California Budget Bomb & LA County Fire Risk Areas

Uncontrolled wild fires would wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars of property. All the mountain communities would burn to cinders. All the properties that border on the wild would be toast as well as any close to large areas of dry brush.

There's no way you could stop those walls of flame with a garden hose.

But that being said, if there were no firemen for that kind of thing, people would stop building where firemen were necessary.

I'm looking at google maps here for large areas of vegetation that would become infernos just by someone casually dropping a lit cigarette from a car. Without a large fire department these areas would be charred rubble next October:

Hollywood Hills
Beverly Glen
Mullholland Drive
Sherman Oaks
Mountain Areas of Beverly Hills
Parts of Belair
Getty Museum and surrounding terrain
Topanga Canyon
Parts of Pacific Palisades
All the area between the 110 and Pacific Coast Highway (Malibu Mountains)
Calabasas (Burn Countrywide Burn!)
Granada Hills
Porter Ranch
Sylmar
Sunland
Tujunga
La Crescenta
La Canada

I can't even go on there are so many. That's probably about 1/20th of the places that have had fires in the past that required massive firefighting efforts.
**********************************************************************************
"Then what happens? Do Californians adjust peacefully? Or do you get chaos? Maybe a crime wave?
What's the mood out there, Californians?"

I'd say there's a general sense of Nausea in the air....On the surface things still look somewhat the same, folks still have their piercings, tattoos and/or big asses and carry themselves with a slight air of irritation that their celebrity continues to go unrecognized (but i've felt that for years, that everyone here goes around trailed by invisible paparazzi).

But the freeways are emptier....there are "For Lease" signs EVERYWHERE. Unemployment is touching EVERYONE and the budget bomb has not even detonated yet! The rapidity of the fall has allowed folks to make sharper comparisons with the "good time bubble years" of bull**** & plenty but like Fitz & Slartibartfast, i've found that people still aren't really ready to face the music coming from the observation deck. Instead, they've leavened the air with an un-sunny heaviness...people still don't make eye contact at Trader Joe's (as if everyone was ashamed or complicit or disdainful simultaneously)......but some are beginning to exhibit....vulnerability....and sobriety

my abstract two cents
********************************************************************************
It's funny, but it isn't. I just saw Arnold on the Tonight Show in late May and he said Cali had been projecting $104B in revenues. Now they apparently expect $79B. (Actually available on nbc.com) But...what if it turns out to be only $60B?

It's that/those pesky mathematics again.