Wildfires

[00:00:00] Astonishing Legends Network. Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Killari. And I'm Ed Vecola. And on this episode, we're talking about a fear that's been on our minds for no real reason at all. Wildfires.

[00:00:28] Like most natural disasters, they're nothing new. But what used to be considered a seasonal threat has become a year-round reality fueled by climate change, drought, and human activity. And as we've seen this year in California, they can cause devastating damage, destroying homes, communities, and lives. So today, we're going to face this fiery new fear head on. We'll talk about the science behind wildfires, the factors that contribute to their intensity, and the impact they have on our environment and our health.

[00:00:56] We'll also discuss ways to prepare for wildfires and what you can do to protect yourself and your loved ones, mostly by examining what I failed to do before the fires came racing down the mountain towards me. So, if you're scared of wildfires, welcome to the party, pal. And if you aren't, maybe you should be. What are we? Scared. When are we? All the time. Join us. Join us. Join us. Now it is time for... Time for... Scared all the time.

[00:01:26] Woo! We're back. We're back in. We're in it, baby. We're in it, baby. Welcome back to Scared All Time, everybody. You know how we do. We like to put a little housekeeping at the top to keep you guys in the loop on what's going on and do some five-star reviews and all that. But for housekeeping today, we sort of have a semi-big, almost astonishing announcement. And that announcement is... Show's over. We're done. We're done. We're tired of this shit.

[00:01:53] No, that announcement is today is the first episode that is getting released on our new release schedule, which is instead of doing the sort of 10 weeks on, one month off pattern that we've been doing, we are now switching to a more sustainable and I think ultimately better for you guys every other week, no breaks. So you'll get a full episode of Scared All the Time every other week.

[00:02:21] But, Ed, tell them what we got for the patrons. Oh, yeah. But if you're a patron, you actually get the show every week. So the main show, the big, long, bad boys that come out every other week, I mean, that's coming out free to everybody. But patrons are going to be getting kind of a mini episode and mini in our standards, so it'll still probably be fucking long. But like you're going to be getting like these in-between mini episodes. So it'll be main episode, then the following week patron mini episode, then the following week big episode for everybody.

[00:02:49] I'm doing a bad job explaining it, but what you're getting is fucking Scared All the Time all the fucking time. Every week. So go check out the tiers that we're offering that at over at patreon.com backslash scared all the time. And because we are switching to this new release schedule kind of to celebrate it, anybody who signs up at any level for our Patreon is going to get 50% off their first month. That's 50, 5-0. It sounded like you said 15, but we're not some piece of shit, cheapskates.

[00:03:17] No, 50, 50%, half a centennial percentage of dollars off the price of your first month of Patreon if you go sign up in March. So we're excited to be running that for you guys. We're hoping we'll see some more of you. We just had an awesome live show. Super fun. I think we're going to be posting. One of the most fun ones we've done. Yeah. We're going to be posting some video from that and we're going to keep the train rolling. All right. Speaking of keeping the train rolling. Oh my God. Bless you. Speaking of keeping the train rolling.

[00:03:46] If I keep that sneeze in, I saw him roll. His fucking desk chair rolled 600 feet from the computer. That blew him back. That sneeze. If I keep it in, I'll lower the audio on the sneeze so it doesn't blow our audience back. But yeah, speaking of keeping things rolling, let's hit a couple five-star reviews. It's been a minute and then we'll do producers and then we'll start the episode. Great. So yeah, you guys, you know them. You love them. If you're new, we like to read some of our five-star reviews. You guys leave lots of them and it's really awesome of you.

[00:04:15] So if you do want to possibly get your voice on the show or get your words on the show, go leave us a five-star review and we might read it on the show. So this first one, we've got your new best earbuds from Galen. He says, I have so much love for this show, heart. Every episode is a wonderful mashup of casual summer night garage hang and eavesdropping on your little brother's super secret cryptid club treehouse meeting energy, which if you were me, those are one in the same.

[00:04:45] Chris and Ed have a wonderful rapport and the subject matter is equal parts horrifying and hilarious. There are frequent tangents, some hard left turns, occasional mispronunciations, and froggies. What more could you ask for? Bonus points for extolling the virtues of one of my very favorite movies, Waxwork, in the AMA episode. Love you guys. Stay safe. Hell yes. Waxwork is still one of my favorites. I might, I forget if I said this, but someday I am going to buy another VHS player just so

[00:05:15] that when I feel like popping in Waxwork, I can watch it on grainy VHS the way it's meant to be seen. But thank you, Galen, for the five-star review. Ed, you want to hit us with another one? I will, but first I'll say I can also digitize that for you on VHS. So you can always have that look if you want. Oh, thank you. Or if you want, we can do an episode from Until They Tell Us to Leave from in front of the Waxwork house, which is three minutes from my place. That definitely wouldn't let us do it. Anyway, the next five-star review I have here is from Jeff, Jeff Tofferson.

[00:05:44] Subject, scared as much as possible. Body of the five-star review. Ed and Chris are great ear candy. I decided to find one that was more ear talk. So again, Ed and Chris are great ear candy. I'm always ready to press play in a new episode drop. Give them one chance and you'll be hooked like me. So that's awesome. Thanks for the big shout out there, Jeff. All right, here we go. And last five-star review that we're going to read for this week is from CreateNickname67.

[00:06:13] Five-star review. A great listen. Spooky and a whole lot of fun. Love this podcast. Easy to listen voices and great content. Keep up the great work, guys. Thumbs up emoji. All right. Thanks, everybody, for those sick five-star reviews. And now we're going to go to the people who make this show possible every fucking month. We're going to go to the producers in good standing. I'm going to read them as fast as I possibly can. Or I'm going to read them really slow one time just to punish people who aren't producers to be like, you know what?

[00:06:41] If you want me to read them faster, start becoming producers. No, I'm going to read this one fast, though, in my normal way. And now for your producers in good standing for the month of February, year of our Lord 2025. And we will start in alphabetical order, as always, with a last name almost always concealed. I don't know why. I don't know if I should do it a different way. Anyway, Anita A, Amanda M, Anne-Marie V, Ariel M, Audra M, Bambi F, Buttercup H, Cassandra

[00:07:08] O, Christopher F, Christopher M, Claire B, Cracked Paint Studios, David V, Diana E, Donna B, Gabrielle G, Ibis Ibis Ebis K. I don't think I'm just going to do it like that forever. Isabella C, O, Jeff Q, Jonathan B, Jonathan L, Justin H, Justin R, Carly C, Catherine L, Kevin W, Kirsten T, Kristen S, Kyle E, Lauren M, Lucas P, Madeline MW, Madeline? She just told me to.

[00:07:38] Let's go with Madeline. Madeline MW, Marshall K, Matthew S, Melissa L, Nicholas A, Nicole G, Ovial or Oval? Oval's going to... It's probably not Oval. Oval M, Royce D, Samantha C, Sean K, Tabby F, Timothy M, and Will F. And that's producers in good standing for the month of... February. ...people who make this show possible. Thanks, guys. Genuinely. Thank you very much. So yeah, go check out Patreon. Sign up for discounts, deals.

[00:08:08] Also keep your eye on the merch store. Because I have a couple new things coming out. The ones that I can make myself will be done soon. But the ones I need help from other people will be a little bit further down the road. Not far, though. And it's stuff you guys have requested a million fucking times. I have had more emails and stuff about this than almost anything we've done on the show. So I'm finally going to make your dreams come true. I'm sure some of you have already guessed what it's going to be.

[00:08:36] I'm not going to say it here, but in the next probably two weeks, the merch store will finally be offering the thing you all want. Dildos branded... It's not branded dildos. It's not student debt relief. It is something else that I could make happen. All right. So let's get into this episode. Wildfires by us. No, just... All right. Welcome back to Scared All the Time. What a goddamn decade.

[00:09:06] 2025 has been. Buddy, we just did hell and you're already using the Lord's name in vain. Well, look, I saw hell from my bedroom window a few weeks ago. So... That's true. We're going to talk about that in a few minutes. But yeah, it has been a crazy year. Lots going on. Lots to be scared of. Not the least of which are the California wildfires. Which, by the time this episode comes out, might have also become the California mudslides.

[00:09:33] We'll know more about that tomorrow or the next day. Oh yeah, we have a lot of rain at the time of recording earlier this weekend coming up. Yeah. All the rain that couldn't come to land on top of the fire had to fucking wait. Yeah. But as of right now, we haven't experienced horrific mudslides. We have experienced the most visceral, frightening wildfires imaginable. To give a brief recap, if you're just joining us, because I think if you didn't listen to our

[00:10:00] emergency update episode, which I don't know how many of you did, or if you're just finding the show right now, we got to get you up to speed a little bit. So Ed and I both live in LA. I live in Pasadena, about a mile from where the Eaton fire started. I live in safety. Ed lives in the center of the city in a very safe area, or safe from fires at least. Safe from mudslides? Safe from fires? Traffic and crime, I guess, is the only thing I have to worry about. Eaton Canyon up near me was my happy place.

