{"id":98362,"date":"2025-12-17T15:03:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T15:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/98362\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T15:03:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T15:03:09","slug":"there-needs-to-be-more-communication-between-firefighters-and-nasa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/98362\/","title":{"rendered":"There needs to be more communication between firefighters and NASA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dec. 17, 2025 5:30 AM PT <\/p>\n

To the editor: It is a supremely tragic and unfathomable irony that one of the world\u2019s premier image analysis facilities, with particular expertise in the detection of hotspots and fires \u2014 the Caltech\/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory \u2014 resides within the zone of the Eaton fire (\u201cWith Altadena burning, L.A. County lacked satellite mapping tool used by other agencies,\u201d<\/a> Dec. 11). Many scientists and engineers, and others employed at JPL, lost their homes in the fire<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet, in the years before the fire, as far as I\u2019m aware, there was only minimal effort put toward connecting L.A. County fire resources directly with this JPL expertise and, especially and glaringly, no success in developing sustainable programs to this end. NASA and NOAA have additional resources beyond Department of Defense satellites that could have possibly provided additional data in a timely fashion.<\/p>\n

Data sources are well-known to researchers, but are apparently not well known, nor are easily available to operational firefighters in L.A. County. This egregious lack of interagency communication could more easily be rectified with the appropriate funding. However, under the draconian cutbacks<\/a> to earth science funding at JPL, no such remediation is conceivable. Thus, residents even in proximity to JPL, and more generally nationally, will continue to lack access to these critical resources, and will remain at increased risk.<\/p>\n

This is just one more example of how the attack on science by the current Republican administration and Congress is costing lives and money as long as it remains unchallenged and unabated.<\/p>\n

And, as long as science research is strangled by funding decimation in favor of increased military spending and ridiculously generous tax breaks to well-connected large corporations, the American public will lose money and lives. Bigly.<\/p>\n

David Pieri, La Crescenta
This writer is a retired JPL\/NASA research scientist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dec. 17, 2025 5:30 AM PT To the editor: It is a supremely tragic and unfathomable irony that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98363,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[53699,53701,2072,3802,4330,53700,6112,8161,48,52,51,1637,47,50,49,4263,53698,3098,10645,32660,645],"class_list":{"0":"post-98362","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-additional-resource","9":"tag-defense-satellite","10":"tag-editor","11":"tag-fire","12":"tag-firefighter","13":"tag-hotspot","14":"tag-jpl","15":"tag-l-a-county","16":"tag-la","17":"tag-la-headlines","18":"tag-la-news","19":"tag-life","20":"tag-los-angeles","21":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","22":"tag-los-angeles-news","23":"tag-money","24":"tag-more-communication","25":"tag-nasa","26":"tag-noaa","27":"tag-other-agency","28":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}