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Featured Replies

3 minutes ago, wood said:

That's nuts. Wow. Takes some big swinging cojones to pick up water out there imho. 

I can’t believe it’s been two hours and nobody has stuck that urban legend of the scuba diver being scooped up by the firefighting plane here.

This level of factuality is disappointing

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  • Sbbruin
    Sbbruin

    OK so we’re good.  At the Dena (old Sheraton) in Pasadena.  The whole hotel is full of Altadenaeans and their animals.  Shit is fucking crazy.  We’ve got 2 cats and a dog in our room. Cats are out of

  • Sbbruin
    Sbbruin

    Neighborhood is devastated. Looks like our house will survive. But many friends and neighbors lost their homes. My kids elementary school is gone. Our country club is gone. Neighborhood will neve

  • So we scored, in a way.  We met with ServPro today, and our place is so much more trashed than we thought.  The outside air smells perfectly fine, but our house smells like a campfire.  He went around

Posted Images

45 minutes ago, shakahorn said:

LOL I'm in IT and sometimes we have to walk construction sites to plan out networks and sometimes they make us wear hard hats...I've worn mine like 10x in 20+ years.  Back when I first got it, the site manager took one look at me and burst out laughing.  Told me to put a few scuff marks on the hat so that no one else would laugh at me.

My wife’s new-ish job has her going out to work sites on occasion and she has to wear all the protective gear (hat, goggles, vests). Before her first visit, I took her new work boots outside and scuffed em up to make them look like they didn’t come right out of the box. 

49 minutes ago, shakahorn said:

Told me to put a few scuff marks on the hat so that no one else would laugh at me.

Woulda been cooler if you'd head-butted him in the teeth with it. For scuffs.

6 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Just so we're clear, we're calling this woman from the video "fugly?"
 

Emily Wahls (@emilywahls) • Instagram photos and videos

 

Meteorologist Emily Wahls - Today was busy — like wake up in the  morning…go, go, go…hardly have time to eat a snack kind of busy. I'm taking  an hour to sit outside

 

image.png.a946265b91af55860d16e5bc179b621e.png

 

image.thumb.png.fa6b78df6d7da17b2ac2cf383b2ede3f.png

 

 

There's a tremendous chance that 80% of you people have never gotten close to sniffing a piece of trim that attractive. And that's after she popped out a kid. 

 

 

I guess I'll jump on this grenade for y'all. I'm selfless like that.

This is a very interesting thread from the Director of UC Merced's Fire Resilience Center. Touches on a lot that has been discussed here already about mitigation. 

 

View from my aunt and uncle’s house on Westridge Rd. near Mandeville Canyon. This is from yesterday afternoon I believe. They are optimistic but not in the clear. 
 

 

IMG_7825.jpeg

2 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

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Would not bang.

Rejected.  Your Mr Perky would fit snuggly into that little fold of elbow flesh.

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3 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

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Would not bang.

Spoiler that shit.

2 hours ago, Bateshorn said:

The controlled burn thing is a bit of a lark.  It's hard to control burn in residential areas, because (waives hand).....Houses.  The goat/brush clearing is actually a significant point, but again: you are talking 100 mph Santa Anna Winds in a defacto desert area, following on the heels of an irregularily wet season.  Brush clearing on a mega basis is expensive. 

Texas had a week long power outage because.....it was "too expensive" to insulate the natural gas lines. 

Control burns work well in rural areas, but believe it or not, in addition to regulations, there is actually an industrial forest fire fighting complex that actively lobbies against controlled burns.  Because 'murica. 

Yeah I was referring to rural wildlands. In WUI areas fuel removal helps, but not by burning it. They aren't going to do that near residential areas. Removal helps. It's not going to prevent the incident, but it can lessen the severity.

Edited by wood

16 minutes ago, mdmost said:

I believe that's the air crew out of Canada. Saw this shot on Twitter. 

Gg1X_8RaEAAlF7O?format=jpg&name=medium

The two Canuck tankers on Flight Radar had call signs with QUE. I assume Quebec.

3 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

The two Canuck tankers on Flight Radar had call signs with QUE. I assume Quebec.

Gouvernement du Qubec, Service arien gouvernemental

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16 minutes ago, mdmost said:

I believe that's the air crew out of Canada. Saw this shot on Twitter. 

