Intel Update - Jan 11 - Battle Tracking Los Angeles

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the Intel update for January 5th through the 11th 2025 in classic fashion uh it's been a very very busy week so let's get right to it starting off in the Southeast region I briefly wanted to keep uh people's minds on the situation in Western North Carolina with regards to the hurricane helian recovery efforts things are not going well uh the local uh County city state federal agencies have not been particularly helpful over the past couple of months and most of the uh self uh created Aid either by people just trying to do the best they can locally or from volunteer uh agencies coming in uh from outside the area it's been a it's been a fight tooth and nail just to get anything done in Western North Carolina most of the area is still completely devastated and over the past couple of weeks the whole area has gotten you know in some places over a foot of of snow so again that makes uh recovery efforts very challenging and uh I think this is my personal opinion. But I think that it's fairly obvious right now that uh the federal government is just kind of hoping that people will forget about what's going on in in Western North Carolina so they can just go ahead and cut Aid and just kind of forget about the situation entirely so I did want to bring the spotlight back to Western North Carolina to keep this incident in people's uh hearts and Minds so to speak uh because this this crisis is nowhere near over right there are still 3,500 families uh without uh without any sort of Housing and FEMA is trying to kick them out of hotels um so so as of last night I saw that FEMA did graciously allow one single extra day of housing for the people in Western North Carolina so that they can get out of their temporary housing uh in the middle of a snowstorm so again I'm not going to to um uh talk about this one very much because it just gets me very unnecessarily angry and and I don't want to push that on you guys so uh I will just cover that also in this region the white house the other day announced that they will be giving uh or or they will be covering 100% of the uh Aid and Recovery efforts needed for California so we're talking about potentially hundreds of billions of dollars uh over a period of 180 days so California has a blank check they have literally been given a blank check by the federal government for anything and everything that might uh happen over the next 180 days so again not going to uh comment on that too much. But uh we'll get to the situation in California in just a moment before we get to the Wildfire situation I did want to briefly mention something that occurred uh yesterday which is the theft of three Humvees from an Army Reserve Center in Tustin this one was kind of interesting because they actually were successful in getting uh three vehicles uh so uh I'm not entirely certain what's going on with this. But you here you can see the solicitation uh for from the detectives working the case now I know what a lot of people are probably thinking is is this preparation for a terror attack because I have seen a lot of speculation on social media that says that the that the thieves made off with weapons and ammo and explosives and all that kind of stuff so far officially none of that has been taken all they all they took were some Humvees you can see all the stuff they made off with it's basically just scrap metal and anything that look valuable uh laying around again an Army Reserve Center I'm not entirely certain they have an Armory there right they may not have an Armory for weapons or explosives at all so some old busted Humvees from the gwatt era just sitting in a lot all it takes is a couple of you know bolt cutters and there you go free humy right so I think that's probably what happened I just wanted to kind of pump the brakes on that on that speculation right now there have been no confirming reports of any explosives or weapons stolen uh so again that kind of that kind of mitigate that little bit of information mitigates the terrorism risk does it not right of course this is just my assessment. But I think that if anybody's going to take the time to steal 18 bayonets and 40 pair of binoculars I doesn't really sound like they're interested in in causing a lot of harm looks like they're trying to Hawk a bunch of stuff at a pawn shop so you know that's the kind of thing you have to look at the opportunity cost you know if it was just the Humvees I'd say hm maybe a little suspicious. But it looks like they took everything that wasn't nailed down so again concerning be on the lookout for uh humpies being driven by people who don't look like they're in the military and you know that that's the kind of thing that's going on uh out there in California now moving to the fire itself uh I'll I'll get to the to the more up-to-date battle tracking map here in just a moment. But really situation has gone from bad to worse in many regards some places in some areas it's uh it's it's maintained the status quo but the fires continue to spread one of the complicating factors uh in addition to this crisis we're getting uh a lot of um complications from many different angles we've got the political thing we've got the financial thing we've got uh water shortages we've got infrastructure crumbling we've got social Decay and societal uh collapse kind of things so this is all kind of making the situation worse if it was just a wildfire and we didn't have to worry about any of the other stuff I think wouldn't be as bad as it is. However um this is a