This is one of the most maddening fuck-ups on the Palisades Fire. Watch this fire progression video. I've mentioned how the goal with these fires is to keep them "skinny". Notice what the fire is doing for the first few hours? Skinny, directional, as you'd expect with a wind-driven fire...that directional bias makes for a skinny fire where the flaming front has all the energy, but the heel and the flanks are manageable, because the wind is directional. You may not stop that front from piercing through, but you can keep it skinny. Well, they didn't. Look at how it just ballooned out sideways. My home was out of alignment of the fire for hours. We should've been OK. But as the day went on, we saw it just creeping towards is, crab-walking slowly sideways, slowly backing down the canyon towards us...not a single resource up in our area working the flanks. The outflow winds are pushing it towards the ocean, but look how fat this fire got. It should've looked like a candy corn, but instead it swallowed the entire town. What's worse, is that this video doesn't show the progression on the following day, when the fire went BACKWARDS and consumed the Highlands, even though they should've been completely out of danger. But, they never properly secured the heel of the fire. Notice how the heel (origin) of the fire just stayed static all day? That's cuz it can't run against the winds. That's your best chance to button up that part of the fire perimeter so you only have to worry about 180 degrees, not 360. Well, they didn't seal the backdoor, and when the wind shift came, it blasted back through and destroyed my buddy's home in the Highlands. Just a catastrophic failure of fire management. Thank God the US Forest Service came through and got control of that eastern flank before it burned down all of Mandeville Canyon and Brentwood. Chief Garcia deserves a Presidential medal or something.
Botched Altadena evacuations, dysfunction in Pacific Palisades: Long-awaited fire investigation identifies missteps
latimes.com/environment/stor…