or too femme. It's tricky flying and they'll take anyone who can do it.
So some fire departments in LA County spent their downtime looking at demographics and trying to recruit firefighters from groups presently under-represented in the firefighting staff? So what. If they ended up with a few more who spoke the various languages spoken in their districts, or more familiar with the neighborhoods, great. Fighting fires is hard work, and it doesn't pay all that well for the amount of risk and effort it involves. If you're worried some nice white Christian boy is missing out on those sweet, sweet fireman jobs 'cos a dark-skinned pagan lesbian from across the sea edged him out, you're nuts.
Update
2 months ago
4 comments:
It is interesting to see the general population move from being world class experts in counter drone procedures into having an absolute mastery of firefighting procedures & techniques.
There is knowledge on how to mitigate wildfires. Clearing brush away from homes, prescribed burns in the wet months so they don't get out of hand. And maintaining sufficient reservoirs of water so you aren't in perpetual drought conditions rather than letting snow melt and excess rain drain away to the oceans (California hasn't built reservoirs since the 1960s while the population have massively increased). But none of that is done in Southern California or in state and federally managed forests in California so their wildfires are worse than they need to be.
Mike V -- you mean, other than the 32 new reservoirs they have built since 1969? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_and_reservoirs_in_California
This stuff is easy to look up.
Lots of pushback on zoning/etc. about having trees, shrubbery, brush too close to houses, on the grounds of personal freedom/interference with private property.
As for "raking the forests," that's a whole other can of worms, and not as simple as many people appear to believe.
Mike V - the reservoirs could have been overflowing and not helped one bit. The reservoirs aren't dry - the water towers and tanks that store water for distribution DID run dry. They are sized for normal usage and reserve for normal firefighting. And they can't fill up at the same rate that water can be withdrawn...no system I'm aware of is designed any other way.
Oddly enough, the best way to keep the scrub down in forests like that is probably the use of periodic controlled burns...done often enough to keep the available fuel small.
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