this has been a long time coming as many many people know uh throughout the firefighting Community uh Los Angeles being at extreme risk for this exact scenario so uh some of the coordination uh challenges that I noed this morning I wanted to again address a a rumor that I have seen and I I don't know if it's entirely true or not. But again time is of the essence so I've got to kind of get this information out quickly I'm seeing claims be made that California has held up uh upwards of 60 firefighting rigs from Oregon and other uh neighboring states in Sacramento for inspections of emissions right emissions testing to make sure the fire fire trucks are not um you know emitting too many you know greenhouse gases I guess uh what I do know so far is that this is partially true at least uh Sacramento is the uh staging area for a lot of outside resources you have to think this is very very big calire and California at large is a very large State and we're talking potentially hundreds of firefighting rigs moving around just from outside area that's not including the thousands that are inside the state you know already so I don't know if this is if this claim is true I don't know if California is so backwards minded that they think that they need to test conduct missions testing on a firefighting truck I I I don't know if I mean it sounds just like California doesn't it. But again uh this could also just be staging woes it could be somebody at the staging Depot just complaining that things are taking too long once again think think higher level than you might want to think you do not want to send every uncoordinated firet Tru right to the fire you want to send them to a staging area so that levels of command can take control and send them to where they need to go otherwise you're just having a lot of people show up clog up the roads and there's going to be a very very inefficient use of resources so once again if California is concerned about emissions testing of fire trucks for in any case what ever even before the fire I think we all can probably agree that's pretty ridiculous. However uh I don't know if the recent claims that are being made are true or if this is more of a staging thing again a lot of people will take a photo and they'll take a video of some inefficiency right we all know the the uh story of dot workers you know 15 guys standing around watching one guy shovel something same kind of thing happens in firefighting. But we focus on that sometimes and not the higher level picture again with any sort of government response you're going to have a very inefficient uh response right that's just the way that it is. But again I'm trying to keep things as neutral and as as realistic as possible because the situation in California is is not developing super well right now one of the other main concerns is the leadership problems within the Los Angeles Fire Department so again this is just kind of a political thing that it gets people really inflamed. But it it it must be noted that the political um and uh leadership problems within Los Angeles at Large there's a lot of infighting going on I've seen reports that the Los Angeles Fire Department chief uh has been fired as of this morning I don't know if that's true or not once again I've seen reports that says that the mayor um retracted the the firing again I don't have enough time to verify these things all the way down to the ground and there's a lot of uh very bad information going on out there a lot of it being pushed by you know mainstream media and government sources. But uh once again I think that one of the major things to keep in mind again people like me tend to think a little bit differently any anytime a natural disaster comes out and we have to think is this potentially a malign actor uh considering the context of what I'm going to talk about is developing right now in Southeast Asia I think we probably need to consider this right now I think most people the general consensus right from many authority figures and from many people in the know and in the career field is that most of these fires maybe not all of them. But most of them are probably arson we know this for sure with a lot of the smaller fires that are kind of popping up and and dotting around now I don't know if some of the larger fires are Arsen. But it it certainly seems like a lot of these are uh deliberate but again this is a speculation thing that we need a lot of proper investigation to discern the reason that we have to lean on this right now is again risk assessment right and we have to assume again assume worst case scenario then walk it back to a more reasonable perspective once we have information and in this case uh this is exactly the kind of thing that we would see if a malign actor were to want to cause some harm right everyone from just a homeless guy setting a fire to some kind of you know pyromaniac kind of thing or someone who's a little bit more educated and more deliberate in what they do right or even a nation state actor right uh if just to right up front if China wanted to start something this would be what they would do okay so this is one of those things on that checklist of of potentially China becoming a little bit more kinetic in their military aspirations setting fire to Los Angeles is one thing that I would expect a Chinese Sleeper Cell to do again pure speculation. But we have to kind of think of these things especially in the context again like I said of what's going on in Southeast Asia now before we get to the map I wanted to also mention a a sort of incident that's kind of going on that