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Comment by murgindrag | Hacker News Reader

One more odd thing is how fast we forget. There were no articles after-the-fact even indicating the fire was over, or how things were going. I searched major web sites like NY Times. Things were burning like crazy, and then reporting stopped.

Is it over? Is it contained? Are San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford just gone? Reading the newspapers, you just don't know.

I'd like to have a retrospective. How much damage was there? What's gone? What's still there? Etc.

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It might not be in the headlines on major news, but there are updates from local cal fire every day. I’ve been following cal fire scu posts on twitter. Currently 375k acres and 40% contained as of yesterday. People living in the evacuation order areas are starting to be allowed to return home. Not a lot of structural damage out here as it’s mostly wilderness, but the other fire up north in the Sonoma area has burned through multiple buildings and homes afaik. I don’t have much information on that one though since I’ve been so focused on the one close to home for me.

Edit: https://twitter.com/calfireSCU

CalFire updates its page regularly. And anyway Mountain View, San Francisco and Stanford weren’t at risk. Fires burn upward because heat rises. Silicon Valley is in a valley and built out. It’s not wilderness. There’s five minute fire response times throughout.

Five minute fire response times presume that there isn't a million acre fire saturating all fire departments. If CZU were rapidly spreading and hit the side of Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose all at once, I think we'd have multiday response times. Fortunately, it wasn't.

Was it possible for it to spread like that? I don't know. During COVID19, we had a constant series of claims, repeated by politicians and public health officials, which had no basis in fact. Post-COVID19, I just don't believe claims like these anymore without a citation. Most were wishful thinking.

If the CZU fire had jumped jurisdictions (HWY 35?) it would have turned worse because the Evergreen fire had sucked all those resources already.

The governator really needs to return firefighting resources back to normal. There has been a significant drawdown of resources in Cal as other states boost their capabilities but the governator has not countered that and now resources are thin in CA.

We also need to pass AB 2147: https://www.firehouse.com/operations-training/wildland/news/...

I guess if these kind of fires are “the new normal” for California [0] (and also probably Australia) we should expect that to carry over to how it is covered in the media, too. Reporting will become increasingly localised to the areas affected

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-wildfire-evacu...

> Is it over? Is it contained? Are San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford just gone? Reading the newspapers, you just don't know.

Well, you know that San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford aren't just gone, because that would be a sensational news headline, and there's no way the rags would pass up the opprotunity the write about it. Otherwise spot on, though.

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