Hacker News Reader

Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I find it all amusing. A few hundred or thousand acres burn in NY/NJ and everyone loses their shit. Watching the newscasts, governor and other admins talk about the issue they make it seem like something we have never witnessed before as a human race. Meanwhile in my home state of California (often mocked and judged by the rest of the nation), they are dealing with fires that burn hundreds of thousands of acres.

NY: "Statewide, there are currently six wildfires in New York State encompassing nearly 6,031 acres, including the Jennings Creek/Sterling State Park fire. "

CA: 1,040,146 acres burned this year.

So next time you wanna talk shit about California and how they handle wildfires, take a look at the amateur hour response from the east coast first.

View on HN

This comes off as really immature and weirdly defensive. Of course places that hardly ever get wildfires are taking it extremely seriously. If Los Angeles got 3 feet of snow it would be a really big deal, but in Buffalo that's just winter.

> California (often mocked and judged by the rest of the nation)

Being this defensive about your state is ridiculous. And don't pretend people in California never mock people from the "flyover" states.

Watching west coast elites bicker about east coast elites is peak 2024.

This exact bickering is a plotline in a fair few Woody Allen films. I think this is a decades old inclination!

I live in Michigan, lol. I just think that California is often the butt of many jokes around the nation when most people do not understand the sheer scale of the state (in physical size, population, economic contribution, etc)

This is how everything works. Systems that aren't designed to handle an event are unlikely to handle it well. Where I live, we got 4 inches of rain in 20 minutes yesterday. That was a Tuesday. From the time I've spent out west, I believe in that place it would be disaster level flooding.

We're likely to see more of this with climate change, right? Major snows in areas that can't handle it. Typhoons|Cyclones|Hurricanes hitting areas that can't handle it, etc.

It is a big deal when an area gets a weather event that is not normal for that area because they cannot handle it and don't have the tools or people with experience in the area to deal with it. I think the freaking out is justified because it may help save lives - people in the affected area are more likely to hear about it and hopefully react accordingly.

Yes, 100%, though we may build more resilient systems as it becomes the norm, or better mobile response type systems.

I too am in the heart of fire country but I don't find unexpected disaster coming from global warming to be amusing.

There's no doubt that climate change will shift the centers of disasters from one place to another (there's speculation about California getting tropical storms [1]). But I'd say you should only able to laugh or throw snark about this if you're also doing something about it.

[1] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/extreme-weather-events/study-...

Let nobody deny California is the best at burning to a crisp

They are different places with different weather and different expectations. This cannot be surprising to anyone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com