Palisades Fire Maps: A Link Page

1. Summary

I've been trying to follow the Palisades Fire, which is very difficult because the government info seems to have broken down. Someone with coding skills who knows big data could have made a million dollars with a couple of all-nighters, I think, taking public data and organzing it into maps and selling it to the press and to LA County. Here are the info sources I’ve found:

1. The best map is probably the federal one, AirNow Fire and Smoke Map at Fire.airnow.gov. (7pm update: suddenly they added password protection; but now, after an hour, it’s open again)

2. What may be a very good one, but with no key to say what the yellow dots are, some of which are in the ocean, is WildfireAware ESRI at Livingatlas.arcgis.com.

3. One state map is at SceneViewer, California Department of Forestry at Calfire-forestry.maps.arcgis.com.

4. Another state map is at Cal Fire Incidents at Fire.ca.gov.

5. A nonprofit map is WatchDuty is at App.watchduty.org.

At the bottom, in the third and last section of this Substack, is the list you have just read, with a screenshot from each during the fire to illustrate what each of them shows you.

---

2. Material Added after the Substack’s First Appearance

(a) This is the time for political organization. There is going to be a monstrous war over who is allowed to rebuild, when, and how. I hear in the past it has taken a year just to get a government permit to bulldoze your own burned down house, much less to start to rebuild. Many powerful people in California are going to want to block rebuilding entirely, since they’d prefer the land to go back to wilderness.¹ So, everyone: pick your side now, before the other side has mobilized against you. It sounds like Rick Caruso is the man to look to for reformers; Karen Bass is the champion of the Establishment and the Communist Party.² I don’t know what grassroots groups are currently organizing.

(b) The LA Times is behind a paywall, but here is a map of which neighborhoods support Caruso and which Bass in the 2022 mayoral race.

c) “Evacuation Centers, Animal Shelters, And Resources For Those Affected By Wildfires” by Secretlogangeles.com. This looks extremely useful as a source of links:

Compare the private Secretlogangeles.com, which is probably for-profit, with the pitiful efforts of the various California government units, at city, county, and state level. DEI, graft, grifting, and political favoritism really show. Government is just not as good as the private sector in providing goods, which includes in providing information. Here is one example:

LA County “Incident Response”, official but might not be very useful. You can find the evacuation and warning maps more usefully in other places.

But the government is big and lavishly funded, so it can’t help but provide some services, even if the private sector could do it better with the same money. Fire cameras are an example, as are some of the fire maps listed at the end of this Substack.

---

-3. Fire Map Sites with Screenshots

1. The best map is probably the federal one, AirNow Fire and Smoke Map at Fire.airnow.gov: (7pm update: suddenly they added password protection; but now, after an hour, it’s open again)

2. What may be a very good one, but with no key to say what hte yellow dots are, some of which are in the ocean, is WildfireAware ESRI at Livingatlas.arcgis.com:

3. One state map is at SceneViewer, California Department of Forestry at Calfire-forestry.maps.arcgis.com:

4. Another state map, probably with the same data, is at Cal Fire Incidents at Fire.ca.gov:

5. A nonprofit map is WatchDuty, which appears not to be showing the fire perimeter right now, at App.watchduty.org:

I used to live on Encina Road in Topanga back around 1992, which is right on the edge. My brother lives in Topanga, and my niece is in the part of Santa Monica that is under Warning status now, which is why I am so interested.

Footnotes

1. I don’t live in California so I might even support them. I might be better off if Malibu, Topanga, Pacific Palisades, and Santa Monica were all bulldozed to the ground and returned to chapparal. After all, it isn’t my property, and I could go vacation in the park. Ordinarily, the government would have to pay compensation for the houses, but if they’re burned down, seizing the land gets a lot cheaper. And pretty much all the people there are Democrats, rich Democrats who donate a lot and help run the party, and we in Indiana don’t feel very kindly to them after 4 years of them pretending that Joe Biden wasn’t senile and Kamala Harris was an honest woman. You sleep in the bed you make, even if you have to hare it with Joe and Kamala.

2. I haven’t been able to find out whether the Communist Party USA endorsed her in her 2022 election, but she eulogized their local leader in the Congressional Record and is glowingly described in The Daily World (the successor to the old Daily Worker). So it is accurate to say that she is favored by the Communists, and values them.

On the eulogy:

Bass (D-Calif.) delivered the remarks in January 2017 in the wake of Oneil Marion Cannon’s passing, commending him for his “longstanding commitment to serving and uplifting others, and for a century of fighting to make the world a better place.”

“As part of the [Independent Progressive Party], he used economic power to force employers to hire Black and Mexican American workers, using the slogan ‘don’t bank or buy where you can’t work.’ He worked for decades to elect representatives of color to office, including Tom Bradley, Ed Roybal, and even campaigning at age 90 for Barack Obama,” the congresswoman said in her remarks.

From The Daily World, “Karen Bass makes history despite being outspent by billionaire Caruso 11 to 1,” (2022):

Bass’s victory goes beyond symbolism and speaks to the tsunami of voters attempting to change the status quo. There’s much to be done, but in a time of continued civil unrest and emboldened far-right extremism, Bass’s campaign prevailing over billionaire spending can be seen as a tremendous, impressive win in the continued fight for democracy.