LA thoughts

The fires are far from the places we used to live, before we left in '63. The closest I've been since then was at meetings at UCLA, which may be threatened in the next few days. (I was offered a post there once, with a raise--but when I looked at cost-of-living it would have been a disastrous pay cut.)

I remember very little of the town. Most of what I know about it has come through pop culture, which is why Sheryl Crow's "All I Wanna Do" keeps coming to mind when I hear reports mentioning Santa Monica.

The contrast of that song is a bit jarring; "have some fun" vs evacuations and loss. But looking over the lyrics it seems as though part of the "fun" is the (lesser) contrast between the revelers and the busy or sleeping mundanes. I wonder if they'd have as much fun if the revels were a community dance, with everybody participating, instead of just a select few at night while everybody else sleeps.

That's a rabbit trail; coming back to the main track:

What can we do to make houses more resistent to fires? Metal roofs would help (it was something like a factor of 5 more expensive than asphalt shingles when we checked; it may be less now. Still it represented an investment of something like 1/3 the nominal value of the house.) Window frames that don't melt in the heat. Siding that doesn't allow embers to get stuck in cracks, and resists burning.

And the painful parts: trees away from the house (no shade), bushes away from the house (gardening and flowers), and so on.

I suppose if we want to build in flood plains we have to build for floods, and if we want to build in chaparral that burns regularly we need to build to resist burning.

Fixing that will take a while, though. In the meantime, they'll have to build more of the same, assuming they can get permits (never a foregone conclusion in California).