[00:10:29] It's part of why I loved that I moved to Pasadena. It was this- If you love Pasadena so much, why do you pronounce it Pasadena with a tilde over the end? Pasadena? That's how you just said it like jalapeno. You fucking tired ass new dad. Yeah, this is going to be a loopy episode. And you can't drink, right? Because then the baby will die? No, my wife can't drink because she's breastfeeding, but I can drink whatever I want. But anyway, Eaton Canyon was my happy place.

[00:10:55] It was a little tucked away canyon with some woodland and some streams. And I would walk up there a few times a week to sit by the stream and look for critters and find a little peace in nature. And after almost a decade and a half of living in LA and never feeling at home, I felt like I'd found a little slice of heaven. Until the night of January 7th, 2025. I'm an OJ Simpson. The way you said until the night was very funny. I'm going to stop talking. Well, the Santa Ana winds that day had been roaring all day.

[00:11:24] And Ed and I, we've both experienced Santa Ana winds before. They're nothing new. We'll talk about them more in a minute. But they'd never, Ed, unless I'm mistaken, we'd never experienced anything like this, right? I've been here 15 years. I've seen them blow real hard before. We've talked about them in other episodes. We've talked about them in the big one. They're a regular occurrence every year, but not like this. Yeah. I was talking to a guy who was born and raised in LA. And he was like, yeah, I'd never. He's about our age. And he was like, I'd never seen anything like that.

[00:11:53] Based on the last couple of years, it's only going to get worse next year and the year after. Because it seems like it's only gotten worse everything since we've lived here. Yeah. I mean, we were getting 90 to 100 mile an hour gusts of dry wind ripping through Altadena and Pasadena. It was a hurricane. It was a dry hurricane. There was no rain. And I didn't go outside, but I was looking out my front window and I live right on a park and I was watching people trying to walk through the park and I shit you not having trouble

[00:12:22] standing up. It looked like when you see a weatherman battling to stand up during a hurricane on TV, except just wind. No rain. No, it's hard to keep the pickleball game going out there during the Santa Ana winds. The palm tree outside of my house was slamming against the side of my house for two days, like two straight days before the fires. Yeah. And like the so much Spanish tiling here on people's roofs, like that shit was like on the street. People's fucking roofs are flying off.

[00:12:50] Yeah, I didn't see any trees come down, but I heard trees coming down or large pieces of trees. And on top of all of that, I had the flu. My fever had broken like 12 hours prior. It was it was a pretty miserable day in general. So that night, the night of January 7th, I'd seen so the fires had already started in the Pacific Palisades, which is the opposite side of the city from where I am. It's on the water near Malibu.

[00:13:21] And so when I saw that that fire had broken out, it barely registered because fires in L.A., especially during a really dry fall and winter, are really not that unusual. We'll talk about why in a little bit. But other than a brief thought that I hoped everybody was OK, that the fire wasn't really going to spread. I wasn't on like a red alert or anything. And then as Ed probably did, I started seeing reports about how fucking big the Palisades fire was getting.

[00:13:48] And I started getting nervous because fires in and around L.A., as they're very common, are usually stopped pretty quickly. But this fire got big fast because a combination of some dry reservoirs and high winds are making it impossible to fight it effectively. Hot ash was spreading through Pacific Palisades faster than it could be tracked and sparking more fires in every direction. Well, not really every direction, I guess. In the direction the wind was blowing.

[00:14:15] So people started to flee and then the roads got jammed. So I was seeing video of cars just left on the roads. And then the fire department started bulldozing the cars out of the way, literally bulldozing with a bulldozer because they couldn't move them. So then there was this alert that if you were going to abandon your car in the fire, please leave your keys in it so that cops or firefighters could move your car in case they needed to get past it. But it's important to bring up that those people were told to leave their cars.

[00:14:45] They weren't just being right. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure some of them probably were. Either way, it's crazy that an alert went out that was like, hey, make sure you leave your keys in your car if you abandon it. It was written by the Kia boys. It was written by like those fucking teenage gangs that steal everything in every major city. What a great plan, though. Spark a fire, trap everyone on the roads, somehow bribe the government officials to tell them to leave their keys in the car. And then when no one's looking. Fuck bribing the government officials.

[00:15:13] The government officials are all 90 years old. So these teenagers just change the signs themselves and send out the crap themselves. Feels like it could be a reboot or a sequel of like Rebel Without a Cause or something. Just a bunch of aimless greaser teenagers. I don't know where this is going. My brain's falling apart, folks. And he doesn't usually do a lot of the... I don't do the riffing. Ed does the riffing. Um, so after I saw how big this fire is getting and how many people were fleeing it, you know,

[00:15:42] my danger level increased a little bit. But not so much that I felt that I needed to do anything because I'm sitting in Pasadena completely oblivious to the fact that I'm living in a super dangerous fire zone. As we discussed in our episode on the big one, I spent most of my years in LA afraid of earthquakes. And I know how to check that a building is earthquake safe or if it's been retrofitted.

[00:16:08] I know not to live in brick buildings because those would fall apart in a big earthquake. I know to have an earthquake go bag, although I have not put a new one together since I'd moved. So that wasn't going to help one way or the other. But what I'd never thought about was a massive, fast moving fire. I'd never lived in a fire danger zone and I didn't know I currently was living in one. I never checked to see how dangerous it was to be living in the foothills of a dry mountain town.

[00:16:36] You know, maybe if I'd been in Malibu or like some of the western canyons where there'd been bad fires. But this is Pasadena. It's worlds away. Yeah, it does seem worlds away. People also don't maybe who when they listen, they don't really know how big Los Angeles is because New York, you can kind of understand it's built vertically. So you can have like an island like the city of Manhattan with 8 million people because they're all living on top of each other. Los Angeles is this huge sprawl.

[00:17:03] I saw something and I'm sure you'll give the actual statistic later. But it was like that overlay map to show how much acreage burned in these fires. And they showed like the amount of acreage like superimposed over the five boroughs of New York. Yeah. And it was like, I don't have it in front of me, but it basically it looked like it would be the equivalent of like all of Manhattan and like two of the boroughs burning down or something. It was just so much fucking amount of space. So much fire. Yeah.

[00:17:30] So I thought that Pasadena being what feels like on the other side of the world from Malibu and in the opposite direction of where the winds were blowing. I thought that I was fine. I was safe from this fire, but I wasn't because I'm living at the base of a mountain that hadn't seen rain in eight months. And I knew that the air was really dry because I was having trouble keeping the frog tanks humid.

[00:17:54] Like usually I spray them once or twice a day and they stay at like 60 or 70 percent humidity or higher for a while. I was spraying them multiple times a day and I'd wake up this winter and they'd be at like 10 or 20 percent humidity, even though I just misted them the night before. So I knew that the air was dry. I didn't realize that it was so dry that all it would take to cause a problem was a single spark.

[00:18:19] And with the wind raging, it wasn't long before that spark came in the form of an electrical fire. Or we think it was an electrical fire. I think it's technically still under investigation. We're going to have to pop a huge allegedly in there. Huge. We're going to drop a big allegedly.

[00:18:35] It's suspected that there is a video that seems to show that some high tension power lines that run over the mountains started to spark a transformer blue or something and started the blaze right there. Well, the 2018 fire started from electrical company. I think they're still paying people out.

[00:18:58] But yeah, there's a whole bunch of stuff that I can get into for an hour, which I'm not going to about the fucked up way that infrastructure works where taxpayer dollars pay for the building of things, but none of the upkeep. And it's all so dumb that I'm not going to get into. It's just going to fucking get me going in a way that's unbecoming.

[00:19:17] Well, I mean, if you want to talk about dumb, one thing that I learned that's dumb is that the reason that there are high tension power lines going through this dry mountain pass is just because that was the cheapest way to... That was the shortest line from point A to point B. Yeah. So they just built them right over the mountains. And they knew when they built them that it's not like they've never been dry before.

[00:19:42] It was just sort of like, well, you know, this makes the most financial sense. So let's do it this way. And remember, all that was taxpayer dollars for the building of the cheapest way to do it. Yeah. And then none of the upkeep, which is why 2018 it was like, oh, this power line was installed in 1905 or something.

[00:20:04] It was like the first, I'm sure there was like a champagne bottle broken on the side of that transformer in 1905 to be like, everyone, the first line. Yeah. There it goes, the very first line. And like, that's what caused the 2018 wildfire. Since 1992, more than 3,600 wildfires in California have been related to power generation, transmission and distribution, according to data from the U.S. Forest Service.

[00:20:34] There was electricity running through those wires when they still thought that you could transport ghosts over electrical wires. Yeah. Yeah. There were lamplighters still looking for new jobs when that was installed. And yet, yeah, that's the shit that because, again, nothing is no fundings put to upkeep. Yeah. You know, but that's again, that's a whole other episode. Maybe we'll do like a get ed canceled Patreon that I can just gripe about stuff, but I'm not going to do it in the main show. A scared all the time civics lesson. Yeah. Well, let's keep it moving.

[00:21:05] Well, I mean, I was going to recount the night of the fire, but question for you here. Is this something that I should recount or do you just want to drop in the already recorded content? I'm going to go ahead and just drop in the already recorded content because it wasn't part of an official episode. No, that's why I don't think anybody knows about it. I don't know if anyone listened to it. Yeah. I'm going to just drop it in because you're already tired. You're I'm looking at you on the screen. You're like molasses. So let's just try and get your ass back to that little baby.