Gg1X_8RaEAAlF7O?format=jpg&name=medium

You know that crew is going to go home to to the Great White North and claim total Air Superiority and that they bombed the fuck out of America.  

Just now, Da Fino said:

Gouvernement du Qubec, Service arien gouvernemental

Better be in both language dammit.

1 minute ago, 0xdeadbeef said:

You know that crew is going to go home to to the Great White North and claim total Air Superiority and that they bombed the fuck out of America.  

And not only bombing, since they dropped retardant it was a chemical attack. Of course being Canadian they did not kill anyone and sent everyone a muffin basket afterwards.

27 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Just so we're clear, we're calling this woman from the video "fugly?"
 

Emily Wahls (@emilywahls) • Instagram photos and videos

 

Meteorologist Emily Wahls - Today was busy — like wake up in the  morning…go, go, go…hardly have time to eat a snack kind of busy. I'm taking  an hour to sit outside

 

image.png.a946265b91af55860d16e5bc179b621e.png

 

image.thumb.png.fa6b78df6d7da17b2ac2cf383b2ede3f.png

 

 

There's a tremendous chance that 80% of you people have never gotten close to sniffing a piece of trim that attractive. And that's after she popped out a kid. 

 

 

Didn't mean her specifically, just talking generally they put the hotties away when there's serious weather to be talked about

 

 

1 hour ago, HenryJames said:

So have we solved the California wildfire problem or nah?

I think we're going to go with the Superman frozen lake plan.

28 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

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Would not bang.

im not interested in fooking her elbows man.....

1 hour ago, Iceman said:

For the Palisades fire, over 17,000 acres burned and the Eaton( Pasadena/ Altadena) fire is over 10,000 acres burned.  That's mind bottling.

For a comparison, 32,000 acres burned in the Bastrop fire. So, superimpose the Bastrop fire on SoCal, and this is the result.

8 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Narrator: It Didn't. 

Oh well, sorry. Must have been too big a file. 

1 minute ago, wood said:

For a comparison, 32,000 acres burned in the Bastrop fire. So, superimpose the Bastrop fire on SoCal, and this is the result.

Yeah, but nobody lives in Bastrop...(Yogi-ism)

1 hour ago, Herbie Hancock said:

When I was younger, this kind of declaratory statement used to really aggravate me. It still does, but not as much as it used to as I came to realize that the majority of people making these kinds of statements are either intellectually deficient or misinformed. Or both. So I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are simply misinformed.

Every department/agency has what is called a PIO (Public Information Officer). He or she has been designated as the mouthpiece for the agency when high visibility incidents occur in that agency’s jurisdiction. They have been beaten over the head by city lawyers, HR, and their superior(s) with what to say and how to say it. 98% of the time they are a desk jockey position; not someone that is currently assigned to operations and engaged in daily tasks. If you’ll notice, they almost always have on a white shirt and/or white helmet (and it’s not dirty). If it is dirty, it’s because they borrowed it from someone else. Thanks for coming to my TED talk

 

 

Thanks for taking that one on, Herbie. Nobody's missing any time on the end of a handline because they decided to go do pressers instead. I understand the emotional response from that poster, but it's only that - an emotional, malformed response. And nobody's just letting a school burn because they don't feel like putting it out. In situations like these, as you're well aware and I mentioned earlier, it's a case of triaging the fires just as you would do at a mass-casualty incident. 

3 hours ago, Sgt Hulk said:

For those asking about planes using the ocean. 
 

 

 

44 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

The two Canuck tankers on Flight Radar had call signs with QUE. I assume Quebec.

Yep. Most likely Canadian birds and crews as the superscoopers are a Bombadier and DeHavilland product built in BC and Alberta. The USFS is supposed to have some but these are most likely the two that LA County Fire has on seasonal lease during wildfire season.

7 minutes ago, 0xdeadbeef said:

I'm getting dizzy just looking at this dude.

image.thumb.png.794c6cf4424d1581cd29c32034fa79d4.png

As the call sign dictates, this is the Air Boss aircraft that directs the tankers for air drops.

30 minutes ago, Stunns38 said:

So before there's another freak-out - over them not having hoses on the engine - there are several possible reasons for that.

