The word 'why' is interesting as it seems to me to mean - almost always - what and/or how.
'Why did the chicken cross the road?' means what factor(s) motivated the chicken to cross the road. Also, what sequence of events brought the chicken to the road, and how did the chicken get there (walk or fly)?
Anyway, when I hear 'why' I immediately translate into 'what' or 'how'...
Michael Schellenberger also has a substack post today about this situation and its also quite good. He is usually good at sorting out the various narratives that are wrong or partly wrong.
This is a good post Roger, but it won't be useful if policy makers and political leaders are incompetent. It does seem that this has become the biggest part of the problem in the deep blue states. This includes Washington state where we are increasingly a high regulation and high cost state. The pandemic really accelerated this trend. Never let a crisis go to waste and all that.
The most effective policies are ones that address the most combinations of circumstances at the least cost. Since putting out a fires is a race against time of marshalling resources, the key is focusing on response time. This means having heightened monitoring for fire and a rapid response available to every location. The more explosive the conditions the more the heightened response monitoring required. The point where the model shows it more economical to build fire breaks than increase response capability then that becomes the favored policy tool. Fire breaks are also more fail-safe than hydrants and firefighters.
Approaching this question as an engineer with a career in a high hazard industry, the question is, really, "what analytic tools are available to help us look at the problem in a logical and structured manner"?
Computational models ain't the answer.
The BowTie analysis method provides a useful structure for thinking about the problem.
If the top event is "ignition of flammable material" them on the left hand side of the diagram are the factors causing ignition, such as power lines, BBQs and deliberate arson (which seems to have been a factor here). Between these factors and ignition are possible barriers, such as burial of power lines / improved maintenance and access control to sensitive areas. Further thought might lead to the conclusion that there is no effective barrier against arson.
On the right hand side of the diagram are the consequences of ignition. Principally, in this case, destruction of property. What are the barriers between ignition and destruction: Prescribed burning to reduce fuel load, creation of sterile areas, zoning of housing, mowing of grassland, intensive monitoring, rapid response capability?
The Bowtie method then allows for the addition of factors (such as politics) which may erode the strength of individual barriers.
Irrespective of the politics, a model-free objective analysis of the problem in a structured manner should be capable of laying out all the options, strengths and weaknesses from which an effective policy response might be developed.
When my doctoral students started running computational models, of systems that produced high densities and high pressures, a large fraction of them spoke and thought as though the model was the reality. A few understood better at the start, but for many of them it took time, energy, and the experience of predictive failures to beat them into a more realistic perspective. Well, we had laboratory experiments to provide them with predictive failures.
Much natural-system modeling, whether regional or global, does not provide good opportunities to learn by failing. Bad conclusions follow.
In my experience, significant event such as this have multiple factors that come together as causes; what in the medical field that call "constellations" of factors.
The fire service has a model called the "fire triangle". It has three elements — heat, fuel and oxygen that come together and you have a fire. Remove and one and the fire goes out. You can take all of the speculative causes for these fires and relate to any one of the three elements.
Proximal causality: Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst all look like they were caused by electric utilities equipment.
Distal causality: LADWP had no power safety shutoff program despite all the attention of the reinsurance problem in the state, and all the investor owned utilities around them having significant issues with powerlines that cause wildfires over past two decades. Insane. SCE had their 220kV transmission line upwind of Altadena/Pasadena energized. Also insane.
What factors were necessary and/or sufficient for the disaster to occur? Energized lines. That's it. Full stop. No power in the lines. No sparks. None of these three fires.
Factors amenable to policy? Require all utilities serving areas with high insurance/reinsurance exposures to have PSPS programs, and use them. Also will probably need to add LADWP to the state fire liability fund which only covers IOUs.
I just heard on CNN that ATF is in charge of investigating cause of the Palisades fire. That would seem to me to suggest that arson might be suspected.
NYT/LAT have quotes suggesting LADWP broken utility pole and downed wire along Temescal Ridge Trail, supported by voltage anomalies. Feds took over all SoCal fire investigations.
Roger, I did some work on the investigation of fires and explosions in chemical plants and oil refineries. Wrote a book about it, for what that's worth. (Damage Assessment, Materials Technology Institute). When leading such a team, my most firm rule was that none of the investigators were allowed to talk to the press, or TV reporters, or media heads of any sort. The reason was that the reporters invariably got it wrong, and broadcast oversimplified tales which poisoned the well for a serious technical study of causality. I let the corporate public affairs people issue anodyne "the cause is under investigation" statements which usually sufficed to keep the reporters out from under foot for long enough for the incident to retreat off the front page, and off the six o'clock news. That gave us the elbow room for serious evidence gathering, data analysis and hypothesis testing. We had the luxury of being able to just lock the front gate of the plant to control access. For a notorious highly public event such as the LA fires, there is just no way to control access so the proliferation of wild theories and speculation may be inevitable.
