What you need to know about rebuilding after a fire, DCFS has a new director and LA businesses that use Bitcoin
3 ways housing can be better developed to minimize fire destruction
Before fires started their rampage through Southern California last week, few residents in the LA neighborhood of Sylmar or the city of Ventura could have imagined flames engulfing their homes. But it's clear that living within city limits is no safeguard against fires.
"We're a fire-prone environment. It's going to blaze, have huge catastrophic fires in terms of communities," said Richard Halsey, director of the non-profit California Chaparral Institute.
Halsey believes that this fire season should be a wake-up call for local government officials to reconsider their priorities when developing housing. "Instead of trying to stop fires, [we need to ask] how do we save lives and property?" he said.
How housing development should change
1. Rethink the intense focus on vegetation management
Defensible space around a community is very important. There's no questions about that. The message sometimes gets out that we want to clear the vegetation. All that creates is a bare zone which ultimately creates a bowling alley for embers to hit the house. And the point is here that houses don't explode and they don't get engulfed by flames. Most homes ignite by ember attacks.
2. Retrofit houses with technology that will better protect them from fires
"The Australians have a great technology and even the Canadians use this. They have external fire sprinklers. It's a strange idea that fire is going to come in from the outside, but that's what happens now. And so you hit a switch or push a button and the house is immersed in a mist of moisture. You throw a hose into the pool or you have your own independent pump that is going through an independent generator. It worked marvelously, but we don't look at it this way because we've never had this kind of problem with all of these communities fingering into these dangerous areas."
3. Stop building suburban housing into converted wildland areas
"I know people love to be out in suburbia, but we cannot keep putting people out in dangerous conditions like we're doing. We just can't. I know there's a housing crisis. But you're going to have a mortality crisis if you keep doing this. There are ways to make communities fire safe. There are ways to not put them in high fire zones. And the communities that are there, we need to sit back right now and do an after action report and say, 'Why did we lose those homes? What can we do to prevent that from happening?'"
Learn more about the man charged with helping LA's foster youths
There are more than 30,000 children in the Los Angeles foster care system, and the county's Department of Children and Family Services had been without a permanent leader. That changed on December 1.
Bobby Cagle now leads the agency, taking over for his predecessor Phillip Browning, who retired earlier this year.
"Bobby has had a very fast rise to now leading the largest child welfare administration – the largest foster care system – in the country in Los Angeles," says Daniel Heimpel, founder of the Chronicle of Social Change who wrote a recent profile about Cagle.
As a child, Cagle was an adoptee, himself, and that background played a role in what made him attractive to county leaders.
"His experience having been in the system," says Heimpel, "I think that was really important."
Cagle's task not only involves caring for these children, but reforming the department's image after the 2013 high-profile death of eight-year-old Gabriel Fernandez.
Four social workers had investigated allegations of abuse in his home but ultimately decided that he should stay there. Fernandez was eventually tortured and killed by his mother's boyfriend.
"Cagle's coming into a system that has reacted to that death and has taken some pretty significant steps," Heimpel says.
Bitcoin believers: Why these LA businesses take cryptocurrency
A few years ago, a couple walked into Wynn Nail Spa and paid for a mani-pedi using one Bitcoin. Owner Wing Yu never cashed the coin in, opting to let it sit in his digital wallet. Bitcoin's value has gone up a tad since then.
"In hindsight, I hope they have fond memories of paying $15,000 for their first mani-pedi," Yu said.
There's been a lot of buzz about Bitcoin this year, due mostly to its meteoric rise in value in recent months. At the beginning of 2017, one digital coin would have cost about $1000. Today, that same coin is worth more than $17,000 — $2000 more than when Yu spoke with Take Two just three days ago.
That growth might be attributed to the Chicago Board Options Exchange, which began listing Bitcoin futures last weekend. Buyer interest caused the exchange's website to crash. The price of one coin shot up as much as 26 percent.
Up until its weekend debut, Bitcoin has had analysts scratching their head. It pays no dividends, and its value is driven purely by demand. As a means of transferring value, Bitcoin's reputation is seedy. Think dark web and illicit purchases.
Since its release in 2008, Bitcoin has fathered a dynasty of digital coins called "cryptocurrency."
"It sounds a little scary," said Priscilla Sotelo Klisch, assistant manager at Le Petit Jardin Cafe & Flowers. Her shop is one of a handful of businesses in Los Angeles that accepts Bitcoin for payments. "Crypt is not known for being the most pleasant-sounding currency. Putting the two together, what is that?"
The "what" of Bitcoin is something few understand. But some business owners have simply accepted the mystery.
"I just look at it as, if I can trade it for real money — dollars or euros — then at least I have that," Sotelo Klisch said.
2017 has seen Bitcoin slowly move past its dark history and into mainstream culture. For Francisco Dominguez at Meltdown Comics, Bitcoin's continued rise is vindicating.
"I'm giddy because I've been telling everybody 'Bitcoin, Bitcoin' left and right. They always thought I was talking crazy," Dominguez said. "Now, everybody wants to know about Bitcoin."
Dominguez takes all major forms of payment, but he likes Bitcoin the most.