[00:21:35] You know what I mean? Great. One man's story told before to be told again so that he can get some sleep. Please enjoy the very first and maybe only installment of Hear It Again Theater, where only the most obscure clips in the most dire of circumstances return with a kind of gusto you won't find from a falling asleep Chris. And if you've heard it before, well, the chapters are your friend.

[00:22:02] So without further ado, let's hear it again from Chris. I did think for a second, like, boy, the Palisades really got it pretty bad. And within 30 or 40 minutes, I started getting alerts on my phone from the city. I had downloaded the Watch Duty app, which is like a I don't know exactly what official channels it's sourced from, but it's a map of fires in your area.

[00:22:27] And it also keeps you incredibly up to date on both evacuation zones, evacuation warnings and even just like fire department press conferences. And like they really give you like, here's a summary of this that happened. It's a great app. It's a not for profit organization. So I'll throw them a couple of bones. They have a donate section. They put a big donate button up because I think the entire city of Los Angeles downloaded it. So I downloaded that.

[00:22:51] I had put down my Xbox controller and paused Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which is an incredible Indiana Jones game. I'm really loving it. But I'm sure the Chris Galari in the circle of fire. Yeah, I started pacing around my living room because my wife was still feeling like pretty run down, even though she was recovering from the flu. And I was like, hey, you know, we might want to think about like, I don't know, getting out of here or evacuating or something. And then I texted a friend of mine who lives like a mile and a half from me.

[00:23:20] And he was like, yeah, we're leaving right now. And that kind of made me pay a little bit more attention. And then all of these red zones started popping up a little bit north of me. And the red zones are like the level three go. So on the Watch Duty app, there's red zones and yellow zones. So the yellow zone, if you're in a yellow zone, it's like be prepared to leave at a moment's notice. And the red zone is you are now leaving. It's also mandatory by the city. You can't be here. Yeah.

[00:23:50] Both for your safety and impeding firefighters being able to their jobs. And those so this fire had started in Eaton Canyon, which has become one of my favorite places. You've talked about it on the show. I walked there. It's like it was like a sanctuary and a haven for me. So I know how close it is. I mean, it's when I do my walks up there, I go once or twice a week because it is a long walk. It's like, you know, maybe two, two and a half miles to get there. But I walk there.

[00:24:16] So it's close enough in my mind that I was like, oh, boy, that's a pretty close fire. And then the red zones filled up 95% of my walk quickly. Yeah. And then that's when I was like, OK, I think we're going to have to go. So I called Ed and he said we could come over. So we threw some stuff. I learned I need to have a go bag ready to go because I didn't. So we threw some stuff in a bag but left like didn't even think to take important documents or anything.

[00:24:45] Just because all of a sudden my adrenaline went up, my heart rate went up and I stayed pretty calm. But I was like, OK, well, I need a toothbrush and I need a pillow and I got to get my cat. And I had to leave the frogs. Guys, I had to leave the frogs. Unfortunately, or I guess I shouldn't say unfortunately, I went back to check on them and I sprayed them down and fed them. They were hiding. So I do not know how they're doing. I'm hoping to find out today after I record this. Actually, I'm going to go back.

[00:25:15] See if it's frog minus mode. See if it's frog minus mode. But yeah, I had to leave everything really quickly. And it wasn't until, you know, the day after that I really started going through everything in my head and being like, oh, I guess I'd lose that. I guess I'd lose that. I guess I'd lose that. And that, by the way, a day after is also when we started to hear from friends who were like, I lost that. I lost this. I lost that.

[00:25:38] And so, yeah, your house is so close to where all these people who were getting texts from being like, yes, my wife and my kids are alive, but everything's gone. And that was no exaggeration. Like some of those are a half mile from you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then and then when I actually did finally, you know, I got my wife in the car. We remember to take the car seat just in case she went to labor and we had to go to the hospital and bring a baby home.

[00:26:05] We had to remember the car seat because they don't let you leave the hospital if you don't have a car seat. And so leaving my neighborhood was one of the craziest. I felt like I was in War of the Worlds or the Spielberg's War of the Worlds or something like there were people driving every which way. So I backed out of my driveway. The winds are still absolutely just roaring, which is why like you're like, oh, Eaton Canyon's on fire. Wacky.

[00:26:32] And then 30 minutes later, you're like three miles of homes have burned down because, yeah, that wind was like, let's go fire. Let's bring this shit. Yeah. And so I pulled out of my driveway and immediately I could see the hills behind my house or the mountain behind my house on fire, like Mordor style giant wall because it's dark now. So all I'm seeing is a giant wall of flame seemingly like in the sky.

[00:26:56] And then we drove down the street to the way we usually leave the neighborhood and there was a tree across the road. So we couldn't leave that way. So I turned around, went back up the street and now I'm looking kind of down left and right around me to see which way to go. And I'm seeing people like running out of their homes, cars just every which way. Like it really felt like a disaster movie. And then, you know, we did find a way out of the neighborhood.

[00:27:22] But then even getting to the highway, there were trees down across major roads. And when we got on the 210, there were trees in the road in the 210. On the highway. 210 is a highway. So it was I mean, you know, it was nerve wracking. It was really kind of intense. And I always thought that it would be an earthquake that would really scar me first. But it was a fire, a very fast moving fire. That marks the end of wide awake Chris from long ago.

[00:27:55] Now for the return of sleepy molasses, Chris. So when I went back to check on my home, it was still standing. But the air was so thick with smoke, I couldn't even try to breathe without a heavy duty mask on. We've since cleaned up and air purified and crossed our fingers that the worst is behind us. But so many people are going to be dealing with the repercussions of these fires for a very long time to come.

[00:28:17] All that to say, we had to do an episode on these natural disasters in the hope that we can come to better understand them and be better prepared for when they strike. So let's start with the basics, as we always do on this show, because Ed and I barely graduated high school. What are wildfires and how do they start? Unclear. At the end of the day, spoiler alert, they're big fucking fires. That's what they are. And they burn in the wild. Yeah.

[00:28:42] According to the Western Fire Chiefs Association, which sounds like a fun group of guys and girls, a fun group of people, Western Fire Chiefs, they feel like that's adventure. That's living a life. But a wildfire requires three different components to burn. Fuel, oxygen, and heat. These are unsurprisingly the same materials that any regular fire needs to start.

[00:29:06] The fuel can be anything from wood or paper to flammable liquids, plugged in electrics, or even metals such as potassium and magnesium. The fire needs heat, which ignites the fire. And this heat source can be anything from batches to a lightning strike to a tossed off cigarette butt that's still hot. And then fire requires oxygen. Specifically, at least 16% oxygen in the air in order to burn.

[00:29:31] The average air around us contains 21% oxygen, which sounds really low to me. Yeah, it seems low, right? I think you breathe oxygen, not 21% oxygen. Yeah, because isn't there like a thing about like Vegas or something where they're like, maybe it's a, you know, wives tale or an urban legend, but where they're like, oh, they pump in 100% oxygen or something to like keep people happy or keep people doing something or other.

[00:29:58] I don't know, but maybe we're not, are we not designed to do 100%? No, the majority of air is nitrogen. 78% of the air is nitrogen. Huh. Only 21% is oxygen. Wait, so it's 21% of the air normally, not just 29% of the air of a constantly smoggy Los Angeles. Yeah, I mean. So we probably get like 3% oxygen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can't, we can't, there's even less. I think, I heard a fire coughing recently.

[00:30:28] The fucking fire was coughing. The reason that wildfires grow to such incredible size is because in the wild, there are massive amounts of fuel available to them or what the Western fire chiefs call fuel load. So if a house catches fire, the fuel load is just what's in the home or the materials that it's made of.

[00:30:51] When we talked about spontaneous human combustion in our spontaneous human combustion episode, the human body is the source of fuel and makes up the entire fuel load. So when there's no body left to burn, the fire goes out unless it's already managed to start feeding on the materials around the corpse. But in a wildfire, we're talking about acres and acres and acres of underbrush available to the flames. And without human intervention, they can just keep right on burning.

[00:31:17] So dry fuel, like dead grass, leaves, or branches, which are commonly found in drought-stricken areas, is the ideal source for creating a high-intensity wildfire. And the more fuel that's available, the easier it is for this high-intensity fire to spread. The state of the natural fuel load also impacts how big a wildfire will become. If there's moisture present in the dead leaves and logs on the ground, the fire will smolder and burn out quickly.

[00:31:44] In what's known as fire weather, which is what we've been experiencing in Southern California, that moisture that you would normally find in dead leaves and logs has been completely sucked out of the air, turning entire areas of the state into kindling just waiting for a spark. And on top of that, the previously mentioned Santa Ana winds make the environment even deadlier. Because I think the Santa Ana actually wicks moisture out of the air, right? Because it comes with none. Yes.

[00:32:13] It doesn't bring, like, any sea air with it. It's just like, what's up? I'm here and I'm a fucking nuisance. Yes. So the Santa Ana winds are a dry, hot wind, sometimes called the devil winds, that occur every year between September and May, blowing in from an area known as the Great Basin of the United States, which is the desert area to the east of Southern California, including Nevada and parts of Utah.