Excellent discourse, but let me suggest that you explicitly include what is at risk as a factor. This would lead to policy options to limit what is at risk (e.g., don't allow building in high wind areas, OR limit the amount of combustible material around a residence). There is an excellent picture from Lahaina showing a row of burned out houses, except for one which still has the owners' car in the driveway. Apparently this was the only house that did not have lots of dry plant material around it. This works for coastal storms (don't put high rises on beaches likely to be hit by hurricanes), flooding (require houses to be raised above X ft), earthquakes (build not your house on fault lines)...
A year ago today I was in LA and felt the 4.6 quake. I thought my hotel had been hit by a garbage truck. Flying over, there were fires under us all the way. I took pictures.
I hadn't seen your video of the barn on fire before. I wonder why none of the local news coverage included that.
Rotting hay can spontaneously combust, but that requires some moisture. The hay in that open barn was probably very dry.
I remember seeing the smoke from when the fire started that day. I was driving north on Indiana St. in Arvada. West Arvada looked like a scene from a dust bowl movie with brush, grass, dirt and debris blowing across the road driven by that strong wind from the west. When I saw the smoke I knew it would be trouble with the wind and dry conditions. It turned out to be far worse than I thought.
The wind that day was so strong that a tire store in Arvada collapsed. It just blew down flat as a pancake. No one was hurt, fortunately.
Have the authorities determined a cause yet? I haven't heard anything conclusive.
In the case of California, state mandates have required California utilities to invest in green energy policies in lieu of routine maintenance, equipment upgrades and risk management. Since utility ROE’s are capped, those companies can’t do everything. What about the happy consumers of electricity? Here in San Diego county we routinely pay 40-50 cents/kWh vs about 17 cents nationally. Most of the State’s water supply empties uselessly into the San Francisco Bay, while farmers are rationed water so that the Delta smelt can thrive. This is a symphony of political mismanagement.
Pacific palisades supposedly has 120 million gallons of water storage, 117millionwere empty before the fire, a broken reservoir that was supposed be fixed, money allocated, nothing done, and yet we are supposed to believe that policy has no effect?
With 100mph winds it may not have helped but how would we know?
There are many cataloging the list of governance failures even if Roger doesn’t want to go there. Heads are going to roll I think.
Did you see Gavin Newsome in an old video on X bragging about having removed four water storage dams to restore the rivers and streams in CA? That is the outsized influence of enviros. Salmon are natural and good, human engineering is bad. They are necessary storage and flood control when you have massive coastal populations. I recall the Marshall Fire, also the horrific floods in Ft. Collins and Boulder Co.
Chris Bray lives there and is posting his thoughts including posts from the past few years detailing all of this.
All of those saying “this is not the time to discuss these things” are the people who made all these decisions.
Sitting up here in Alberta, I feel the exact same way about an electric grid that is 100% gas dependent now that we almost lost last January at -40 and such a thing would be far worse than what LA is going thru.
Winter is Coming and the Night King is still ruling the roost in Ottawa with no way to be rid of him no matter what you may have heard.
I've heard that the biggest cause of wildfires in California is faulty power lines. Many of PG&Es power lines are decades past their initial end of life. A couple of years ago PG&E gave in and agreed to bury their power lines. That will take decades and be enormously expensive. In the mean time they need to replace power lines that are dangerously old.
All this is very reasonable, but is still just an intermediate product. How does THIS event alter our model of the causes of this kind of event. Whether it was a power line of a campfire that stated THIS fire, the issue remains, what is the cost benefit analysis of preventing downed powerlines or preventing down power lines to ignite fires AND the cost benefit analysis of preventing campfires in fire prone areas? Did this event bring any new information to the model?
I think causality is synonymous with root cause analysis... a required first step in any real problem-solving.
The problem with the politicizing of the events are two... one it subverts the energy that should go into root cause analysis, and two, it deflects from the needed discussion and planning for REAL solutions.
It seems criminal to me with the behavior of our political leaders in charge to farm political advantage by exploiting natural disasters instead of working to solve the problems. It seems the Shirky Principle to me... that organizations will tend to perpetuate the problems they advocate to solve. It is unethical, immoral and probably worse in a lot of cases.
The word 'why' is interesting as it seems to me to mean - almost always - what and/or how.
'Why did the chicken cross the road?' means what factor(s) motivated the chicken to cross the road. Also, what sequence of events brought the chicken to the road, and how did the chicken get there (walk or fly)?
