The critical factors that contributed to its devastating fires are listed by Professor of Natural Disaster Management and Chairman of the OASP , who is in Los Angeles with a view to working with the operational actors in the region. Mr Leccas points out that in terms of economic impact, fires in Los Angeles are the worst disaster in the category of fires in the present century and adds that the cost of fires has already reached $250 billion, an amount equal to the estimated costs of the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. CORVERSE “Besides giving political responsibility for what may have gone wrong at management level, there are key factors that we need to understand if we want to limit the likelihood of recurrence of events,” notes Mr Leccas, according to which the critical factors that have contributed to the major disaster are: “Extremely strong downhill winds (katabatic or flowing downhill wins), the region’s geomorphology and prolonged and extreme drought constitute the three key risk-raising factors at the level of fire spread. The speed and frequency of these winds, also known as devil wins, are even stronger due to the evolving climate crisis. CORVERSE In addition to the above factors, structured tissue acts as an overcritical factor in increasing the degree of vulnerability of the system, increasing the overall degree of risk accordingly.” As he notes, “undoubtedly, we find from the facts that a large urban fire cannot easily be dealt with as in the areas of forest and urban tissue complexion (wildland urban interface – WUI), fuel mainly in modern urban areas is multiple than in a forest” and stresses that “while one cannot avoid geodynamic phenomena (shocks, volcanoes, tsunami), the evolving fire is a complex disaster, whose individual dimensions under evolving climate crisis are not mature until now.” According to Mr Lecca, dealing with the fire under these conditions is becoming an extremely difficult equation, with many parameters that are not yet known. “The lack of early intervention, forces, means and available water are clearly weaknesses of the whole system, as if operational forces fail to control the fire at its start under these conditions, then everything is considered lost. Apart from the superficial political approach, what we urgently need for every disaster to achieve is an understanding of the evolution of natural phenomena, which are much more complex than we have so far considered and, in addition, much more complex, when escorting secondary risks are involved in their development,” he concludes.
Leccas for Los Angeles: The worst fires of the century at cost as the Indonesian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina together
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in World