kind of shows or or is more of an indicator of the decision-making process of some of these commands here now uh I don't want to armchair quarterback any of this of course uh. However we we have to to kind of to look at some of these incidents as they occur right and one of the incidents that occurred was one of the super scooper aircraft uh the um Marine based firefighting aircraft that was working the Palisades fire struck a drone allegedly struck a drone or some something in the air uh yesterday and it grounded not just this aircraft. But all of the aircraft on the fire uh for a period of of many many hours so once again um just me thinking from a more military perspective we have to understand risk assessment and risk management in this case we've got a damage to the Leading Edge of one of the wing tips of uh one of the super scooper aircraft and the aircraft itself uh did not crash it uh they you know had landed again and inspected and found the found a hole in the wing right. But again if you're thinking of more military timas of the essence kind of we've got a go sort of thing you know I'm surprised that you know some 18-year-old maintainer with some you know safety wire and speed tape didn't just fix this in like 5 minutes. And then get it back into the air because people are dying out there you know so I don't know you know we may see more and more of this. But um this is this is once again something I kind of want to talk about more uh when it comes to risk management risk assessment and mitigating risks right so with that out of the way let's uh let's jump to the map and I'll show you uh something that I kind of have thrown together uh over the past few days with regards to an incident tracking map a battle tracking map uh that many of you can use so all right everyone so here is the battle tracking map that I've created the incident response or incident tracking map that I've created here in Arc gas online uh for those of you who did not see my previous post or my pre previous video on this the link for this map will be in the description box below so uh once again this is something that I've have done before. But I'm going to start doing this a little bit more deliberately so uh if you if there is an incident that requires some sort of geospatial component if you need to just really look at a map uh this is something that I'm going to to do uh for the foreseeable future uh again this is a very expensive service to maintain from my end so special thank you to all the patreon uh supporters out there uh who made this possible um. But for now this is what we've got so again this is not just one map for Los Angeles as we can see over here on the on the other side on the side of the screen here uh this is I just have one folder for the AL fires if there are multiple incident going on around the world I can track all of them on this one map so don't think this is just something I'm doing for the Los Angeles Fire any time there's some kind of major event going on around the world I can create a folder for this. And then once this La fire is done I can archive it and uh you can see the historic data so uh let's go ahead and start with some bookmarks here again the overall view of the area here is uh you can see a lot of fires now again this time of year in California this is decently odd uh this is is not the peak uh Wildfire season this is the off season so you have to wonder uh really what's going on with a lot of these fires right uh in any case it's hard to say if this uh recent incident is is all linked together into one sort of you know magic storm of weather conditions. But again I don't want to speculate on the on the cause too much here so let's go ahead and take a look down here at the Palisades region here in Santa Monica as we can see uh let me cover some of the things here on the map uh so this is the fire extent now let me go ahead uh getting a little nerdy for a moment let me go ahead and turn some of these layers off so you can see what's really going on here now here in the base data folder we've got critical infrastructure where's fire data here so let's turn all of this off and we will see what's going on so right now we're just seeing the evacuation areas that Los Angeles uh county has has mandated right so yellow is get ready to move and red is evacuate uh mandatory right so let's go ahead and throw on the uh calfire official map uh of the fire extent now as we can see this map is a little bit out of date uh this is because calfire to the best of my knowledge does not update this map. But once a day this is more of a strategic resource uh that can be you know kind of summarized in a day again fires move around a lot and it would be a lot of of effort to to track each little point that the fire advances so uh again aerial surveys are conducted to create this map and it's it's a very good resource. But so again we've got a pretty good strategic resource here but I think we can do a little bit better and let's go ahead and throw in one of these satellite options here this is the modus data uh from the modus uh sensor platform this is a satellite again that orbits the earth and uh uh shows uh hot spots so again each one of these little red dots is a hot spot detected by the satellite and as we can see uh the uh calire map you know is great resource. But it's a little bit out of date so maybe we can get a little bit better of a of a picture as to where this fire may be may be starting now again this is not a perfect resource. But it's just one tool in the toolbox that can kind of help us out a little bit now when we