On a day like this, one fire in Ocean Grove could mean there is no more Ocean Grove.
Absolutely - maybe not the scale of LA, but certainly the scale of Lahaina. I don't think people understand how tinderbox dry fuel (houses and vegetation) conditions, very low humidity and hurricane force winds, plus an ignition source can lead to a fire going from tiny to a town-wide conflagration in a few hours. Lahaina and LA, unfortunately, will not be the last such tragedies. I've been involved in a few chemical fire simulations in my day, but those are like child's play compared to a wildfire with 80-100 mph wind gusts.
Reading the article below (a few excerpts from it in italics, below), made it really hit home for me how critical the nearly unprecedented sustained winds and wind gusts were to what happened in LA, despite CAL-FIRE's well-earned reputation of being the finest wildfire fighting force in the world. These winds not only prevented airborne water drops, but they also prevented the initial intelligence gathering and early "attack" aircraft from flying, meaning the whole operation was flying blind, so to speak, preventing the wildfires from being contained while small, which is much easier than battling a full-blown conflagration traveling at hundreds of yards per minute.
As Wayne Coulson said (below), "when the wind is howling like that nothing's going to stop that fire."
I'm guessing the next frontier for CAL FIRE is going to be figuring out ways to fight wildfires without manned aircraft - maybe drone technology could do some of the job - or maybe figuring out safe ways to fly in the kind of winds we had for this fire.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/california-wildfires-technology-war.html
The scale of the destruction is all the more dismaying given how assiduously California has prepared itself to combat wildfires. The state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as CAL FIRE, spends $4 billion a year on prevention and mitigation. Over the last decade that money has allowed it to assemble an army-like force of unprecedented sophistication and scale, with a staff of 12,000 and an aerial firefighting fleet larger than most countries’ air forces.
Yet in the face of some of the worst fire conditions in over a decade, it hasn’t been enough. Though some 9,000 firefighters were on hand to battle this week’s blazes, they were overwhelmed by the multiple wildfires that moved at hundreds of yards per minute. “We don’t have enough fire personnel in L.A. County between all the departments to handle this,” L.A. County fire chief Anthony Marrone told the L.A. Times on Wednesday.
Even the most formidable human efforts are useless when bone-dry undergrowth is whipped by the strongest winds the area has experienced in years, with gusts up to 100 mph. “When that wind is howling like that, nothing’s going to stop that fire,” says Wayne Coulson, CEO of the aerial firefighting company Coulson Aviation that’s battling the fires. “You just need to get out of the way.”
Unfortunately, in extreme-weather events like the one currently gripping Southern California, conditions can be too severe for firefighting aircraft to take off. To get around this, aerial firefighting company Coulson Aviation has developed the ability to fight fires at night, when winds usually die down. But the winds currently buffeting the region have been so intense that they weren’t able to fly even then. “We were scheduled to fly all night, but the winds just didn’t subside,” company CEO Wayne Coulson told me Wednesday morning. “We’ll fly when the wind is under 50 knots. But it was blowing 50, 60 knots last night. It’s been violent.” (The crews were eventually able to get airborne later that day.)
