California Fires - INFO (not politics)
- Thread starter nycfan
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The clean-up will take MONTHS.
Throughout the clean-up questions will linger about heavy metals, lead, asbestos, etc.
People whose homes survived. Do we trash everything inside the house? How many times do we wipe down each-and-every surface? Is it safe outside for my kids/pets?
The Lahaina cleanup took over a year and even today, nearly 18 months later, people are just starting to move back to the burn areas.
My SIL in Agoura Hills had a fire go through her community about 5 years ago. Her house survived and they never moved out. Just a deep clean and repainted (paid by insurance company). But only about 30% or so of the houses in her community were actually destroyed. In the war zone areas of the Palisades, I’m guessing it will be quite awhile before people can return.
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Yeah, just seeing all that still needs to be done in WNC after Helene, I think years may be more likely for the fire cleanup. But maybe the terrain in LA County is more hospitable to the cleanup phase than the backwoods of WNC …
superrific
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To some degree, sure. But there's a lot of vertical elevation out there. Palisades is, IIRC, about 2500 feet higher in elevation than LA. Altadena is anywhere from 800-1600m.
The tallest point in Los Angeles County is 10,000 altitude. The tallest point east of the Mississippi is 6600 feet of altitude.
It is not a height issue, it is an infrastructure issue. WNC has many areas that are only accessible by one two-lane highway. So, it is just logistically difficult to get repair equipment into many of the damaged properties. Plus, the damage in WNC is very spread out and not compact.
In LA, there a gazillion roads to get everywhere. Pallisades has limited ingress and egress, but the damage area is compact and will be easy to access (not to mention the dozens of hardware stores within 30 minutes of the fires). WNC will be much, much harder to rebuild.
superrific
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I understand that. But height is not irrelevant, nor its close cousin, gradients. The lack of compactness is obviously relevant. I didn't want to say much about that because I have no idea how compact the LA fires actually are. I mean, compact compared to a third of a state, sure. I also don't know just how relevant compactness is, given that compactness usually implies bottlenecks. When I say I don't know, that's what I mean here.
When urban areas in California are ravaged by fire, they rebuild quickly (Santa Rosa is a good example). When rural areas are ravaged by fire, they rebuild very slowly (Paradise is a good example). It is just hard to rebuild in rural areas.
superrific
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Santa Rosa is at 50m altitude.
One reason it's hard to rebuild in rural areas out there is that they can be very high. Indeed, that's a big reason they are rural. I don't think we can separate these points. I don't think LA will be as big of an undertaking as WNC but I do think that people in WNC are probably underestimating what is required in LA.
In my experience, people from the Appalachia areas in the US (here I am referring to the mountain range that goes from Georgia to NY, which goes by different names in different places) sometimes don't understand that their mountains are really big hills, compared to most other mountain ranges. And I'd bet that most Americans would not realize that the peak of LA county is much higher than anything east of the Mississippi.