[00:32:37] According to Robert Fovall, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA, these winds aren't hot because the desert is hot. They actually start as cool winds in the basin. But the basin, despite a name that suggests that it's low, is actually at a much higher elevation. So I never knew this, but when air descends, it becomes compressed and its temperature rises.

[00:33:05] So dry air warms on descent at a rate of about 5 degrees Fahrenheit for each 1,000 feet that it descends, or about 1 degree Celsius for every 100 meters. So since LA is basically at sea level and the Great Basin is somewhere, I mean, there's various heights, but between 4,000 and 13,000 feet above sea level, those winds, when they blow east, they are heating up.

[00:33:33] The Santa Ana winds also tend to have a very low relative humidity, often dropping below 10% humidity. So as they blow down slope, or as the Santa Ana winds blow east and the air descends, they're not just getting hotter, they're also getting drier. And dry air is called thirsty air, which, Ed, like you said, it takes moisture from wherever it can, including your skin and plant life.

[00:34:03] So the wind's out there stealing your moisture. Yeah. That's why you got to put your moisturizer on in the morning, so that you don't dry up like the guy at the end of Last Crusade. He dried up because he's a Nazi doing what he shouldn't have done, not because it was dry. I just mean the visual more than the... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm surprised they haven't done more commercials out here. That's like, I'm trying to think of a big lotion brand. CeraVe? All the lotion in my home is lotion I've taken from hotels. I don't know the fucking...

[00:34:29] But I'm surprised there hasn't been like a big lotion brand company running like a scare ad of like the Santa Ana winds return. Or, you know, are you prepared? And instead of it being like a wildfire ad, it's like they're showing like, it looks like cracked, baked desert ground. And they pull out, it's just like your skin all dry. And it was like, you know what I mean? Yes. When the reservoir runs dry, don't let your bathroom cupboard run dry. CeraVe.

[00:34:58] Well, look, Ed, when we start scared all the time productions and we go into the advertising business, we can pitch that around. It's got to be better than these fucking Super Bowl ads I saw. Anyway, moving on. At high speeds, you know, like 80 to 100 miles an hour, like what we were getting last month, very dry air can desiccate vegetation. It sucks the moisture from its bones. Or I guess vegetation doesn't really have bones, but whatever a plant's bones are. Well, peppers have ribs.

[00:35:29] Okay. Well, it sucks the moisture from the ribs of a pepper. That's right. But this winds like the Santa Ana winds are basically nature's Kindle creation machine. There's usually somewhere between 10 and 25 wind events in an average year. A wind event is the term for when the Santa Anas whip up. So basically what that means is they're not blowing constantly all fall and winter. When they do, that's considered a wind event.

[00:35:56] And when that happens, there can be some pretty extreme weather in Southern California. The Santa Anas are actually the reason that my beloved months of September and October are usually the hottest months of the year in Southern California, even though the desert at that time of year is much cooler. That colder air, again, is dropping and heating up. And when that air is cold, it's going to drop faster and heat up.

[00:36:19] So not only is the hot wind rushing across Los Angeles, but they don't even have to blow very intensely to keep the cool wet air that would normally blow inland from the coast from getting very far. Yeah. So it's a recipe for disaster. What's cool is these winds aren't a new phenomenon. I did a little bit of research on them. And I mean, I guess I knew that it's a wind. It's a weather pattern. It's probably been around a long time.

[00:36:45] But they've been causing wildfires at least 5,000 years back when the Tongva and Tadaviam people were some of the earliest human inhabitants in this area of the world. According to an article on PBS SoCal, quote, Local lore offers several competing explanations for how the winds got their name.

[00:37:05] One holds that the name finds its provenance in an Indian word for wind, which Spanish missionaries, detecting an evil presence in the winds, liked for its homonymy with Satan. Another claims a saintly rather than devilish origin of the name. While camping in present-day Orange County back in 1769, the Portola Expedition supposedly encountered a fierce windstorm on St. Anne's Day. Huh.

[00:37:32] And yet another explanation suggests Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana as the winds eponym. In 1770. It was 1776? 1775? 1769. 1769. That was just Mexico still, right? Yes. I don't know when those purchases happened, but I'm assuming that they were just standing in Mexico, so I'm not surprised that they're talking about Mexican leadership.

[00:37:57] Winds were ferocious in Santa Ana Canyon on the night of January 6th, 1847, when U.S. forces under Commodore Robert Stockton camped near the canyon during their conquest of Los Angeles. Stockton's diary describes their ordeal, saying, quote, Taking advantage of a deep ditch for one face of the camp, it was laid off in a very defensible position between the town and the river, expecting the men would have an undisturbed night's rest.

[00:38:25] In this hope, we were mistaken. The wind blew a hurricane, something unusual in this part of California, and the atmosphere was filled with particles of fine dust so that one could not see and but with difficulty breathe. Which I find kind of concerning because the Santa Ana winds in 1847, I guess the air quality out here was good enough that it was notable that the air was filled with particles of fine dust.

[00:38:54] Well, what year was it you said? 1847. I mean, I don't remember when the Industrial Revolution really kicked off, but I'm assuming it wasn't, you know, it was just natural grossness and not like fucking industrial grossness. Yeah, no, well, that's what he's saying is that the Santa Ana winds caused that dust. Whereas now I feel like, you know, I've lived in multiple apartments in Los Angeles that have black soot that builds up like on windowsills and stuff that I have no idea. I also have that. Yeah.

[00:39:23] I assume it's like car exhaust or something, but every time I try to clean it, it's like sticky and tarry. And I have the distinct sense that that is also must be coating my lungs. Oh, a thousand percent. A thousand percent. And what's funny, my brother came out to visit one of my family members who was living out here in like the early 90s and all the pictures look like tobacco grad. Yeah. They just look like fucking Days of Thunder. Like it just looks brown. Yeah. Like every picture.

[00:39:52] But what's weird is that I would say in the last two years, we're kind of getting that back here. Yeah. Like I was at the Getty this year and I looked out on the city and I'm like, this is disgusting looking. And I Googled it and apparently I'm not wrong. Like it is bad again, even with all the emission restrictions and all this stuff. Apparently, it's still just the way Southern California in Los Angeles County, the way the air works with it's like becomes like a dome that traps your emissions. Right. Basically.

[00:40:22] Right. If the weather wasn't so fucking good, no one would live here. Well, hey, look, my argument is that I'm going to get shit for saying this. I don't really think the weather is that great. It is. It's too hot. No, it's not. You ever been to air a fucking zona? Well, sure. You ever been to El Paso, Texas? You ever been to Pennsylvania in the summer where it's not only hot, it's just now you're dripping wet. But you get it's also humid. Here's my argument. Pennsylvania, you get the variety of life.

[00:40:49] You get the spice of heat and humidity in the summer. You get crisp fall. You get well, you don't get white winters anymore. Now, I guess they're getting kind of gross and just soggy because there's no snow. Maybe this year, though, because we had no snow in Connecticut for two or three years. Then now it's fucking crazy this year. Yeah. Well, I know I stand by it's not as good as San Diego, but it's almost as good as it can get. Like the weather out here. Yeah. Here's a good question.

[00:41:16] If you don't think the weather is so good, when's the last time you looked up the fucking weather? You ever just looked up what's the weather going to be? Ever? Good point. No, you put on a t-shirt and jeans and you enter your life. When it rains, you're like, oh, shit, it's raining. There's no like, oh, rain's coming on Thursday. It's like, oh, something different's happening. That's a good point. But I guess maybe that's what bums me out about it is that it's so consistent that it feels weird. It feels like there's no rhythm to life. There's no... No, there's definitely no rhythm.

[00:41:45] That's why you can be here 15 years and I feel like I got here 12 days ago because there's no winter to remind you that a new year has started. And I used to joke about this, but it's kind of not a joke anymore. Like, seasons in LA are basically what your coffee tastes like during that time of year. It's like, you know, am I getting a peppermint mocha or pumpkin spice or lavender honey? You know, like that's pretty much... That's what's good. That's what your season is.

[00:42:15] So what's that kind of nice moment in the beginning of La La Land where they have like that whole big musical number on the highway and then like the chyron comes on. It just says like winter or whatever. Like you would never know. It just looks like the whole thing. You think it's summer. Yeah. So these winds in Santa Ana Canyon that Commodore Robert Stockton described is one of the earliest, you know, written descriptions that we have of these winds. Everything else is sort of, you know, rumor, oral history, whatever.

[00:42:41] So it seems obvious to me that this event would be where the name Santa Ana winds came from. It happened in the Santa Ana Canyon. But there's little evidence that exists to back that up because subsequent written descriptions of the winds lacked any name for them until November 15th, 1880. Nearly 37 years after Stockton and his men faced the winds. Somebody was like, we got to stop calling these these hot ass winds.

[00:43:09] Like I got my kids over here calling on the hot ass winds. It's fucking it's like we got to find a better name than these hot. Like when we say hot ass winds, y'all know what we're talking about, but it just sounds ridiculous. So let's get a name. That name, the earliest known written reference to the Santa Ana's, appeared in an article in the Los Angeles Evening Express titled The Philosophy of Sandstorms. And I'd just like to pause to say, what happened to journalism? Yeah. We used to be a country.