combine that with another resource let's turn on the ve uh sensor as well again let me turn off the modus one so we can just see veers same same right same same. But a little bit different and and that is uh these little dots up here that show a little bit finer resolution as to where these hotpots are located now when we combine the two let's see here turn the bo on we can get a little bit better clear picture as to what's going on here and when we add in a third satellite detection method let me turn on just that one Noah's HMS platform now we can see a lot more up to date so again dots equal heat so this shows that the fire here in this case is advancing if we turn actually let's turn all of them on here we can get a better picture and a lot more um a lot more real time I suppose than uh you would ordinarily get just by looking at the calire maps we can clearly see that this area here is uh is very much in danger of the fire expanding which is why we have all of these evacuation orders going on here so so once again if we're looking at this kind of mapping structure here it's very very dangerous to start interpreting fire Maps right this is not what we're trying to do what we're trying to do is get a little bit more Fidelity on what's going on on the ground a little bit more up to dat right so this map can be opened by a single person with a single smartphone so if you're on on the ground in the area and you still have cell service again of course this requires a cell service I'm working on other options. But for now if you can access the internet and you have a web browser on your phone one single tap one single link will bring you to this and you can turn on and off layers As You Wish now I have them all turned on because what I want people to do is at the at the expense of people saying ah the fire is not coming towards me don't want to do that right uh we want to actually make sure that people are not you know reducing the risk. However if you're in say you know one of these areas over here in enino as the fire is advancing towards enino this is something that you might be you know maybe want to be a little bit more mindful of because as we can see uh the fire right now so again let's check out one of these hotspots here from the uh NASA uh HMS fire detection system and this is at 1029 UTC and right now as of I'm recording this it is 1, 1600 uh UTC so again we're we're several hours behind uh in terms of the satellite data. But it's more up to date than once a day isn't it so as we can see this is one of the main values for having a system like this of course it does rely on a cellular connection if you wanted to pull it up on your smartphone. But if you are panicking if you've got family who are are trying to get as much information as possible in an easy to see format this can help I'm not saying it's the best I'm just saying it's it's what I've got to help right so this not just applies to this crisis. But other crises as well I'm going to keep this going for as long as I as long as I can right uh but really the goal here is if you have a smartphone and you have an internet connection still you can access this map with a single tap you don't need to have any app you don't need to have any training you don't need to know how to do anything you can send this to the most technologically illiterate person on the planet and they can still look at the map and see what's going on so once again if we jump over here to the map if we had say for instance just left uh on the uh calire Maps uh which are updated as as often as calire does if we were to just leave the calire maps up and and just go from that we might not have a clear picture as of the danger right so if we turn on all of our satellite uh information well now we get a better picture and we can even see that say some of these areas right here in in south of venena are you know they're starting to get hot right at least I I can't tell if there's a fire there. But I can say that at least three separate satellite systems are uh detecting fire in this area or something hot so this shows a little bit more of the fire advance than just just going off of what you see on social media so once again this is really just uh that so again if you are uh sort of tech illiterate got bookmarks over here too so let's go again back down to Santa Monica where we can talk about this a little bit I've put purple circles and polygons on the map to depict areas where I can find looting uh once again you can just click on this and see uh looting reports I've linked a couple of Twitter pages here for the most part uh it's hard to track where the Looting is occurring because again people are either evacuated and the people who are still in in some of these areas they're there to loot so this is a conflict situation so they're not obviously not going to record themselves looting so we have we have this little bit of an intelligence Gap. But it seems fairly certain that as soon as these uh evacuation zones pop up and in this case they're popping up all over uh the northern flank of the fire uh today this morning uh as these evacuation areas hit a lot of people a lot of the looters start organizing start hitting up and casing these areas to see who's leaving right now here's the problem with that people are seeing this and they're saying well I don't want my stuff looted so they're not evacuating they're not leaving so it's it's Catch 22 right I mean what's more valuable your house or you know the I your house is going to burn up either way so what does it matter if people steal stuff from it you know if that's