While fire hydrants lacked sufficient water, the solution is to prevent preventable drought and restore deserts to the grasslands they once were, rehydrating California.
First and foremost, blessings and well wishes to the people of Southern California.
Unfortunately, the news is not going to tell you very much about what causes fires like this or how they might be prevented.
One factor in these wildfires is high winds coming from the east. Prevailing winds in LA come from the Pacific ocean, from the west. But occasionally, you have Santa Ana winds coming from the east. These winds are hot, dry and sometimes strong. This is a formula for wildfire.
Wildfires can start due to lighting or electrical lines, or they can spread from someone’s Bic lighter or outdoor barbecue. Once started, a fire might go out quickly, or it might grow into a huge, catastrophic event. The difference is whether the ground is dry and the winds are high.
Hot, dry Santa Ana winds
According to Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, husband and wife scientists who grew up in the area, the Santa Ana winds reached 100 miles per hour this week. See this video: Fires, Facebook & Free Speech: The 259th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
What Brett and Heather don’t mention is that these winds are hot and dry because they come from the desert.
Restore the Salton Sea / Imperial Valley area
In this video of mine, I interview Rodger Savory, whose focus is turning deserts into grasslands and claims to be able to cool down and slow down the otherwise hot, dry winds coming from the desert to the east of Los Angeles.
"Turning Deserts Into Grasslands," with Rodger Savory
The desert to the east of LA is called the Salton Sea/Imperial Valley area. This area used to be less hot and less dry. It used to be a grassland. It could be restored to the grassland it once was by using livestock. Modern news consumers are accustomed to thinking that livestock is always destructive, but properly managed livestock can be restorative. Grasslands co-evolved with grazing animals. Many grasslands have become--or are rapidly becoming--deserts because they lack the positive impact of the grazing animals with which they co-evolved.
If the Salton Sea / Imperial Valley area were restored to the grassland it once was, then this would reduce the risk of severe wildfires in Los Angeles.
Weather and climate and the primary drivers of wildfire
Chad Hanson, author of Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and our Climate, says that the biggest factors in the wildfire are weather and climate. When you have a dry landscape and high winds, that is what causes wildfires to burn hot and spread fast.
Conversely, if we could create landscapes that are not as dry, then they would be less prone to severe wildfires. And if we could create a (local and regional) climate that is less prone to strong, hot, dry winds, then we would thereby reduce the risk of wildfire catastrophes such as what we are seeing in Los Angeles.
Using livestock to restore a desert to a grassland might require public expenditures. And it might require the removal of regulatory barriers. But if it reduces the hot, dry Santa Ana winds coming from the Salton Sea / Imperial Valley, then it would be worth it, assuming we want to solve these problems and not just wring our hands at the news coverage.
What really works? Home hardening, defensible space and evacuation planning
Chad Hanson, reference above, whose work is very well researched and whose conclusions and recommendations are very well documented, says that it does no good to try to suppress wildfire more than 100 feet from a home or building.
He says that the only thing that prevents buildings from burning is making the building itself fireproof (a process called “home hardening”) and removing flammable materials from within a 100 foot radius of the building (a process called “defensible space”). He says nothing else works, including these heroic efforts to suppress wildfires more than 100 feet from a home or building.
Besides home hardening and defensible space, we need evacuation planning and evacuation assistance. And yet, less than 3% of public expenditures go toward these proven measures. 97% of public expenditures go toward measures that do not work.
Does Los Angeles drain its landscape dry?
How can the Los Angeles landscape be less flammable?
Los Angeles captures very little of its rainfall. Like most municipalities, stormwater systems are designed for drainage, not hydration. Instead of soaking water into the landscape, stormwater rushes out to the Pacific ocean.
According to Judith D. Schwartz in Water In Plain Sight, every inch of rain equates to 3.8 billion gallons of runoff from LA’s landscape. Even in years with low rainfall, this equates to several thousand gallons of water per resident. Are we going to soak this water into the ground or make it rush into the storm drains and out to the ocean?
Instead of draining this water away, much of it could be stored in the soil and plants.
Think of the iconic HOLLYWOOD sign.
How much of the rain that falls on this hill soaks into the ground? I’m guessing very little. Most of it runs off, leaving the hill and its vegetation arid, without much water in the plants or in the soil.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that LA and California could reduce the severity of wildfires by soaking more rainfall into the ground.
How to soak rainfall into the ground
Please watch this video of Brad Lancaster.
Harvesting +30,000 gallons of roof runoff in tree basins for FREE
Brad is located in Tucson, Arizona, a city whose annual rainfall is similar to that of Los Angeles, about 11-13 inches per year, on average. In this video, Brad provides one powerful example of how to capture rainfall and what to do with it.
This is the opposite of drainage! He is capturing the rainfall and using it to grow native, fruit-bearing trees.
In modern society, drainage is the norm. But we pay a high price for allowing our stormwater to rush into the storm drains. We end up with a dry landscape that is flammable and not able to grow very many plants. But if we capture our rainfall and soak it into the ground, then it becomes available to grow plants.
And then … plants improve the soil, increasing the soil organic matter. Soil that is rich with organic matter then captures more rainfall and grows more plants. It is a virtuous cycle.
Instead, what we have now is a vicious cycle. We send our rainwater into the storm drains, allowing the soil to continue to bake in the hot sun and dry out, making it less able to grow plants or improve the soil.
Eucalyptus is flammable
What else could be done to reduce the severity of California wildfires? Well, we need to understand the costs and risks of planting eucalyptus, a highly flammable tree. Eucalyptus is one of those plants that thrives on fire. It wants to burn. Burning helps its seeds germinate. So eucalyptus has evolved to be very oily and flammable.
Most species of eucalyptus are native to Australia. It is not native to California, or to Portugal, another place where it has been complicit in causing severe wildfires.
Wildfires are natural, up to a point …
Wildfires occur everywhere. And every place has evolved with a certain frequency and severity of wildfires. So wildfires, including severe wildfires, can be ecologically beneficial. But we don’t want to increase the severity or frequency of wildfires by planting trees that are not native and are unusually flammable.
“The revolution will not be televised”
Nothing I have written here will be included in our news coverage. Don’t wait for the so-called news to tell you how we could temper the hot, dry winds by using livestock to restore our deserts to the grasslands they once were. Don’t wait for them to explain how we could make our landscapes less fire prone by improving the soil and soaking more of the rainfall into the ground. And don’t expect them to explain the prevalence of highly flammable, non-native trees.
The media will tell you either that catastrophic wildfires are inevitable, or that--to the extent they are preventable--they could be prevented by this or that political party.
But if you’re getting your information from reliable, independent sources like this, then the unreliable media will become increasingly irrelevant.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hart Hagan is an environmental reporter and ecological consultant based in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. Hart has recorded 378 episodes of The Climate Report, and is the founder of Water & Climate on Facebook. Hart believes that climate salvation lies in rejuvenating our forests, farms, and landscapes. For more on the work of this author, explore Hart's Blog and Hart's Courses.
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