More Fires

We’re safe. Nothing near our homes.

Nothing near Saturday’s wedding venue, although there have been two small brush fires that were in locations that could have exploded into Malibu Canyon. Fortunately, both were put out quickly and held to under 10 acres. The worst problem was some spectacularly lousy traffic on my commute home. (Remember that bottleneck I mentioned about the Calabasas Grade on the 101 Freeway? The small fires were on either side of that, one yesterday, one today, right in the heart of that pass.) Our undying thanks to the fire crews that jumped on those and saved us from a worst-case scenario.

There have been relatively few homes lost – just a few dozen across Southern California. Northern California is worse off.

But I’ve never seen the sheer number of fires all starting up at once. Watching the news where they were listing just the ones that were at least 30-40 acres up to 300-400 acres with freeways closed and evacuations ordered, there were at least seven or eight today. Plus the one by the Getty Museum from a few days ago that’s pushing 1,000 acres and is still burning. Plus the one that started this morning near the Reagan Museum (remember these views? – they were all on fire today, literally), surrounded the Library right up to the building perimeters, which is at 1,645 acres with 0% containment as of three hours ago.

And the winds are still howling. For 24 hours straight they’ve been blowing at 20-30 knots steadily with gusts much higher. And they’re expected to do that for another 24 hours – or more.

And all of the power outages are horrific, all over the state. The killer part is that the power companies, Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison, are shutting off the power for days at a time to millions of people and leaving them totally stranded with spoiled food, disabled people left in life-threatening conditions, businesses and schools shut down, lost wages… And they’re doing it to “prevent” more fires, which would be caused by their shoddy, ill-maintained power lines.

Yet several of the local fires look like they were started by…failures of shoddy, ill-maintained power lines.

These idiots are shutting off the power AFTER the fires start to try to prevent the fires from starting.

Even if we can’t get the morons of our society to accept the reality of climate change, can we get them to accept that time travel isn’t possible, no matter how bad they feel about the legal liability of being complete screw ups?