Denial is incredibly powerful. Most people can't really comprehend that there isn't enough water in that region (even though it should be obvious). We've lived in a time of plenty for so long the idea that something as fundamental as water could be limited just seems impossible.
You see this everywhere, and only tend to notice the denial when the problems don't impact you. Comments pointing out concerns that impact tech or everyone are frequently downvoted to oblivion here on HN. I saw a comment claiming that democracy in the US has been under threat, something no one who was observing the US from outside would deny, get downvoted to oblivion and decried as pure hyperbole.
We're all living in a constant and escalating state of cognitive dissonance, the world around is collapsing in multiple ways, but locally you aren't allowed to acknowledge this. The "this is fine meme" summarizes our current environment perfectly.
Y2k comes to mind. I was in high school at the time, and still remember all the breathless articles. The trains would stop, the water treatment plants would fail, the traffic lights would go haywire. Somewhere within each semi truck, grid sub-station and bank mainframe was a tiny ticking time bomb that would rollover in a few short months to 00 and implode into chaos. For the want of a few bits, the implements of modern life would become useless hunks of scrap. The crusty cobol programmers were working round the clock to stop it but there simply weren't enough of them or the source code was missing or nobody had a compiler anymore. We were doomed.
Turns out, the damned lights didn't even flicker at midnight.
And with rise of click-driven journalism, it's even worse.
The Governor last year: "“There’s something that is truly Californian about the wilderness and the wild and pioneering spirit,” Newsom said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I’m not advocating for no (building).” [1]
AFAIK, lawmakers are actually considering subsidizing insurance costs for exurbs in places that were never meant to host human habitation year round.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/b17b5c9200a64466b49f3f605f9202fe
For example of the latter, the Winnipeg floodway is a huge ditch around Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Built in the late '50s, it diverts the Red River around the city, reconnecting further north. It was seen as a huge boondoggle when being built, but has saved much of the city repeatedly since.
and which places on earth were meant for humans exactly?
From the article: "They believe that the county is not going to let five hundred homes next to one of the wealthiest cities go without water.”
In their mind: "This is America." Meaning they are used to living in the "Land of plenty" never thinking that one day, it could end.
This was my thought as well. The music is about to stop. Many don't realize it. Some don't believe it. Some actively deny it. But it's happening, and faster than we're ready for.
We can still avert most of the predicted catastrophes, but we need to stop letting the people with the money just dictate policy to the rest of us to favor themselves.
It's pretty normal in rural areas to basically not have a fire department for all practical purposes anyway. Yeah, they often have a volunteer fire department, but when your best case scenario response time is like 30 minutes, you're not gonna save structures anyway. That's not considering the wildfire risk at all.
Lol... no. There are so many flawed assumptions here I'm not sure where to start. Basically everything you said was wrong.
First, the "neighbor house" would typically be hundreds of yards away at the absolute closest.
Second, the availability of water for fire fighting purposes in rural areas is commonly dubious normally. It's exceedingly rare that a residence will have any form of pressurized water like "personal hydrant" type of system. At best, they might have a 2,500 gallon polyethylene tank, or a pond they could dip into, IF the volunteer fire department has a pump and hose setup, which is itself kind of rare or slow to arrive.
Third, a lot of the efforts on scene are unlikely to involve water at all. It's more like wild-land fire style where you might try to cut fire lines and stuff to try and prevent igniting surrounding areas, evacuate and render aid to affected people, etc.
If they really are building on multi-acre lots then you're probably right. But if it's more like a suburban style where houses are on 0.25 acre lots and there's only maybe 15-20 feet between houses then I feel my concerns are legit.
You could say that having homes that depend on cisterns actually helps in firefighting efforts:
I volunteer with our rural, island-based fire department. The more populated part has 90% or more of the people, and is part of our coverage area. The larger part is more parks and forest, and sees regional coverage such as chopper- or truck-based crews, helicopters and so on.
Each of the engine trucks carries something like 1000 gallons of water, and is kept full. So are the tenders, which can dump into the "porta-pond" as in that video. The water supply team has a list of available sources of water that they can go to to keep that water flowing, but if there is nothing nearby, the round-trip time will get longer, and firefighters will have to leave the building until there is water available.
Wildfire fighting is very different, and much more focused on containing the edges of the fire by using natural fire breaks or creating new ones. (Think picks and shovels, heli buckets, and heavy equipment where available.) If there is a house or two threatened, maybe some sprinklers can be set up ahead of the fire. If the house is on fire, too bad, efforts are on what's ahead.
Last year I ran across an LA Times article about how people were making different life choices due to the pandemic, and and other factors - specifically moving from LA to this place. In contrast to locals who tend to build low houses and choose colors that blend with the desert landscape, these people were painting their houses bright white and, I kid you not, installing swimming pools.
That said, I see wiggle room on "if nothing changes there eventually won't be enough water", even if we all know that in practice nothing will change in time, so I don't know how that actually plays out.
In some ways it's nice to not have an HOA, no one bugs me if my lawn is looking sad. But in other ways it would be nice to have a unified group to take care of some neighborhood things, like unifying garbage pickup since we have private garbage companies here: there's probably 6 different companies who service my neighborhood on all 5 days of the week, it would be nice if we all just had 1 and probably we could all save some money this way too.
In many locations neither of those items are purview of the HOA, those would be City ordinances and City Services.
HOA's in my experience fit 2 molds, with some over lap
The first takes care of common property of the community, like playgrounds, community centers, etc.
Then you have rules enforcement, which are beyond the standard city rules like length of grass, in the realm of the type and style of grass you can have, the plants you can have, the color of the home, the type of (or if you can) have a pool, or structure, or Playground, etc etc etc.
These HOA expanded on what would be normal governmental regulations around safety, and go into the realm of "property value" protection, and other ascetics needs of the community
Pools and structures like decks or sheds are regulated by the building code of the town, but they do not impact your property value for property taxes. Pools specifically also don't seem to impact property value when you sell, a pool is only useful here for 3 months of the year and lots of people don't want to deal with maintaining them. I would happily pay an HOA to take care of a nice neighborhood pool instead of maintaining my own but I've never seen a local single-family home neighborhood with a community pool here.
All the FL/TX ones even come with gates.
1) The conspiracy theory is that intentionally pointless HOAs were pushed by small government folks as a way to make people skeptical of tax-for-service organizations.
2) The HOAs point isn’t to regulate the 99% of people who would otherwise maintain their house. It’s for the 1% of people that wouldn’t and in order to avoid housing discrimination charges, you have to regulate everyone equally.
This is representative of the core conflict of American politics that makes it so confusing to outsiders - ideologically, the people in power (often delusionally) identify with Europe, but in practice, they desire power dynamics similar to oligopolies seen in the developing world.
Not to go too far with the metaphor, but if America never established race-based slavery (and instead, racial minorities were primarily the small number of remaining Native Americans), I bet we'd have a similar political system to Australia (where overtly exclusionary practices are more frowned upon).
I have no information about this, but I would expect that homeowner's insurance should get much more expensive for these locations as without access to water it's quite hard to have firefighting infrastructure. Without firefighters, homes and humans are at much higher risk. Maybe insurance economics will help to resolve this?