"When I take a transaction in Bitcoin, my percentage is so much less than taking a transaction from a credit card," he said. "If I could, I would take Bitcoin all day long [rather] than paying all the high credit card fees."
Meltdown is also one of the few places in L.A. where you can find a Bitcoin ATM machine, where customers can exchange cash for cryptocurrency.
"It's a future machine," Dominguez said.
He said people from all walks of life come in to use his machine. Sometimes, there's a line. When Bitcoin prices are up, people come in to cash out, much like traditional investors. But Bitcoins are not to be mistaken for conventional investments; exchanges are subject to little government regulations and few protections. As Sotelo Klisch learned, forgetting that can have costly consequences.
Bitcoins are stored in digital wallets either online or on a device like a smartphone or a cryptocurrency storage device. Because there is no bank watching over the funds, users are more or less on their own. Online wallets can be hacked, and storage devices can be misplaced.
Shortly after Le Petit Jardin started taking Bitcoins, they lost the phone they used to store their currency.
"With Bitcoins, there is this aspect of you have to be a little bit more hands on and responsible for managing," Sotelo Klisch said, looking back.
Some websites and exchanges try to make Bitcoin more user friendly, but for right now, cryptocurrency users are more or less on their own.
Despite the added responsibility, all three business unanimously agree that we'll be hearing a lot more about cryptocurrency in the future.
"Everything's going to be on your phone or device," said Meltdown Comics' Dominguez. "But, you know, that's 100 years in the future, and we'll all be dead when it happens, but it's gonna happen."
Big fires, big business: The cost of fighting wildfires has ballooned in recent decades
It doesn't matter where you live, nature's threats are everywhere.
Case-in-point: Houston, Texas. Residents there are assessing the damage from last week's hurricane, as another threatens the Florida coast.
But the perils don't end there.
In California, at least 20 active wildfires are burning as of Thursday morning. These fires and the flames to come are likely to be of interest to one Michael Kodas.
Kodas is the author of the new book: "Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame."
In it, he makes the case that over the past three decades, wildfire fighting has ballooned to become a multi-billion dollar industry in the country – that's reason enough to rethink our relationship with forest fires.
In an interview with Take Two's A Martinez, Kodas outlines how the U.S. came to view this natural phenomenon, and when the country's antiquated attitude toward fires crossed a line.
Highlights
When did we declare war on fire?
This goes back more than 100 years to the big burn of 1910, which was a fire about the size of Connecticut that burned in Idaho and Montana, about five years into the existence of the U.S. Forest Service.
This fire was so intense that it actually nearly overran a guy named Ed Pulaski and his crew of firefighters.
Years later, America latched onto this hero story of Ed Pulaski and everybody that fought this fire, even though the firefighters on the ground there said it was a total failure.
The next several leaders of the U.S. Forest Service were all veterans of this fire and eventually they would implement what they called an "out by 10 am" policy, which was basically that we would extinguish every wildfire that was sighted in the United States by 10 am the day after it was sighted, regardless of whether it threatened humanity or human structures.
That led to a vast firefighting operation that's proven to be very expensive for our government and changed the structure of many of our forests in the U.S. In some cases, it made those forests more prone to more severe fires today.
How much money are we spending on this?
In the 1990s, the U.S. spent about $300 million a year on wildfire – that's fighting fires and preparing, preventing and helping landscapes recover from them afterward.
That number in a bad fire year today can top $3 billion. The trajectory of expenditures on wildfire is on a very steep climb, and that's before you consider what states like California spend.
It sounds like a growing business. Where is that money coming from and how is it usually spent?
When you're looking at the figures I gave there, we're talking about U.S. taxpayer's dollars, generally.
About half or more goes to the private sector. One interesting way to get a sense of how much money there is in a wildfire is to just go by a fire camp when there's a big fire going on. The biggest profit line to private contractors is in aviation. The aircraft are incredibly expensive to operate. The retardants are often quite expensive.
Tuesday Reviewsday: Miguel, Weird Al and Sharon Jones
Tuesday Reviewsday is our weekly new music segment, and this week Oliver Wang joins Josie Huang to talk about the latest releases.
Following are his picks:
Miguel
Album: War & Leisure
Song: City of Angels
This is the fourth album by this L.A. rising star (or is he just a star-star now?)
It's not nearly as funky as his previous LPs because this one has more fuzzed out/psychedelic touches.
Still a very sexy sound, though!
Weird Al Yankovic
Album: Squeeze Box: The Complete Works of Weird Al Yankovic
Song: Yoda
As a kid growing up in L.A. in the 80s, Weird Al’s music were legitimate hits despite being total parodies.
It’s kind of hard to imagine the same thing working now, but I appreciate how prolific his career has been over that time.
This new box set collects everything: 15 albums deep! All in an accordion box!
Plus, with the new Star Wars film around the corner, it's never a bad time to bump, “Yoda.”
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings
Album: Soul of a Woman
Song: Rumors
Daptone Records released the album a year to the day after Jones’s death from cancer.
This posthumous release keeps true to the sound that she and the band crafted ever since they broke out 15 years ago, and it's a wonderful way to remember her.