- they had to leave them behind at another fire because they were in use by other crews/apparatus and they still wanted to keep this engine in service as a manpower unit, doing whatever it could do

- they had to drop lines and leave a fire scene quickly to escape with their own lives

- it could be a reserve engine that simply wasn't even ready for front line service but they took it out anyway (pretty likely imho, since it's an 'all hands on deck' situation where you wouldn't have enough apparatus for everyone who's coming in to work), or other reasons.

Edited by wood

Must be a nightmare running traffic control for all those assets. Especially with lax right nearby

2 hours ago, hookemATL said:

Goats are great.  Low maintenance.  Eat almost everything (except bull nettle and tin cans).  Our herd cleared 15 acres of raw land scrub/yaupon/etc., allowing for much easier work to get dry fuel cut and piled/mulched.

Occasionally, one would get their horns stuck in the fence overnight and coyotes would get a free buffet.  Wandering up to a find a head sticking through a fence attached to a spinal column covered in viscera was metal af.

IMG_7170.gif.d7b1793a40048e57a6dc525a177339cb.gif

 

4 minutes ago, Updawg said:

Must be a nightmare running traffic control for all those assets. Especially with lax right nearby

Air space around wildfire operations become restricted air space. Must get permission from the Air Boss (lead aircraft/ see above) to enter the airspace.

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1 hour ago, HenryJames said:

What about emus to protect against looters?

I think I mentioned that when there were fires in San Diego many years ago, I took several days off at work and evacuated horses all over the county (had a truck and horse trailer, which was also used to haul beer to the old hornfans tailgates).  A few of our horse friends did the same, and we all went caravan style.  A local tack and feed store became central dispatch.  The TV news and radio would tell people that needed help to "call Mary's",  and once we were done with a run, we too called Mary's, and got the next assignment.   The horses were hauled to the Del Mar race track, where volunteers on the ground would take the horses from us, get them in stalls with feed and water, etc.   There we many times when I didn't know who's horse I had in the trailer...in those cases I'd tell the ground crew where I'd picked up the horses, and they would note it. 

After a few days, it calmed down considerably, and, upon arrival and unloading at Del Mar, Mary's told us that there were no other evacs needed at that time.  So, we took a well-deserved breather, and somebody; a grateful horse owner IIRC,  produced a cooler full of beer.   

So, we were just sipping our beers, and I walked along the stalls checking out some of the horses.  The ground crew would use tape to mark the stall with the horse's name and place of origin, and "unknown" on the stalls of the strays.   Anyway, we're walking along the stalls, the wife is feeding each horse a carrot, and I'm calling them by name and saying hello to them.   Usual horse-type names..."Hello Billy Bob"..."Hello Bandit"..."Hello Charlie Brown".   And then I come to a stall where the horse isn't hanging his head out.  The tape on the stall reads "Emu".  Hmmm.  That's a funny name for a horse.  So, in the fog of my exhaustion, I stick my head in the stall saying "where are you Emu" and of course, IT'S A FUCKING EMU ABOUT TO PECK MY FUCKING  EYEBALL OUT.   Scared the shit out of me but I avoided injury. 

 

1 hour ago, Beau Vine said:

I really expected LA to have much hotter weather girls.

Fox 32 is absolutely not a So Cal station.  Fox is 11 in L.A.

1 hour ago, Beau Vine said:

I really expected LA to have much hotter weather girls.

Pretty sure that's a Chicago station... hence the comparison to Chicago..... and the Chicago weather forecast. 

29 minutes ago, wood said:

Thanks for taking that one on, Herbie. Nobody's missing any time on the end of a handline because they decided to go do pressers instead. I understand the emotional response from that poster, but it's only that - an emotional, malformed response. And nobody's just letting a school burn because they don't feel like putting it out. In situations like these, as you're well aware and I mentioned earlier, it's a case of triaging the fires just as you would do at a mass-casualty incident. 

And if no officials hold pressers regularly, you'd have a whole shitload of people saying "why aren't they telling us anything?? They're hiding something!!"

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28 minutes ago, 0xdeadbeef said:

I'm getting dizzy just looking at this dude.

image.thumb.png.794c6cf4424d1581cd29c32034fa79d4.png

Pretty sure that's a map of my wife in Target

8 minutes ago, NorthLoop said:

Pretty sure that's a Chicago station... hence the comparison to Chicago..... and the Chicago weather forecast. 

