As of today the Southern California fires have destroyed 17,000 structures and driven more than 100,000 people from their homes. In the Great Chicago Fire 17,500 structures were destroyed and 150,000 people were made homeless.
I wanted to bring an interesting interactive map to your attention. I’m not embedding it because I expect it to change rapidly. Here’s the description from KTLA:
LOS ANGELES (KTLA) – The Los Angeles County Fire Department has provided the following maps of the thousands of structures, primarily homes, that were damaged or destroyed in the Palisades and Eaton wildfires.
The map icons reflect the current known status of each structure. Red indicates a structure was destroyed. Orange indicates “major” damage. Yellow indicates “minor” damage. Green indicates a low level of impact. Black indicates a structure not damaged. Grey indicates “inaccessible.”
Incident commanders say field damage inspections are ongoing and may change as new information is gathered and verified.
OT, but it does concern California. I predicted that there would be very public raids of illegals but that they would primarily occur in blue states. It has already started. Note that this will harm the CA economy. They could have done similar raids in Texas at any time in the construction industry where the state supposedly would welcome getting rid of illegals but it’s not happening. To the extent that there are raids in red states they will avoid raiding areas that might negatively affect their economies.
Steve
https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/01/kern-county-immigration-sweep/
A complication on that is that, although unskilled or semiskilled migrants DO add to GDP, they capture the economic surplus and more. So, yes, California’s economy may be “harmed” if lowering GDP is harm. But its bottom line could be better.
Won’t be surprised when it turns out we need an another trillion dollar disaster assistance package from the treasury.
Every few years, like clockwork.
And every time the spending leads to greater wealth consolidation masked by inflation.
The largest financial institutions and corporations are always able to profit from disaster.