Anyway, when I hear 'why' I immediately translate into 'what' or 'how'...
Michael Schellenberger also has a substack post today about this situation and its also quite good. He is usually good at sorting out the various narratives that are wrong or partly wrong.
This is a good post Roger, but it won't be useful if policy makers and political leaders are incompetent. It does seem that this has become the biggest part of the problem in the deep blue states. This includes Washington state where we are increasingly a high regulation and high cost state. The pandemic really accelerated this trend. Never let a crisis go to waste and all that.
The most effective policies are ones that address the most combinations of circumstances at the least cost. Since putting out a fires is a race against time of marshalling resources, the key is focusing on response time. This means having heightened monitoring for fire and a rapid response available to every location. The more explosive the conditions the more the heightened response monitoring required. The point where the model shows it more economical to build fire breaks than increase response capability then that becomes the favored policy tool. Fire breaks are also more fail-safe than hydrants and firefighters.
On the percentage of a percentage trick, at least they also shoes the actual change (.05 to .06).
That is better than just showing the percentage.
Agreed. And a proper showing of the uncertainties would make it clear that this change is not remotely significant, practically or statistically.
Indeed!
Approaching this question as an engineer with a career in a high hazard industry, the question is, really, "what analytic tools are available to help us look at the problem in a logical and structured manner"?
Computational models ain't the answer.
The BowTie analysis method provides a useful structure for thinking about the problem.
If the top event is "ignition of flammable material" them on the left hand side of the diagram are the factors causing ignition, such as power lines, BBQs and deliberate arson (which seems to have been a factor here). Between these factors and ignition are possible barriers, such as burial of power lines / improved maintenance and access control to sensitive areas. Further thought might lead to the conclusion that there is no effective barrier against arson.
On the right hand side of the diagram are the consequences of ignition. Principally, in this case, destruction of property. What are the barriers between ignition and destruction: Prescribed burning to reduce fuel load, creation of sterile areas, zoning of housing, mowing of grassland, intensive monitoring, rapid response capability?
The Bowtie method then allows for the addition of factors (such as politics) which may erode the strength of individual barriers.
Irrespective of the politics, a model-free objective analysis of the problem in a structured manner should be capable of laying out all the options, strengths and weaknesses from which an effective policy response might be developed.
When my doctoral students started running computational models, of systems that produced high densities and high pressures, a large fraction of them spoke and thought as though the model was the reality. A few understood better at the start, but for many of them it took time, energy, and the experience of predictive failures to beat them into a more realistic perspective. Well, we had laboratory experiments to provide them with predictive failures.
Much natural-system modeling, whether regional or global, does not provide good opportunities to learn by failing. Bad conclusions follow.
In my experience, significant event such as this have multiple factors that come together as causes; what in the medical field that call "constellations" of factors.
The fire service has a model called the "fire triangle". It has three elements — heat, fuel and oxygen that come together and you have a fire. Remove and one and the fire goes out. You can take all of the speculative causes for these fires and relate to any one of the three elements.
Proximal causality: Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst all look like they were caused by electric utilities equipment.
Distal causality: LADWP had no power safety shutoff program despite all the attention of the reinsurance problem in the state, and all the investor owned utilities around them having significant issues with powerlines that cause wildfires over past two decades. Insane. SCE had their 220kV transmission line upwind of Altadena/Pasadena energized. Also insane.
What factors were necessary and/or sufficient for the disaster to occur? Energized lines. That's it. Full stop. No power in the lines. No sparks. None of these three fires.
Factors amenable to policy? Require all utilities serving areas with high insurance/reinsurance exposures to have PSPS programs, and use them. Also will probably need to add LADWP to the state fire liability fund which only covers IOUs.
I just heard on CNN that ATF is in charge of investigating cause of the Palisades fire. That would seem to me to suggest that arson might be suspected.
NYT/LAT have quotes suggesting LADWP broken utility pole and downed wire along Temescal Ridge Trail, supported by voltage anomalies. Feds took over all SoCal fire investigations.
Maybe should add to policy tools the FERC taking over wildfire safety oversight from the CPUC.
Roger, I did some work on the investigation of fires and explosions in chemical plants and oil refineries. Wrote a book about it, for what that's worth. (Damage Assessment, Materials Technology Institute). When leading such a team, my most firm rule was that none of the investigators were allowed to talk to the press, or TV reporters, or media heads of any sort. The reason was that the reporters invariably got it wrong, and broadcast oversimplified tales which poisoned the well for a serious technical study of causality. I let the corporate public affairs people issue anodyne "the cause is under investigation" statements which usually sufficed to keep the reporters out from under foot for long enough for the incident to retreat off the front page, and off the six o'clock news. That gave us the elbow room for serious evidence gathering, data analysis and hypothesis testing. We had the luxury of being able to just lock the front gate of the plant to control access. For a notorious highly public event such as the LA fires, there is just no way to control access so the proliferation of wild theories and speculation may be inevitable.
