Is there no room for common sense here?

The Washington Post has an article with the headline "Why Los Angeles was unprepared for this fire".

I have a problem starting right there - the headline seems to assume that because the fire happened, LA was ipso facto "unprepared" for it.   

Here's an early paragraph:

Experts said several key factors — including urban sprawl, a resistance to clearing vegetation around homes, and a water system that’s not designed to combat multiple major blazes at once — left L.A. exposed to disaster. As climate change fuels record heat, leaving the hillsides primed for wildfires to grow swiftly into massive conflagrations, these factors led to catastrophe.

So "urban sprawl" - that happened many decades ago - is partly to blame?   Well, I suppose humans learning to walk upright and build houses out of combustible material has a bit to do with it too, but seems not that much point in talking about it.   

Sure, you can complain about the design of new subdivisions, I suppose:

Zeke Lunder, a wildfire mapping expert in Chico, California, and director of an online outlet devoted to information about fires called the Lookout, said the location and design of the Palisades neighborhood, tucked between Topanga State Park and the Pacific Ocean, made it especially vulnerable to fire — and almost impossible to protect.

I think that there are likely realistic limitations though, when trying to deal with this.  Far better, I would assume, to require the new homes built to replace the old ones to have vastly improved resistance to catching alight from airborne embers - although even then, I suspect it may be difficult to make it foolproof as well as having a house attractive to the eye.

My biggest bugbear is one we saw in a different context in the Australian bushfires - the issue of clearing around houses.   We saw this brought up by Right Wingers here who would complain that people were not allowed (for Greenie environmental reasons) to clear around their houses enough to protect them.  In California, the WAPO article has people arguing this:

Before a home is threatened, experts say one of the few steps homeowners can take to make their property more fire-resistant is clearing it of grass and shrubs, removing fuel. In California, people living in risky areas are required to maintain a buffer around their homes — a five-foot perimeter free of vegetation known as “defensible space.”

But in practice, the rules haven’t been followed uniformly. Many homeowners are reluctant to remove wooden fences, replant their gardens and trim the lower limbs on pine trees. Aerial images of the Palisades neighborhood taken before the fire show homes surrounded by greenery, a common sight in wealthy areas where residents put a premium on privacy.

California’s five-foot rule “has been very controversial,” said Ken Pimlott, a former Cal Fire chief and firefighter for 30 years. “People are very upset about ‘What do I do about my fence, my plants I like,’” he said.

Oh come on!   As with the biggest bushfire outbreaks in Australia in recent decades - when fires are spreading due to extremely high winds pushing embers kilometers ahead of the firefront, surely a 5 foot clearance of vegetation around a house is going to have very limited effect when you look at the big picture.

You always get cases in these types of fires of one house burning to the ground, and for some reason a neighbouring house might luck out and surface relatively unscathed.   While in theory I would prefer not to have (say) a very combustible pine tree within a metre of house, I think it's fanciful in the extreme to think every house having a 5 foot clearance would make a significance difference to the total number of houses catching alight from embers falling from the skies.

A better article about the claims and counterclaims about the fires is to be found at PBS.   

I really feel sick reading the bad faith political attacks that the Right makes when natural disasters happen.