[00:43:39] We used to be a country. The Los Angeles Evening Express's feature article, The Philosophy of Sandstorms, is not a sentence anyone in 2025 is going to be uttering anytime soon. Scholars who have looked into the origins of the name Santa Ana winds generally agree that it derives from Santa Ana Canyon, where Stockton was, just not from his particular naming of the account of it. Yeah, account of it.

[00:44:06] And that canyon is the portal where the Santa Ana River, as well as the Riverside Freeway, leaves Riverside County and enters Orange County. When the Santa Ana winds blow through there, winds can reach crazy speeds in this narrow little gap. Anyway, we're getting off track. Not all wildfires are caused by the Santa Ana winds, but they certainly don't help.

[00:44:30] And neither do the millions and billions of fiery embers generated by wildfires. Now, contrary to popular belief, experts say that most homes destroyed by wildfires aren't destroyed the way that you would think. I think when you imagine homes being consumed by wildfires, you imagine a big wall of fire, you know, racing through the streets or down the mountain and just burning everything in its path. And that happens.

[00:44:59] But most homes destroyed in a wildfire are actually burned up after being ignited by airborne embers, which are the same pretty little pieces of glowing debris that whip up off a bonfire. It's just in a wildfire. They're extremely dangerous because they're not only being generated in large numbers. Like, just imagine you've all seen embers before.

[00:45:23] I don't need to describe them to you, but imagine a single burning tree falling to the ground and how many embers would explode off of that tree. Yeah. Now, imagine that happening to an entire forest and you start to get a sense for how many embers we're talking about. Yeah. You can also just Google Los Angeles fire and see the craziest shit. Like, there was footage on the ground. It's like that Shane Gillis thing about how, like, the entire war in the Middle East is on YouTube. Yeah. It's like, yeah, same thing.

[00:45:51] You can just watch a million points of view of embers whipping 100 miles an hour off of, like, fucking Carl's Jr. signs. Yeah. And every single little ember is essentially another building waiting to burn. So it's kind of crazy that more buildings don't burn because those embers, they can range in size from a tiny little speck to larger chunks.

[00:46:15] And while many people, like I said, have probably seen them come up off a campfire or maybe you even had one land on you. I've had some land on me off a campfire. The embers involved in wildfires are considered different. They're not their makeup isn't different, but the danger is different.

[00:46:34] In ember, once it becomes airborne, the technical term for it is firebrand, according to James Urban, an assistant professor in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester College. That group of people sounds way less cool than the Western fire chiefs. Yeah, that definitely doesn't sound as good. According to Ann Cope, chief engineer at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, another very boring dinner guest.

[00:47:02] Which also sounds like they spend all day trying to find a way to not pay your premium out to you. Yeah. They built an entire little group to be like, yeah, we have dinners every month. We talk about new ways that insurance is not going to pay for this fire. Ann Cope, we don't know you. I'm sure you're a wonderful person, but maybe have second thoughts about who you're working for. I think they might be the bad guys. But according to Ann Cope, those embers or firebrands can travel for miles.

[00:47:31] And it's often the neighborhoods that are closer to the wildlands that get inundated with loads and loads just showered with embers. She said wind allows embers to burn harder and release more energy, causing them to become a more potent ignition source. Like it's all the fuel you need. It just needs somewhere to land. It's got wind. It's got oxygen. It's on the move. It's hot as shit because it came out of like the hottest stuff.

[00:47:55] And the difference between like a campfire ember that's gently floating around and might land on you or whatever is that even in campfires, even if a log splits or something and you get a little burst of them, it's not the same kind of massive clouds of embers that wildfires create. The embers or firebrands, again, in a wildfire accumulate and sort of work together. They gather between the slats of wood fences or in shrubbery.

[00:48:23] And when they gather, that's when they can ignite new fires. It only takes one. But the danger in a wildfire is that there's so many that it makes it really easy for a bunch of them. Your lottery number comes up. You're playing more lottery tickets is what we're saying. There it is. Ed has it once again. Folks, go listen to our Fear of Winning the Lottery episode. Yeah, do that. Make sure you listen to the whole entire Scared All the Time collection.

[00:48:50] In 2017, embers blew across a six lane highway in Northern California, igniting businesses and then jumping from house to house in the Coffee Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa. Quote, a common thought before that was, we don't think embers are going to get all the way across the interstate. That's too far. They'll never get there. Well, never is a dangerous word. Now, embers are like, hold my beer. Yeah.

[00:49:15] A single ember that lands on the ground might burn out within minutes but can also smolder, Urban said, the professor from the Department of Fire Protection Engineering. And I'm falling asleep already just reading that name back. And then he says a sudden change of conditions like wind gusts ignite flames and cause a lot of destruction. I think in the Pasadena fire, these reports were ultimately unconfirmed.

[00:49:40] But there were rumors that I saw while I was getting ready to flee of embers traveling more than a mile through the air and causing flames where they came to rest other places in the city. So it was happening, I think, during the Pasadena wildfire. Between strong winds, whether they were Santa Ana's or something else, and flaming embers, you've already got a recipe for disaster.

[00:50:05] But that doesn't take into account one of the real problems driving these fires to get larger, faster, and more dangerous. That honor goes to Ed. You know what it is. Uh, looters? Climate change. Climate change. Oh, no. Yeah, I don't know. I only hear about one of those two things on the news. So I had to go with looters, I guess. Yeah, yeah. And unfortunately, the looters, if they exist, they come after the fires, not before.

[00:50:35] You know it. You hate it. Climate change is making wildfires really, really fucking bad. The U.S. Geological Survey, or the USGS, tells us, quote, While we're working to improve fire management, we are also dealing with the compounding issue of climate change. Many regions of the U.S. are now experiencing prolonged periods of drought and record temperatures. These areas often have an excessive buildup of fallen leaves and understory brush.

[00:51:03] Conditions remain ripe to drive intense wildfires that damage natural areas and, sadly, nearby communities. Not only that, but this I found really interesting. Because as with everything related to climate change, there are knock-on effects that ripple throughout ecosystems that you're not necessarily thinking about as something that would cause a fire directly, but can be a huge problem indirectly. So, for instance, the USGS tells us that, quote,

[00:51:32] Another aspect that warmer temperatures have on the landscape is they allow non-native creatures to travel to and survive in areas they previously found uninhabitable. One example of a problematic species that makes wildfires worse is the invasive bark beetle. Climate change has eliminated the seasonal cold spells that would normally kill off these beetles,

[00:51:56] and that leaves them to kill up to 100,000 square miles of trees across western North America in the last 20 years. What are they, like termites? I think so, yeah. And these swaths of dead trees are much more susceptible to wildfire and increase the likelihood that a fire can spread faster and farther. I mean, I think we should start these fires just to kill these bugs, it sounds like. Well, it seems like they might be doing a good job of doing that themselves,

[00:52:25] but, I mean, it's almost like everything in nature is connected. Yeah, I know. People say that. Could you imagine if the oceans got too hot? I mean, not going to be in our lifetime probably, but they're definitely getting there. We'd be in real trouble then. Water is weird because it's like that thing where, you know, a frog, put a frog in water, it won't know it's boiling until it boils, but if you, like, throw it in boiling water, it knows it's hot. But, so, a lot of this shit kind of feels like that, right?

[00:52:52] Where when you're living in it, you don't really see it for what's going on, like the temperature rising and stuff. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about it before, but that's why I think climate change is one of the most likely things that's going to wipe our species out because humans are very, very good at dealing with immediate problems, and they're very, very bad at dealing with problems in the future. If the richest people in the world are continually talking about going to Mars, there's probably writing in the wall that this place is no good now.

[00:53:22] Right? I mean, I don't know. Yeah. That kind of feels like maybe that's a thing. You know, one of the things that's crazy to me about that, not to completely derail this episode, but I find it odd that, like, for human beings to really establish a foothold on Mars, like, yes, you can have maybe a couple dozen people in some sort of a semi-permanent base or installation on the surface of Mars

[00:53:48] where daily life is going to be insanely uncomfortable and difficult and dangerous, but to really terraform the planet, to get it to a point where it could become an actual, like, second Earth, there's a bunch of different plans about how you could do it, and would it require detonating, like, thermonuclear weapons in the atmosphere and you have to change everything about, like, the magnetic field around Mars and all this shit. And theoretically, a lot of it can be done.

[00:54:17] I mean, you're talking to a human race who looked at a national park and was like, I should completely fill this with concrete and 50-story buildings and make sure no animals are in here and we should spray for bugs. Like, we're very good at creating a sterile environment that pleases us, no matter how hard it is. But part of what strikes me as so odd about those plans to terraform Mars is that I don't know for sure,

[00:54:42] but I would imagine that's going to be wildly expensive and difficult and for probably a lower price, you could fix this planet that we all live on already. It doesn't sound doable, honestly. I guess not. I'll have to tell you. In any case, whether it's winds or heat or drought or beetles or all four and then some, once an area is dried out, natural events such as lightning strikes or even volcanic eruptions

[00:55:12] can set an area ablaze. And this is just an interesting aside, but I found this interesting. There are actually two kinds of lightning strikes, a cold strike and a hot strike. Both kinds of lightning reach temperatures between 15,000 and 60,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but only a hot strike is capable of starting a fire. And here's why. The term lightning flash is used to describe the entire electrical discharge of a lightning bolt.

