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.

Wikipedia

Controlled burns

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?

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

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?