#hurst wildfire

[abs0luteb4stard]

[cachien]

The thing about the current California wildfires, as someone whose field of study is literally natural disasters, is that people want so badly to blame someone and to believe humans can fix it. It's the dual thing: something this bad can't just be random chance, someone caused it, and something this bad needs a hero to save the day.

I've seen calls for the National Guard to come in. They're already there, actually. They can't do anything because the Palisades are running out of water to pull from hydrants.

I've seen calls for aircrafts to fly in and dump water on the fires, like they have in the past. They haven't been able to do that because the Santa Ana wind currents have reached hurricane-level windspeeds at flying altitude, getting up to 99 mph. If you fly a plane into that, particularly the kind that drops water and at the elevation those planes fly, the planes will get blasted out of the sky and take the pilots with them.

I've seen people say it's God punishing the democrats. Sure, great idea, but if you believe in the Christian God, He sent His only son to pay for the sins of mankind and stopped inflicting natural disasters on people he disagreed with. That was, like, the whole religion.

I've seen people blame the politicians. Governor Newsom rejected millions of gallons of water. The damn democrats in office enacted all these policies to restrict drinking water access from poor people so that rich farmers can use it all. Both of those statements are spun to a certain political bias and also reference far more nuanced issues than can be summed in a single sentence.

But the fact is this: California's ecosystem is built for annual controlled burns that don't happen and the Santa Ana winds are an annual phenomenon. It's rare that the fires and the Santa Anas collide, but this year they did. And we don't have protocol in place for that. California doesn't have the resources for that. The US responded like this with Hurricane Helene, too- the Dems control the weather and sent the hurricane to wipe out the red states before the election; the good guy national guard will be there soon to help people, the government is handing out money to survivors, the evil government is denying survivors' applications for aid, it's all a conspiracy!

And a lot of it is anti-science conspiracy theory-obsessed MAGA brainrot but even well-meaning right-wingers and left-wingers alike are completely ignorant to the glaring reality of the situation: we're facing the impacts of decades of anthropogenic climate change and we can't save ourselves from it. There are no heroes here and there is no greater power to explain it. The best we can do is try not to let it get worse and to respond to these situations with empathy.