[00:55:41] But a flash is actually made up of several shorter discharges. These discharges are called strokes and they each last less than a millisecond. So our eyes can't distinguish between them. And so that's why we just see a single flash. But sometimes a continuing current somewhere around 100 amps follows one or more of those strokes. And that's that continuous current that creates hot lightning

[00:56:10] and starts somewhere around 10,000 fires a year. So I think basically the difference is like a cold strike has the same heat, but not a consistent application of it. That makes sense. Because all those heats would be those tiny little strands that never hits the ground together or whatever. Yes. Now, I think I've talked about it on a different episode, but there's that in Cosmos, Carl Sagan talks about how scary fire must have been for cavemen. But yeah, lightning is the example he gives, which is like realistically lightning caused the first fire these people saw,

[00:56:40] like struck a tree, what have you. I'm just saying lightning's out there causing fires. It is. It is. I thought you were going to say, I thought your comment was going to be out something that you read in Cosmo. And I was really curious to see what that was going to be. It's 10 lightnings to not date. 10 kinds of lightning who will ruin your life. Seven lightnings to not bring home to your parents. Seven kinds of lightning that'll bolt at the first sign of danger.

[00:57:10] Oh shit. That's really good. Or at the first sign of pregnancy. Yeah. Deadbeat. Deadbeat bolts. We'll workshop it. No, we shouldn't. We shouldn't. There's something in there. However, your wildfire of choice starts, they have been with us for a long time. So I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the most destructive wildfires in history. If we're going by acres burned, the worst wildfire in recorded history is the Siberian Taiga Fire in 2003,

[00:57:40] which took out 55 million acres of forest. Oh my God. That's roughly equivalent to 86,000 square miles, or roughly the size of Utah. Utah. Now, Utah is our 13th largest state, which means that the Siberian Taiga Fire was bigger than 37 American states. Yeah. Take that. Little ass states. I mean. Yeah, it was big. I get it. It's very large.

[00:58:09] While the exact cause of this fire remains unknown, we do know that 2003 was one of the hottest summers in European history, and a combination of extremely dry conditions and increased human exploitation of the forest are believed to have played a role in setting the stage for whatever spark eventually set off the conflagration, which, by the way, the Western fire chiefs tell us is the official term for an exceptionally large fire. A congregation? Conflagration.

[00:58:37] These giant blazes can even create their own horrible weather patterns. We've talked about this a little bit before, I think, when we talked- In tornadoes. Yeah, we talked about fire tornadoes, but the intense heat of a wildfire creates intense updrafts and forms towering clouds called pyrocumulus or pyrocumulonimbus clouds, which look like regular storm clouds, but they're caused by fire and can disrupt everything from temperature to humidity

[00:59:06] and even rainfall in the area. And to make things even worse, the updrafts from these fire clouds could change the wind, making the fire spread even faster, which is basically what happened in the case of this Siberian fire. Over the course of six months, the fire spread across Siberia and the Russian Far East, northern China, and northern Mongolia, sending a plume of smoke that reached Kyoto, which is thousands of miles away.

[00:59:35] Get this, the carbon emissions from this one fire, this fire alone, are almost equal to the amount of emission cuts promised by the EU under the Kyoto protocols, and their effects are so strong, they can still be seen in present-day environmental studies on ozone depletion. It's 2025. This fire happened in 2003. So- Yeah, we gotta go to Mars, bro. We gotta get out of here. We gotta go. This was a big, bad fire.

[01:00:04] But it also, it makes me feel like if we're gonna do all this damn cutting, we're gonna do all these things to save the environment, we're gonna drive electric cars, we're gonna recycle, we're gonna- And then just a fucking Siberian fire happens, and it does more damage to the ozone than we can possibly undo through fucking tote bags, then why are we even trying? I can see the appeal to some people. I can see how people will say that. And paper straws. Then you add Chinese industrial revolution happening. But yes. Then you add the creation of cell phones,

[01:00:33] and having to make those in fucking Dickensian conditions. I think that, like, yes, one large fire or a big volcano going off or something can create the kind of damage to the ozone layer. It can release the kind of emissions that are on par on scale with what our industrial emissions are. Although, again, in this case, this is a lot, but it is just the emissions that the EU promised to cut, which is a large group of people,

[01:01:01] but it's not putting out as much as us or India or China, but you are adding all of the planet's industry to those once every 100 years fires or giant volcanoes. So without the industrial revolution, and I'm not saying that we should go back to pre-industrial times. We're going there. Yeah, yeah. We're going there whether we want to or not. It's the only way to get to Mars. Yeah. But yes, throughout time, there were these giant events.

[01:01:31] They just weren't added to what we were already doing, so I don't think they had the same cumulative impact. Well, at least when things go really bad, it'll have a greater impact than when they go good. It's just simple as that, whether it's politics or humanity or the fucking weather. It just takes one bad storm to undo everything, and it's just so annoying. Fucking two bombs in Japan undo 3,000 years of culture and streets in a second. We are shoveling water

[01:02:00] out of the fucking ocean as the tide keeps coming in, so let's go to Mars. I didn't think this episode would be such a strong case to go to Mars, but... Yeah, I don't know. Don't listen to me. I'm just in a mood. All right, so that is the most destructive fire in human history. The second most destructive fire in human history

[01:02:29] was also caused by increasing temperatures and decreasing moisture. You might remember these, although because so many horrible things happen on this planet, we've long since moved past them, but do you remember the Australian fires of 2020? Yeah, I forgot until you just said it. They were a big deal at the time. Like, it felt like the planet was on fire because all of Australia was on fire. They've now faded to just one more fucked up thing

[01:02:58] our planet went through. In defense of people, like, I spoke to people just recently who've already forgotten that Los Angeles is on fire. And I don't mean, like, people who live in LA, but, like, they were like, oh, yeah, did that ever get taken care of? Someone just said that to me, like, yesterday. Did that ever get taken care of? Like, it was 100 years ago. It was fucking weeks ago. Yeah. From 2019 to 2020, Australia experienced the hottest and driest year in its recorded history, and that led to a wildfire

[01:03:26] that raged for 219 days from June 2019 to May 2020. Now, the flames burned 42 million acres, which makes it a smaller fire than the Siberian Taiga fire, although Wikipedia, for some reason, lists the burned acreage at 60 million, which would top the Siberian fires, so I'm not entirely sure. I guess it's competing for worst wildfire in human history. It's certainly

[01:03:55] a strong silver, if not deserving of the gold, but either way, the fire destroyed more than 3,000 buildings and killed dozens of people from the fire alone, and then another 445 people died from smoke inhalation. It also killed 3 billion animals, including 61,000 koala bears. It's gotta be all the koala bears. They were recently declared endangered as a result

[01:04:23] of 61,000 of them being burned in this fire. You know what I would love to say right now, but I can't? What? That's a koala cost. Am I allowed to say that? A koala cost? Oh. I had to say it out loud before I heard it. Yeah, you can say that. All right, address your emails to Chris. You want to keep yourself up at night? Imagine 61,000 koala bears burning alive. Oh my God. Do they scream? Probably. I don't know, but yeah, horrific. That's a lot of eucalyptus going up.

[01:04:53] It must have smelled nice, right? Eucalyptus smells pretty good. Yeah, but I don't know if a burning anything living smells good. That's true. The stench of burning koala bear flesh might have outscented the eucalyptus leaves. The only scent more powerful is just if you have to work in a Yankee Candle store. Ugh. And I'm assuming you must have just migraines all day. I genuinely, my grandparents when I was growing up, there was the Yankee Candle, there was like a Yankee Candle

[01:05:23] attraction or something somewhere in Massachusetts or Connecticut. Like a factory store? Kind of, yeah. And they would take us sometimes because I think at Christmas they had like a really big Santa display and stuff and I would always get the worst headaches. Yeah, I bet. If I worked there, I would, that's hazard pay as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, it's horrific. If you're sensitive to that kind of thing, it's a nightmare. You know what though? The people who fucking own that have too much money. Google Yankee Candle store fucking owner's house or whatever. Oh wow.

[01:05:52] Okay, I see it. I just. Yeah, look at this fucking place. Although it's only on sale for $23 million which is a lot but not like. It's not California. Yeah. $23 million in LA does not get you this. I'm just saying like you did this well giving people migraines. Like look at the living room shot. Are you on the one that shows like all the different pictures? The great room. Wow. Scroll down to number six. But even like, yeah, the dining room. Oh, the great room. Yeah. And I'm not saying this is like. Kind of hideous though. Yeah, sure.

[01:06:22] Oh my God. He gave himself an oval office. His home office is in the shape of an oval. It's the oval office. Yeah. The screening room ain't nothing to write home about. It's three chairs. Number 16. A full arcade is pretty nice though. Oh, sick. And a full gym like the size of like a fucking actual gym. The tennis court with its own bar. That's pretty cool. The water park. The indoor water park with a fucking sky painted. How many children do you think have been sacrificed in this building?

