Are We Having Fund Yet?

“For people like me who don’t live near L.A., the destruction can start to read like a set of statistics—more than 12,000 structures damaged or destroyed; roughly 40,000 acres burned. But statistics have a strange way of obfuscating the magnitude and depth of the damage. On GoFundMe, the harm is shockingly visceral. As the catastrophe unfolds, the site is serving as a real-time record of the wildfires’ destruction.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The GoFundMe Fires.

+ “When an extreme gust of wind sent the helicopter plunging around 100 feet, an emergency light on the dashboard flashed a warning that the transmission box was out of oil. It wasn’t — the aircraft plummeted so fast the oil had flown out of the pump to the top of the casing. In his 11,300 hours of flight time over 38 years, including countless combat missions for the Army, Mr. Sagely had never seen that happen.” NYT (Gift Article): The Terrifying Ride of Copter 17.