fifty or 100 firetrucks and 1000 firefighters standing right outside your neighborhood would have been able to stop such fires that moved w/ such reckless abandon, jumping by leaps and bounds w/ the winds that were very prevalent.
The only advice I know and the other reason I'm suggesting this is that I faced huge grass fires on the prairie and the lower SW corner of the Ozarks where sometimes the winds can push fires to unimaginable speeds in spreading, thank god we didn't have many of these types of fires but there are sometimes where in years past, you'll read about the grass fires on the plains, in OK, in KS, in SW MO, etc. We all know how the wind is on the prairie, constantly blowing. Your best bet is to run, run as fast as you can before you're trapped.
Blaming anybody? No. Yeah, sometimes idiots do set fires and try to burn their trash on windy days (in Ozark land), not a good idea.
But blaming anybody and / or everybody doesn't solve any problems, and if anything, all it does is stir up anger when none is warranted, if there is anger to be distributed, it's directed at the one or two idiots that caused the blaze. In the Calif. fires case, I thought I read that some of the fire(s) were accidently started when something sparked. I know in the past that they've caught people who were suspected of starting some of the fires (and I think that they caught such a person this time around suspected of starting fire(s)).
I'm still in shock at the magnitude of the sheer amount of damage. My heart is going out to these people. Some do have good stories that they were able to save their homes (one guy w/ a swimming pool and a pump to use the water in the pool to protect the house) but Jesus, there were still a lot of homes and neighborhoods wiped out, totally wiped out.
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