Talk:December 2017 Southern California wildfires

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California: Southern California Mid‑importance

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Disaster management Mid‑importance

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Weather: Droughts / Wildfires Mid‑importance

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Wildfire Mid‑importance

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A news item involving December 2017 Southern California wildfires was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the In the news section on 13 December 2017.

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Controlled burns[edit]

the politicians of California reject the idea of controlled burns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn because of local objections. I think this should be discussed. Controlled-burns or out-control-wildfires ten years later, take your pick CorvetteZ51 (talk) 08:36, 17 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Cost?[edit]

The info box lists over $3.139B as the cost with three incites. CalFire reports that they have spent $38M only on fire-fighting as of Dec 11. AccuWeather projects $180B but also gives a calculated cost by Fortune of $500B. (The third source has nothing to do with wildfires.)

Where is the source for $3.139B? The cost line in a wildfire infobox may represent:

the total fire-fighting cost alone
the total of the fire-fighting and insured costs
the total of the above plus business and school closures; clogged commuter routes; respiratory illness and rehabilitations from the bad air; lost sales and business activity and workdays lost.

Does anyone know which it's supposed to be? If the grand total (#3), we should go with the AccuWeather report. The last half-sentence in the lead ("predicted by experts to cost at least billions of dollars in insured damages alone") should be changed to reflect this. --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 13:07, 24 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The total cost is pretty much the third point you put out (all fire-related costs and property losses). I did a little math to calculate the estimated property losses; you can find them in my edit summary for that addition in the revision history of the article. However, the reason why I didn't include exact numbers in the lead is because the estimates are preliminary (they were issues around December 6-7, very early during this outbreak of wildfires). A lot more homes were lost since then, so if $3 billion dollars was the minimum estimate back then, it's likely around $5-6 billion by now. When a more representative estimate is released after the end of the fires (likely in January 2018), I will update the figures and include that number in the article lead. LightandDark2000 (talk) 01:24, 25 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@LightandDark2000: I have changed your edit notes into a footnote so all can see. This may be too brief (for example, what is 40 in 500B/40? why did you choose 500B rather than 180B? etc.) so you may have to extend the calculations with inline citations. If the 12/11 CalFire Update and the SD Union-Trib story (currently reference labels ^[2][3]) support your calculations, their labels should be moved from the infobox into the footnote. --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 17:38, 29 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wildfire terminology[edit]

This article has some good explanations of some wildfire terminology. LightandDark2000 (talk) 08:13, 29 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What does containment and mop up of a wildfire mean?