[01:06:51] That's what I'm saying, dude. Let's go back to the episode but I'm glad you now know that that is crazy. Crazy. Chris and Ed were obviously joking around about the child sacrifice and the decor but not about the all ages headaches. The fires became known as Black Summer and the smoke was so severe that the fires resulted in the depletion of the ozone layer by a full 1% an amount which typically takes a decade to recover.

[01:07:21] Australia has already warmed by one and a half degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution a rate that is faster than the global average meaning that its risk of wildfires is also likely higher than other parts of the world. Yeah, especially if I was there. Man, if I saw one of those snakes or spiders zip up to me I'd be, oh my god, throwing fire at that shit. Just under every rock and around every tree in there is just the craziest, scariest fucking animals, man. The only way to deal with it I think is to light the whole country on fire. They will not let you go snake hunting

[01:07:50] with a flamethrower in the grasslands of Australia I don't think. They might. I got 30 bucks. Maybe that'll move the needle. 2020 was also a record-breaking fire year in California resulting in the most horrific fire damage the state had ever seen until the fires we had a few weeks ago. Earth.org tells us quote, the record-breaking fire first broke out around February 2020 and lasted for the rest of the year tearing through parts of California, Oregon

[01:08:19] and Washington state. At one point every 24 hours an area the size of Washington, D.C. was being burned. Yeah. Do not get any ideas. They just are using that as a rough size estimate. Five of the six largest blazes in the state were also recorded that year. By the end of 2020 nearly 10,000 fires were recorded burning more than 4 million acres of land which is equivalent to about 4% of the entire state.

[01:08:49] In their wake the California fires took dozens of lives destroyed over 10,000 buildings and cost over billions of dollars in damage. Stanford researchers also estimate that the smoke and resulting poor air quality led to hundreds of premature deaths in California cities and across the West Coast in Washington and Oregon. So 2020 was a bad year for fires. I didn't even remember the California fires in 2020. I feel like I remember it being more of an Oregon thing but I remember the 2018 fires.

[01:09:19] Yes. Well and that's what's next on this list because while the 2020 fires were brutal for the state they weren't actually the deadliest in California's history. That dubious honor goes to the Camp Fire not Camp Fire but Camp Fire named after Camp Creek Road which is the first road the firefighters took to get to the flames. Were you with me when we were looking up like how they name wildfires? No. Yeah. It was all these fires were popping up and we had the Watch Duty app and it was always

[01:09:48] like Teresa fire you know and I thought maybe it was like naming a star like the first person to see it they just named it after that you know or like you can name it if you discover it it's not it's usually the first high ranking firefighter person who gets there or the dispatcher a lot of times it's up on the dispatcher because they need everyone going to the same place so they need as quickly as possible a name so they can quickly be like you know we need 27 fire engines to the campfire or whatever but it got so out of hand in Idaho a couple years ago as one of the examples they were saying

[01:10:17] that the dispatcher just ran out of fucking names and they were literally fighting a fire called I'm Not That Creative and that's real that was like one of the wildfires that was happening well that's not how they name this fire I guess no a lot of times it's the road or like but it's mainly this has to be named very quickly so they can get everyone on the same page so it's usually up to the dispatcher or like the reporting high ranking firefighter who's there oh oh oh it's up to the dispatcher I thought you said

[01:10:46] named after the dispatcher I was very confused for a second I gotcha I gotcha not only up to the dispatcher but a lot of times just to make things easy the dispatcher needs to let everyone know so a lot of times it sounds like from the research I had done that the dispatcher has some say just to be like get everyone on the same page right well the fires the campfire fires began on November 8th 2018 in Butte County up in Northern California when a part of a poorly maintained Pacific Gas and Electric Transmission Line

[01:11:15] in the Feather River Canyon failed during strong winds I don't think that these were the Santa Ana winds but they were the same kind of wind caused by air descending from a cooler high density air mass into a warmer low density air mass the failure of that transmission line resulted in heat and sparks that birthed the blaze that wound rapidly through the communities of Concow Megalia Butte Creek Canyon and the

[01:11:44] unfortunately named Paradise largely destroying them this is Paradise California yeah I mean we all remember Paradise Burn remember the like footage of like people using an old school bus to get as many people out of the burning streets as they can yeah Paradise was that whole town was gone yeah according to a report on the fire produced by the National Institute of Science and Technology in 2021 quote showers of burning debris were carried by the wind ahead of the main fire into town where the embers ignited buildings

[01:12:14] and vegetation riddling the town with dozens of smaller fires that ate up precious firefighting resources propelling the campfire's structure destroying spree were fires that spread within and between plots of land or parcels rather than from the fire front sources such as burning sheds plants vehicles and neighboring houses caused many buildings to catch fire either through direct contact with flames or embers generated in parcels so again

[01:12:43] that's that sense of these embers working together I mean they're not really consciously working together but they come in these giant clouds almost these bouquets of embers yeah so if you go to the Institute of Science and technology report in the show notes you can see an animated timeline of how each individual fire sparked and it is so fucking scary how quickly they sprang up and I encourage you if you can go look at the notes you should go look at the

[01:13:13] animation because it really is sort of a frightening display of how powerful and how fast this fire was but back to the report quote paradise's defenses quickly fell once the fire front reached town the incident commander leading the emergency response recognized the fire speed and intensity and ordered his personnel to abandon all firefighting efforts just 45 minutes after the fire arrived save lives keep evacuation moving

[01:13:43] the incident commander said over the radio although the focus of emergency response narrowed on saving lives evacuation efforts were stifled by burnovers which are life-threatening events in which residents or first responders are overrun by flames cutting them off from escape routes across paradise and con cow there were 19 burnovers some of which involved downed power lines or flaming vegetation that blocked off roads causing gridlock and

[01:14:13] putting lives in danger the fire burn for another two weeks and the final tally of destruction came to 85 fatalities 50,000 people displaced and more than 18,000 structures destroyed causing an estimated 16.5 billion dollars in damage that makes it the most expensive natural disaster in 2018 surpassing typhoon Jebi which devastated Japan around two months before the campfire occurred

[01:14:42] it was so expensive that Pacific Gas and Electric filed for bankruptcy in January 2019 citing expected wildfire liabilities of 30 billion dollars on December 6th 2019 the utility company made a 13 and a half billion dollar settlement to the wildfire victims and on June 16th 2020 the utility pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter yeah dude it's just always the electric company allegedly it's

[01:15:11] allegedly always the electric oh yeah allegedly allegedly so far the campfire still holds the record for deadliest fire in California history with only 25 victims or so who died in this year's fire RIP God bless RIP God bless but the death toll of those fires pales in comparison to the deadliest wildfire in American history the Peshtigo fire of October 8th 1871 and if you recognize that

[01:15:41] date you're probably the MVP of your bar trivia team because October 8th 1871 is best known as the start date of the great Chicago fire which leveled three miles of property and claimed 300 lives and this is as good a time as any you know we like to myth bust on this show when we can and the Chicago fire was not started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow knocking a lamp over never happened a

[01:16:10] reporter probably with the lying news media yeah admitted to fabricating that story then the media was fucking crazy back then media shitty now for different reasons but yeah if there's like so many movies you watch from the 1940s where like the press are the bad guys they're like always awful yeah like they're just so like they just lie they're invasive to kicking in doors there's flashbulbs going out on like in like baby's eyes and there's a lot of like well if you don't let me in I'm gonna write it anyway well and I

[01:16:39] it's like I feel like back in the 1800s well the 1800s is even further back but I know but so many stories of like aliens or monsters or ghosts you know there's a lot of times there's a quote-unquote corroborating news story but I feel like the bar for what you could print in the newspaper back then was a lot lower you you could just like print a story that you heard from a guy as if it happened I mean that's why I'd be interested to see if it's just marketing or like when the New

[01:17:08] York Times is just the only news fit to print like their whole thing I wonder if there was actually a bar that they tried to set with the creation of the New York Times back then to try and like undo some of the wild west of everyone's got a printing press but I don't know I don't I don't know the history of it the current bar is you need I believe three corroborating sources so for each fact in a news article that you write and publish essentially like each sentence each thing that you say you

[01:17:38] need to have corroborated by three individual sources now I don't know if all those sources have to be named or if some of those sources can be on background but you do need to have you know essentially that's why all reporters are keeping or should be keeping notes because should somebody try to sue that's the bar of proof that you need is here's my now again you don't have to turn over the names of those sources no yeah but no I mean that's even more than I information that I needed I was

[01:18:07] just thinking out loud about you know their famous motto and if when that was created what the landscape of media was at the time yeah I mean at the end of the day they're all they make their money from the wanted ads anyway that's well they used to I mean I mean but that was literally that's true yeah no I know it's a super fucked up business like the only thing keeping people informed requires advertisements yeah there's no sometimes I wonder there's no real there's not a great way to do independent news because you either

[01:18:37] to make the money you either need to be supported by subscribers advertisers or some sort of state sponsored newspaper and there's no combination of that that really results in really any version of fair and balanced news yeah so we don't really know what caused the great Chicago fire definitive it wasn't the cow definitive it wasn't the cow well because it's definitive because a reporter ultimately admitted to fabricating that story sure but conditions were