the kind of thing if you're in the the the fire zone so uh so far just from my own very limited assessment it looks like calire has been very very conservative very very uh mindful of this and they have not evacuated a lot of areas that that they've waited a long time right because they know that uh people are concerned about this sort of thing so uh in that regard it's it's kind of an interesting it's kind of an interesting note. But uh let's check out Malibu for a second of course uh most of the traffic going east and west uh East from Malibu and then uh over here in Santa Monica West from Santa Monica all these roads are closed the Pacific Coast Highway is closed uh along the the uh along the coast there and they've got National Guard checkpoints up again almost all of the major roads going into where the fire is at are closed and there are National Guard checkpoints or police checkpoints there so uh most of the time they've got you know guard guys standing around checking IDs to make sure people actually do live in a neighbor Hood before allowing them back in uh especially some of these areas along the coast which are not burning anymore uh. But they are uh the people are still trying to move back in right so uh move back in as quick as they can to prevent the looters uh in case their house survived. But again we can see the extent here in palisay is pretty significant so uh let's move over to Hollywood of course Hollywood Hills uh Sunset Boulevard Mass looting as you might expect mostly because a lot of people who live in this area can afford to to evacuate U because they've probably got another Resident somewhere else again not to get really into the socioeconomic factors at play here. But uh you have to remember this entire area is extremely high wealth and what does that generally mean people can afford to leave right they have either another Resident somewhere else or they're insured or some form of fashion they can afford to lose a$ four or5 million house so this is known this is very much known and even places right here which are not near a fire at all uh they have a lot of looting there. But you know down in Los Angeles proper it's just kind of like a normal day right so this is the kind of interesting Dynamic that we we have to kind of be aware of uh when bringing a geospatial component into it it's not just the data it's also the people behind the data too so again moving over to Altadena up here uh on Sierra Madre Boulevard uh looks like everything north of Sierra Madre Boulevard is probably going to be evacuated at some point um they they've been expanding the these evacuation zones progressively further and further south uh throughout the past couple of days so we'll see once again here's an old um expired looting uh Circle and now the area that was uh looted is now just gone right uh most of Al tadena has been uh has been burned so once again preventing the Looting didn't really do much in this particular case. But so that's pretty much the general overall summary just to wrap things up really quickly Pasadena fire is moving North uh into to Ino looks like we might see some more evacuations throughout the day on that hard to say. Though uh the Kenneth fire continues to burn but it looks like it may have mostly just burned out this was an arson case or is being investigated as an arson case. But that one's largely no longer a factor uh moving over here uh to sadre aladina area uh this area is remains kinetic as we can see by the uh the fire fire points. But once again it's hard to say how much this is going to move South into the urban area again it all depends on winds and by the time I've edited this and gotten this out the door it's probably going to change very much so once again the the live updating map here uh is probably your best resource if you're tracking this sort of thing uh in the Los Angeles area so jumping back to the slides here let's wrap things up today with a quick note that I it's more of a strategic indication and warning of something potentially happening in Southeast Asia uh once again uh all eyes are kind of on China and Taiwan and you know the preparations for that kind of conflict there are vastly different schools of thought uh vastly different uh ways of thinking and assessments on how this is going to go a lot of people are kind of sold on China not preparing for war and that other people are saying China is going to go to war within the next 60 days so you can see that's a pretty wide range of of Assessments I'm not a southeast Asia guy. But I can point to what a lot of other guys are talking about right now which is China building barges from Napoleon bonapart to the Viet Kong anytime an adversary or some kind of power uh starts building amphibious equipment pay attention this is important so China has been observed to be building at least at least five uh amphibious Landing platform dock vessel sorts of things uh the I don't know what the official classification of these yet. But it seems like it's more along the lines of just being classified as an amphibious operations vessel uh at the moment essentially uh just to show you how these things work here this is uh what is assessed to be how they operate very much just a barge uh to help uh land tanks in Mass on some of taiwan's more restricted uh beach access points right so again we have seen satellite imagery has very strongly indicated uh that China is building at least five of these right now um you know you can't really dismiss that that's kind of a big deal uh these things are very expensive so this could be an indicator for months to