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Speaking from near the Palisades in Los Angeles:

After we all knew the hurricane-force Santa Anas posed a big danger of fire, because of both news stories and phone alerts, the whole city accidentally got a major "evacuate now" warning, with the big WOOPy noise from our cellphones, that was only supposed to go to residents in a particular area. I had my quadriplegic husband dressed and out of bed and our old go-bags and medical equipment thrown in the car in the 20 minutes it took for the retraction to come out. I also had a bit of a panic attack.

Some people decided to turn off their alarm settings because of that error. But I took it as a warning that we were not ready enough.

I went into the bags and made sure, for instance, that the pants fit me, as I'd gained weight in a year. I stashed the fridge meds in a cold carrier, handy in the fridge. And put the right cat food for the new cat in the cat-kit/litterbox. And created a go-box for the box turtle.

Then I stowed as much as possible in the actual car, including the Important Paperwork file.

All along, we were monitoring as the fires started to pop up and spread.

At 9 pm, we got another WOOP alert. Our address had become part (the far edge) of the Yellow Zone. Not the Red Zone. But as you said, who's going to catch a warning at 2am? (Well, me! But it's a lot harder to react at that hour) In fact, I'm sure that's why CalFire expanded the zones so wide at 9 pm, because they wanted to be sure they wouldn't have to issue a new one overnight.

So we bailed immediately but calmly. Spent 5 days at a hotel near LAX.

Fortunately we had no damage, but had to dip into our emergency drinking water for a few more days until they lifted the Boil Water notice.

Super glad we had and heeded those early warnings about how dangerous those hot dry winds were going to be, and the 9 pm evacuation zone warning.

The relatively low death count in the Palisades fire came from the accurate weather forecast.

The people designated to reach out to locals to make sure they understood how serious it was got fired

I saw a story about a guy who received the alert as he was trying to climb onto his roof because his house was flooded.

But in all honesty, I usually ignore flash flooding alerts too. There are just so many false alarms.

When I 16, a thousand years ago all the way back in 2001, my neighborhood experienced a flash flood.

My mother is bad for panicking over nothing, and we all rolled our eyes as she loaded us into the van and drove up the mountain.

It was one of the wildest things I’ve ever seen. It looked like there were waterfalls coming out of the sky around us. If someone had told me they seen something like that before I seen it, I would’ve called them a liar. But it literally would be dry in one spot and raining just a few feet away, but not normal rain. It was literally like someone was dumping a giant bucket from the sky.

The creek behind my house was instantly in my backyard. This happened as we were leaving.

Later, someone came to the store at the top of the mountain where we were sitting and told my mom that they were going to have to bring boats to get people out of our neighborhood. These big, two-story houses were underwater all the way up into the second floor.

I was so terrified, worried that all of my friends were dead. Fortunately, it didn’t take out the entire neighborhood and people were able to go up the road and take shelter in a church. Only two people died because they tried to drive through it and got sucked into the water.

The people who didn’t take it seriously had to be rescued. We spent months with shovels digging the mud from the houses when the water went back down. The whole neighborhood pitched in. Several families left and the value of the houses tanked. People were buying them for a few thousand dollars. One man from New York swept in and bought several of them and became a slumlord. He did just enough work to make them livable for 350 a month. The neighborhood was so beautiful before that, but it was forever changed. It’s a hellscape to this day.

Somehow we got very lucky. My house only got water in the back rooms and it wasn’t destructive. Everyone from the next house over and on down was ruined though.

1$ per person would have been the capex for a siren system on pre existing cell towers.

Regardless, I hope every single member of that county gets exactly what they voted for.

Or maybe they're just upset that you're using the deaths of children to be smug.

There's a lot more going on in politics than "insert vote, recieve outcome voted for". Gerrymandering, simply being stuck in an area where you are the political minority, politicians campaigning on an entriely different platform than the actions they take later while in office... I could go on, but I expect my words would be wasted.

The dead girls weren't even old enough to vote.

In b4 you start running your mouth off about how it's okay to wish death on the bad people because of what they're doing to you/the good people. Two wrongs don't make a right, and even if it did, you're aimed at the wrong targets. Get your scope zeroed in properly.