I used to work for a Chicago-based company and spent a lot of time there.  I rarely saw a woman that turned my head.  Lots of "hearty" women there

6 minutes ago, Redneck Mutha said:

And if no officials hold pressers regularly, you'd have a whole shitload of people saying "why aren't they telling us anything?? They're hiding something!!"

Absolutely 100% guaranteed.

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Didn't see if this was posted, but this was pretty cool

26 minutes ago, wood said:

So before there's another freak-out - over them not having hoses on the engine - there are several possible reasons for that.

- they had to leave them behind at another fire because they were in use by other crews/apparatus and they still wanted to keep this engine in service as a manpower unit, doing whatever it could do

- they had to drop lines and leave a fire scene quickly to escape with their own lives

- it could be a reserve engine that simply wasn't even ready for front line service but they took it out anyway (pretty likely imho, since it's an 'all hands on deck' situation where you wouldn't have enough apparatus for everyone who's coming in to work), or other reasons.

Would it be possible to press the pumps inside the fire engines into service to push water uphill for use on those fires? I recall eariler that there was some issues with the uphill tanks depleting faster than the pumps could keep up

14 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Would it be possible to press the pumps inside the fire engines into service to push water uphill for use on those fires? I recall eariler that there was some issues with the uphill tanks depleting faster than the pumps could keep up

They can draft or tandem draft, but like @wood said earlier, those engines may have been depleted of their hose lines. Drafting (suctioning) requires hard suction hoses (so they don't collapse under the pressure of the suction) and can be manpower intensive and going up hills, requires quite a bit of large diameter hoselines (usually 3" or greater)

This was a conflagration that overloaded personnel and resources. Eventually you have to protect lives and and try to limit damage. Set up a perimeter and try to protect exposures. 100mph Santa Ana winds plus the fire creating it's own firestorm and this is the result. Loss of a whole community.

If you live in or near ATX, this is similar to what happened with Steiner Ranch (much smaller scale) on Labor Day in 2011.

Edited by BillyGoatHill

23 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

I used to work for a Chicago-based company and spent a lot of time there.  I rarely saw a woman that turned my head.  Lots of "hearty" women there

Yep I've spent a fair amount of time in Chicago. That chick is a Chi-town 10. They build 'em thick up there, and I'm ok with that. 

  • Popular Post
Would it be possible to press the pumps inside the fire engines into service to push water uphill for use on those fires? I recall eariler that there was some issues with the uphill tanks depleting faster than the pumps could keep up

Only thru fire hose and not thru the water mains. Pumping water from a distanced water source (hydrant or static draft) to another apparatus that is called relay pumping. There is a wild difference in pressure when talking draft vs hydrant, but you are pumping the water at a pressure to overcome the friction loss inside of the hose x distance of the hose. Because I suck at explaining things, here is my best explanation

Connect to a hydrant on corner of Avenue A and 1st street. Static pressure of the hydrant, which is the psi on my pump intake when not pumping anything, is 80 psi. The fire is 600’ down Avenue A on the corner of A and 6th street. We lay 600’ of LDH (supply line or large diameter hose) from the hydrant to the engine that is making the actual attack on the fire(attack pumper). I connect my intake to the hydrant, then connect the 600’ of LDH to my discharge. I then send idle pump pressure thru the 600’ of LDH that terminates at the attack pumper.

I coordinate my pressure discharge with the attack engine via radio until he tells me he has 80psi on his intake. My discharge pressure will most likely be 160-ish depending on several factors, the size of the LDH we are using and the friction loss coefficient from the manufacturer; among several other factors.


TLDR; you need volume AND pressure to move water. But when you have enough of one or the other, you can essentially move the water source directly to the scene of the fight, as long as you have competent operators and the equipment necessary to do so. I’ve been a part of a relay that was almost 2500’ and at the terminal end we were flowing in excess of 1700 gpm.
25 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Would it be possible to press the pumps inside the fire engines into service to push water uphill for use on those fires? I recall eariler that there was some issues with the uphill tanks depleting faster than the pumps could keep up

NM. Much better explanations from Herbie & BillyGoatHill above!

Edited by wood

I swear I thought I saw a report about damage on Sunset Blvd, but it appears there is only one small fire near there.  Did I dream that up?  My daughter has a show at El Cid next week and they don't know if they should cancel travel plans or not.

14 minutes ago, NorthLoop said:

They build 'em thick up there, and I'm ok with that.

Denzel Washington GIF

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