Interesting!
Excellent discourse, but let me suggest that you explicitly include what is at risk as a factor. This would lead to policy options to limit what is at risk (e.g., don't allow building in high wind areas, OR limit the amount of combustible material around a residence). There is an excellent picture from Lahaina showing a row of burned out houses, except for one which still has the owners' car in the driveway. Apparently this was the only house that did not have lots of dry plant material around it. This works for coastal storms (don't put high rises on beaches likely to be hit by hurricanes), flooding (require houses to be raised above X ft), earthquakes (build not your house on fault lines)...
A year ago today I was in LA and felt the 4.6 quake. I thought my hotel had been hit by a garbage truck. Flying over, there were fires under us all the way. I took pictures.
I hadn't seen your video of the barn on fire before. I wonder why none of the local news coverage included that.
Rotting hay can spontaneously combust, but that requires some moisture. The hay in that open barn was probably very dry.
I remember seeing the smoke from when the fire started that day. I was driving north on Indiana St. in Arvada. West Arvada looked like a scene from a dust bowl movie with brush, grass, dirt and debris blowing across the road driven by that strong wind from the west. When I saw the smoke I knew it would be trouble with the wind and dry conditions. It turned out to be far worse than I thought.
The wind that day was so strong that a tire store in Arvada collapsed. It just blew down flat as a pancake. No one was hurt, fortunately.
Have the authorities determined a cause yet? I haven't heard anything conclusive.
In the case of California, state mandates have required California utilities to invest in green energy policies in lieu of routine maintenance, equipment upgrades and risk management. Since utility ROE’s are capped, those companies can’t do everything. What about the happy consumers of electricity? Here in San Diego county we routinely pay 40-50 cents/kWh vs about 17 cents nationally. Most of the State’s water supply empties uselessly into the San Francisco Bay, while farmers are rationed water so that the Delta smelt can thrive. This is a symphony of political mismanagement.
Pacific palisades supposedly has 120 million gallons of water storage, 117millionwere empty before the fire, a broken reservoir that was supposed be fixed, money allocated, nothing done, and yet we are supposed to believe that policy has no effect?
With 100mph winds it may not have helped but how would we know?
There are many cataloging the list of governance failures even if Roger doesn’t want to go there. Heads are going to roll I think.
Did you see Gavin Newsome in an old video on X bragging about having removed four water storage dams to restore the rivers and streams in CA? That is the outsized influence of enviros. Salmon are natural and good, human engineering is bad. They are necessary storage and flood control when you have massive coastal populations. I recall the Marshall Fire, also the horrific floods in Ft. Collins and Boulder Co.
Governance of LA is not in my wheelhouse, but no doubt there will be important governance failures at play here
Chris Bray lives there and is posting his thoughts including posts from the past few years detailing all of this.
All of those saying “this is not the time to discuss these things” are the people who made all these decisions.
Sitting up here in Alberta, I feel the exact same way about an electric grid that is 100% gas dependent now that we almost lost last January at -40 and such a thing would be far worse than what LA is going thru.
Winter is Coming and the Night King is still ruling the roost in Ottawa with no way to be rid of him no matter what you may have heard.
I've heard that the biggest cause of wildfires in California is faulty power lines. Many of PG&Es power lines are decades past their initial end of life. A couple of years ago PG&E gave in and agreed to bury their power lines. That will take decades and be enormously expensive. In the mean time they need to replace power lines that are dangerously old.
All this is very reasonable, but is still just an intermediate product. How does THIS event alter our model of the causes of this kind of event. Whether it was a power line of a campfire that stated THIS fire, the issue remains, what is the cost benefit analysis of preventing downed powerlines or preventing down power lines to ignite fires AND the cost benefit analysis of preventing campfires in fire prone areas? Did this event bring any new information to the model?
I think causality is synonymous with root cause analysis... a required first step in any real problem-solving.
The problem with the politicizing of the events are two... one it subverts the energy that should go into root cause analysis, and two, it deflects from the needed discussion and planning for REAL solutions.
It seems criminal to me with the behavior of our political leaders in charge to farm political advantage by exploiting natural disasters instead of working to solve the problems. It seems the Shirky Principle to me... that organizations will tend to perpetuate the problems they advocate to solve. It is unethical, immoral and probably worse in a lot of cases.
Strikes me that the root causes of everything is considered to be overpopulation by the Malthusians in power in Western civilization.