..... use salt water on wildfires, it will ruin the environment and the equipment!

Ok, then explain this from the FBI which is looking for the person who was operating a drone and it collided with a "Super Scooper" aircraft -- which was scooping up salt water from the ocean to dump on the fires.

ttps://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1878596321042735425

"I’d just like to stress, that technique, using that super scooper aircraft, are our most effective technique to fight fires like this, and when this happens, it puts everybody’s lives at risk," said the assistant director at the FBI’s LA Field Office."

Well now there goes that.  Add to the parade of nonsense the fact that San Francisco which has separate fire main connections at the wharf which they installed after the early 1900s earthquake so fire boats can connect to them and fill the system with saltwater at extremely high volume, recognizing that the domestic supply is both insufficient and will go "open" if buildings are severely damaged or collapse as another example.  In addition it ought to be obvious you can't pollute the domestic system with unfiltered salt water -- but salt water works perfectly well to put fires out (what do you think a fireboat pumps onto a burning vessel?)

Of course when the wind is howling aircraft operations are extremely difficult or impossible.  But the LA area could have put in fire-only mains terminating at the water (much like San Francisco did a hundred years ago) and purchased large mobile, diesel-powered pumps to connect to them with the suction put into the water from land where difficult sea conditions would not matter.

Instead what California did was ban fixed backup generators -- which means that whatever you have in your water towers when a fire starts (which is gravity-fed) is all there will be since the power will be cut off -- and without utility power you can't refill the water towers!

Incidentally for those who say that salt water "ruins everything" and thus cannot be used (despite them using it right now and being recognized as the most-effective firefighting tool against this sort of blaze) I owned property on the water in Florida for 20 years.  Several times the land itself (fortunately not my house!) was inundated with..... salt water from hurricane surge.  It did not kill everything vegetative (or the animals around there); the trees, shrubs and grass survived the event just fine.  I'm sure the rabbits didn't like it at the moment (being flooded out of your hole had to not be much fun) but it hardly made the land barren and uninhabitable, never mind that whatever it might do is certainly less-nasty than having everything burnt to a crisp!

May I ask why we don't have some of those aircraft along the west coast since fire risk is sort of a big deal there?  These apparently came down from Canada; is there something preventing us from buying a couple dozen of them and stashing them (with proper periodic maintenance, of course) so when the inevitable fire comes we can use them?

What happens when competence isn't important anymore and that which you need to be able to cover is not done due to other considerations?  Often and in fact usually nothing right away, but eventually all of the things that people who were hired and had as their only qualification competence, and which society endorsed with "we're doing this because we need to; if it has side effects we accept them" built and maintained wear out, break down or simply are overcome by events in capacity and thus when they should have been repaired, replaced, upgraded or augmented aren't something very, very bad eventually happens.

You might want to read about how Rome actually collapsed because yes, it can happen again and if we don't cut this out the odds are extremely high that it will -- and not just in LA.