I want to preface that I’m not trying to be argumentative about it, I just have a lot of thoughts about it after spending a month hoping rain would wash the goddamned ash away soon. The measures you’re talking about absolutely help, in normal circumstances. The fires we had were extremely abnormal. We have fire season here, we’re used to the threat of fires and anyone who lives in an interface zone and isn’t a fool will add fire hardening measures to their home. But these weren’t just homes on and in the hills that caught on fire.

Look at Altadena, so many of the homes there were nowhere near a wildland-urban interface zone. When places a mile away from the hills are are getting torched, that’s not what went wrong. The hills were dried to a crisp after 8 months of nearly no rain; climate change caused the lack of rain, and climate change caused the Santa Ana winds to blow at hurricane force. What could anyone have done to stop a spark from happening anywhere? Once a spark happened, that was it. That’s why we had something like 6 fires burning at once in LA county during that, it might have been more.

Part of the problem is that homes outside what is considered the interface zone, whose owners had no reason to believe it was urgent to take those measures, were getting showered with cinders from a mile or more away while subjected to high winds. They were basically living in the middle of town, not on the hillside.

I want to emphasize that fire hardening is absolutely something everyone should do, but that was considered kind of paranoid re: wildfires until now.