[01:19:06] right because from Sunday October 8th through Tuesday October 10th 1871 wildfires claimed thousands of lives and destroyed millions of acres across the upper Midwest which is not a place that you normally think of as having lots of wildfires but large wildfires over those two days struck several areas in Michigan with Holland Port Huron and Manistee seeing the most significant damage and loss of life although the exact death toll from the

[01:19:35] Michigan fires is unknown it likely claimed in excess of 500 lives the single most deadly fire of that bunch was the blaze that tore through tiny Pestigo Wisconsin a frontier boomtown located a few miles north of Green Bay according to an article on History.com the entire disaster took place in just 90 minutes or the average time of a scared all the time episode that's true think about how much property can be lost in the time it takes to listen to this

[01:20:05] in the time it takes to listen to this the Pestigo fire torched an area twice the size of Rhode Island and killed somewhere between 1200 and 2500 people more than any fire in American history it is still not known how this blaze began but many of the classic conditions for a wildfire were present the town was in the midst of a dry spell and its thriving lumber industry had rendered the surrounding woodlands a tinderbox of sawdust and burned brush on October 8th a cold front

[01:20:34] brought heavy winds to the region feeding smoldering forest fires and creating a firestorm that struck Pestigo like an exploding bomb witnesses later described a roaring column of flames 1000 feet high now I don't know if some of these witnesses were the same who said that a cow started the Chicago fire because that sounds real high well I mean they were burning the woods down looking for a slide rock bolter I think yeah yeah

[01:21:04] they would do whatever it took the slide rock bolter had become far too dangerous to live yeah clothing trees and buildings were instantly set alight and whole houses were lifted off the ground in tornadoes of fire dozens of residents were killed when a wooden bridge became engulfed in flames and collapsed others instinctively fled to the nearby Pestigo River makes sense but the air was heated to such a high temperature that even those who immersed themselves in the icy waters

[01:21:34] found it difficult to breathe by the following morning when a long overdue rain thanks rain for showing up like 12 hours too late which is the same thing happening here we're dealing with all this rain right now like a week later yeah or like it started a week later by the time that that rain helped extinguish the last of the flames the entire town of Pestigo and much of the surrounding forest had burned to the ground the firestorm knocked out the town's telegraph line and melted its rail station so word of the disaster

[01:22:03] didn't reach the outside world for several days which no one said in my research but I wonder if that's part of why besides the fact the Chicago fire happened in Chicago so it's flashier I wonder if the fact that not only was Chicago flashier but it was immediately reported on has anything to do with why the Pestigo fire has kind of been lost to history because I'd never heard of it before but if it killed between 1200 and 2500 people that's a huge fire

[01:22:33] yeah it kind of it's giving that fucking earthquake that happened before the like big earthquake remember there was like the San Francisco earthquake but then there was one that actually like killed more people but it was just some smaller one and where you were saying that they should count the last big one newer because the previous one was just like a podunk little fucking cowboy town oh yeah yeah yeah it was a very big earthquake but I forget now what the name of it was but because it was such a small town almost no one died yeah so even though the quake

[01:23:03] itself was huge it was not as notable yeah well these aren't the same at all then but yeah you're probably right I mean it's probably just Chicago went out on the wire because the wire I guess hadn't burned down versus the only Western Union station burned down up there yeah but I mean absolute nightmare stuff roaring columns of flame houses lifted off the ground and tornadoes of fire look it makes it sound like Pasadena got off kind of easy oh yeah well I mean they build things better now

[01:23:33] than they did in the 1800s yeah we're less prone to Wizard of Ozing yeah we have foundations now for our home we don't paint the railroad station with like kerosene paint the boards of the homes aren't attached to one another by leaning them against each other yeah yeah but let's say you find yourself living in an area that is prone to wildfires how do you get ready for one of these infernos and what happens if you get that

[01:24:02] dreaded evacuation order well if you live in a place that's prone to wildfires it's probably a pretty nice place which means you have no money for evacuation because you spend it all on rent well the first thing you could do is actually free you could prepare your home by making it less likely to burn one of the ways you can do that is by clearing out any dry brush and dead leaves around your property especially in California we know that these winds come every year and so

[01:24:31] every fall from here on out I'm probably gonna go at least do a quick pass around the house to clear as much you know fuel out as I can because if a fire does pop off nearby you want your place to have as little fuel to burn as possible and you might not be able to get each and every last leaf but the more fuel you remove the less likely it is for wayward embers to land on some kind of flammable material yeah you also want to try to make sure that your roof is at least fire resistant

[01:25:01] and that there aren't any gaps in the roof where embers could sneak in and if you do receive a warning about high risk fire weather the way that we did in Pasadena it's also truly not a bad idea to wet your place down with a hose it's not a guaranteed strategy if the Santa Ana winds are sucking the moisture out of the air at 100 miles an hour the back of your house will probably be bone dry by the time you get to the front but it can be helpful one woman in the campfire

[01:25:31] managed to save her home by doing that she wet down the house before the fire came and she wasn't directly in the path of the blaze but she was in an area where other homes burned but the embers could find no purchase on her home so interesting and I would also say since you and I try to be mindful of giving out advice that could get us sued this is something I'm talking about doing well in

[01:26:01] that point you should not be at your house anymore do not hose down your home when the homes around you are burning you should be long gone just don't be there and listen to every evacuation order you get like don't be one of those people who whether it's like a flood or a wildfire anything when like an evacuation goes out take it seriously if you're able to get out get out well that's the last thing I was going to say if you see an evacuation order on your phone or on TV it means you probably should have left

[01:26:31] 15 minutes ago get your go bag get your loved one get your pets and get out and this is where I failed to be prepared I leave now and then when you open your front door and there's a wall of fire in the sky yeah yeah

[01:27:00] you know one of the reasons that I left before we even got the full evacuation notice our area was on a warning we were in the get ready to go zone but I didn't want to get caught up in traffic or do anything that might get in the way of fire crews trying to do their job like if there's flames nearby just go and not necessarily for days or weeks or anything just get out of the way go crash into friends or get a hotel for the night and just hunker down until your area is in the clear also I

[01:27:30] think a red flag warning I I the other way you kind of wait for a spot where you can actually pull off to the side lift them through there's stipulations when a red flag is issued in your neighborhood that means on top of be prepared for a potential worsening is anywhere there's a red flag warning needs to be a place where

[01:27:59] fire trucks can enter exit drive through unimpeded interesting and so like street parking and stuff or I have visitors like that shit can't be there during red flag warning I didn't completely look into this but there was something that was told to me about oh your areas in red flag warning do you have your cars in the street because you need to bring them into the driveway and people need to be able to evacuate when I was so Ed and I were together the night after the Pasadena fire

[01:28:29] I was still at Ed's place and we were watching the news when the Hollywood Hills fire erupted and they immediately when the fire was like very small they put out an evacuation warning because the roads up in those hills are so narrow and so twisty and turny that once everybody tries to leave it's going to take time there's a traffic jam immediately so it becomes a dangerous situation if there's even just one car sticking out into the street and people

[01:28:59] can't get by you now are causing a severely dangerous situation luckily they were able to put the Hollywood Hills fire out pretty quickly because the winds died down so the helicopters could go up that was the first night that we got to have the helicopters go up and do air support which was thank god because that's that's the last thing we need optics wise is Hollywood on fire it just doesn't look good the man Chinese theaters on fire it doesn't look awesome yeah we

[01:29:46] not in my neighborhood yeah your neighborhood definitely is you're much more danger of a hot bucket of piss and shit on your head than a fire oh my god yeah I mean I will pass dozens of mentally ill terrifying hobos like before I'll deal with the effects of embers from a wild fire setting our neighborhood on fire we joked about it not joked but talked about it where people you know would check in during the fire like are you okay are okay yeah and it's like

[01:30:16] if my house is on fire the city of Los Angeles is gone like I been like it's weird I'm in like a really decent spot because if you go north of me you're in the valley we're closer to the hills if you go west of me that you know what mean it was just like weirdly good spot to be in yeah without being out in San Burundino County or something yeah where I

[01:30:58] because as a person who does live at least for now at the base of a very flammable mountain and has a newborn I am very afraid of fires wildfires I've learned my lesson I am going to be creating go bags I am going to have a plan in place because it's by the grace of God that my place didn't catch on fire last month and while there's little that I

[01:31:28] that risk as long as I live here there's a lot more I can do to be prepared and I can certainly take fire a lot more seriously and

[01:31:58] kid but I'm not moving because of wildfires put it that way I'll move because the industry collapsed I'll move because of a number of things if somebody I'm close to on the east coast deteriorates their health and needs my help or something but I'm not going to move because of wildfires I wouldn't leave LA someday maybe I should find an area that's less likely to burn down to the ground it's tough I mean we'll have to see what Black Rock is offering for all these new properties

[01:32:29] please Black Rock well I don't own my place so I would not receive that money I will say that I say like a house fire it's scary to me or I'm sleeping in some space heater thing or

[01:32:59] a spark or whatever that is genuinely scary house fires but yeah the wildfire thing and I watched it ravage our friend group so many of our friends lost their homes they do own and they're paying mortgage on cinder right now but just for me personally I'm not trying to diminish anyone else's fear of it I have it at 3 well guys that's wildfires it's been an honor and a pleasure to serve you yeah especially since we're about

[01:33:29] to

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