In San Francisco there’s a unique secondary “high-pressure water supply system” which is fully independent of the regular water mains of the city. The Twin Peaks Reservoir that was built to supply it has two separate basins so that either one of them can be off-line for maintenance when a major fire hits. I guess all of this has to do with the history of San Francisco burning down more than once.
Sounds like another failure perfectly explained by the swiss cheese model. I don't see any smoking guns in the linked article, most of the actions taken seem reasonable on their own and the only reason for outrage is grief and the benefit of hindsight.
Ok. Are you suggesting we don’t make any changes based on what we’ve seen? That we don’t analyze what happened?
Of course there are angry individuals and of course leadership should identify areas for improvement. Nothing ever improves unless people are able to take an honest look at failures and shortcomings.
I certainly hope we analyze what happened. And the linked article, is, in a way the beginning of one. But based on these early reports, it looks like there is no easy solution. It's not one of those "there was an obvious failure here, we will make X and Y changes which will hopefully prevent a repeat failure".
This is a complex system here. The article only focuses on the reservoir, not the whole fire prevention and response; yet that one simple piece of a much larger problem already talks about federal law, water quality standards, engineering culture at the LA DWP, procurement rules for the city of LA, lack of qualified contractors and a couple more issues.
Addressing this in a satisfactory manner may be very difficult or even impossible. Infrastructure needs maintenance and down time. A typical way around that is to duplicate it, but this is probably too costly here. Experts already stated that had the reservoir been full it may not have made much of a difference. So paying to have two reservoirs a primary and a backup that may or may not be useful in case of a fire sounds like a bad solution, tying up precious resources that could be used in more effective fire prevention measures.
Why is it so hard for people to just acknowledge the world is changing, and we had something happen, and we can improve some things?
Frequency and severity of fires is up, and people have been building closer to the areas where they happen. Kinda simple stuff. We either need to build further away or increase resilience (building codes, responses etc).
Changing the climate probably is outside of local control…
>Changing the climate probably is outside of local control…
This is the mindset I'm coming around to.
Whether you think climate change is mostly human caused, or part of some natural cycle, it's happening and it will probably get worse. We need to figure out how to deal with the consequences of it, rather than pretending/hoping we can change the course.
There would've been complaints if the reservoir was kept filled with a waiver, preventing it from use as drinking water due to the contamination from a damaged cover, and no fire occurred.
When climate change events occur, people will say we could've done more (while there is no evidence today there is willingness to pay these readiness and mitigation costs). When they don't happen, people will complain we're wasting money. The only way to win is to manage your own climate and economic risk at the individual level (in the short term). Maybe people improve, allowing for institutions to improve, but probably not. There is no appetite for the will, spending, and economic drag that will be required to fix this. The accumulated off balance sheet debt (the costs to mitigate climate change) has accelerated beyond the light cone of economic potential (structural demographic decline, labor costs increasing as labor forces decline, future debt obligations, etc).
Sure, but reading the article, what processes should be changed and do we have confidence that they will address the issue? The reporting on this ends with:
> although it’s unclear whether the reservoir would have made a meaningful difference in firefighters’ ability to combat the flames. Water systems experts said that with extreme Santa Ana winds that prevented the use of planes and helicopters, the Palisades fire was impossible to control, and that municipal water systems aren’t equipped for such blazes.
Adhering to sensible fire codes. The wind was not the problem, but people keeping their gardens filled with inflammable trash, their outside walls with fire nests, and their roofs unsafe.
Proper buildings were left unharmed. As in the recent Turkey earthquake. Only the illegal buildings were destroyed.
There is no such thing as "Swiss Cheese". We have many different types of cheese. The one with the holes you are probably referring to is called "Emmentaler". Most Swiss find that cheese quite boring and bland. We usually mix it with another cheese.
https://sfpublicworks.org/project/emergency-firefighting-wat...
https://waterpowersewer.wordpress.com/2019/07/01/a-look-back...
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