years uh I would think that you know China building these sorts of things is going to take some time and China is going to probably need several hundred of these so uh just starting with five is um you know something that uh is going to be very interesting to see because we're probably going to see them training on them using them more uh they already have some similar things. But these are kind of interesting in in that they're very large but. Anyway I did want to point it out because people are kind of talking about it it's not really the indication for China's going to invade Taiwan in the next you know month or so. But once again China has a very large ship building capacity and they can build a lot of these very very quickly quality-wise hard hard hard to say right I guess we'll find out right. But uh really I did want to mention it because it's it's kind of pertinent in terms of what's going on in California once again if if China is really really really set on going to war with the United States and China is really really hard set on taking Taiwan one of the things you might want to do is the you know West Coast infrastructure because you know Port of Los Angeles you know San Diego these places are going to be very very big Commercial and Military epicenters for moving assets across the Pacific for the United States so so you've really got to look at this from the perspective of of what an analyst might do which is think ah okay we've got massive fires crippling the infrastructure of a major city on the west coast in the same general region where we're going to be flooding lots of resources in uh through the west coast to go to the Pacific Theater you've really got to think about these sorts of things right so it's one of those things where just don't panic now. But just be mindful of it and when I mention it again some other kind of development you'll have this knowledge in the back of your mind right so that's pretty much all I have for today uh let me wrap things up with the ghostnet reports uh of course lots of reports this week lots of news Coming Back in Forth a lot of people testing things out. But let me show you something interesting um what I can do uh with regards to this map that I'm doing is I can actually push say for instance I saw this report here um this uh rolling blackouts continue kind of report right so local report from someone in the area of the California wildfires well if we jump back over here to the uh battle tracking map would you look at that I can actually drop the text of these uh ghost net reports on the map as well if it's referring to something that's you know geoloc right so once again it's not the best thing since sliced bread there's easier ways of doing it there's cheaper ways of doing this there's better ways of doing this this is just the happy medium that I've kind of settled on before I used it for many many years. But now I'm getting into a little bit more deliberate now so um hopefully this will continue to be a lot better of an operation in the future so yeah I thought this might be a little bit helpful uh for some of you out there who are interested in this kind of thing I'm going to make it a lot easier uh as time goes on to incorporate this so that you only have to have a one tap uh to export to AAC or to calpo so for those of you who use those kinds of platforms this will integrate very very well because you can export a lot of these layers to KML files right so again getting a little nerdy getting a little in the weeds right now uh for it. But I figured it would be a good time to to use this sort of tool and set it up so that we can start building familiarity with it because once again this is this is just using the LA fires kind of situation as a template and I figured that uh since I'm I'm working on it I might as well show people what I'm working on and I might as well uh uh let people get some use out of it because it seems to be like there are not that many maps that are updating very quickly with regards to what's going on and not any maps that I know of at all that are showing where the Looting is happening and where some of these more criminal aspects are going on so I will try to keep this updated as best I can uh. But no guarantees as you guys can probably imagine incident tracking or battle tracking takes a long time and it's not easy to do right this is difficult stuff so it takes you you spend a lot of time combing the internet right uh for for good information to put on the map. But hopefully this helps a lot of you out there uh if it doesn't I'm sorry but uh this is what I'm kind of working on for now I to get information out there a little bit more quickly than just you know a wire report once a day so so that's pretty much all I have for today again here are the sources thank you again uh for all of you out there who supported me uh and have made this possible I could not I literally couldn't have done it without you because a lot of the layers that I need access to are very expensive so hopefully this will be more of a public service thing. But just know all of you guys out there uh who are using this information for free you're welcome to do so but just know that it's the guys on patreon who have made it possible not me so uh thank you all uh for for all of that I'm just kind of filling in the data doing the best I can in that regard. But uh again thank you thank you thank you for all of that so so I'll definitely keep at it and well I guess we'll see what next week brings so thank you all for watching and we will. See you next time and as always find in the shade.