Yes, it has been a prolonged perfect fire storm ravaging Los Angeles – drought conditions with lots of dry vegetation … high temperatures … strong winds. Some excuse the failure to contain the fires to this combination of conditions. They say it simply overwhelmed the system.
But none of those conditions are unique or unprecedented in that region. The Santa Ana winds have blown regularly for years. Drought conditions are common. And wildfires are iconic events – even bad ones. It is commonly referred to as the “fire season” – much like the east coast has a hurricane season and mid-America has a tornado season.
That excuse suggests that no one could have anticipated what happened. It was a force majeure – an act of God. In fact, it was not only foreseeable, it was also predicted by a number of authorities and experts. The folks in charge in Los Angeles and Sacramento had seen this movie before in the form of earlier devastating fires that wiped out communities and killed residents,
We know a number of things for sure. As the wildfires erupted in Los Angeles, there were not enough firefighters to combat the blazes. There was not enough equipment – ground and air. There was not enough water. We know that a million-gallon water reservoir was intentionally empty. There were not enough preventative policies or contingency plans – such as evacuation education … effective fire-specific zoning and building codes … and fire-impeding landscaping regulations and practices.
We also know that the Los Angeles and the California state budgets reduced funding of firefighting services – despite the regions high risk of major fires and the anticipated increase in the number and intensity based on global warming. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom could have mitigated the situation by effective government decisions and policies – but they did not.
In terms of funding, it was merely a matter of priorities. More specifically, it was an example of how progressive budgeting priorities trumped essential needs – the primary responsibilities of government. Many have pointed to the woke and DEI social and cultural expenditures as examples of misplaced priorities. That is because they are the most obvious and most egregious of misplaced funding priorities. They are among the least urgent matters … the most political issues. Arguably they are things that should not have been funded by government in any case.
That does not mean they are the only extraneous lower priority line items that could be cut. There are others. Money was added to the budget for decorative landscaping – not fire resistant landscaping. Some have argued that this actually added fuel to the fires. There was an increase in the police budget, but not for enforcement. It was for community and social services – a soft form of police defunding,
It is no small irony that there have been increases in expenditures for dealing with the homeless crisis (a crisis worsened, if not created by progressive policies) … while at the same time the underfunding of firefighting services has resulted in tens of thousands of additional homeless folks.
Progressive policies are destroying states and major cities across the nation – increasing crime, reduced protections, accommodating, not mitigating, the homeless crisis, crushing expenditures, exorbitant taxes, housing crisis. See what progressive leadership has done to Detroit, Chicago – and now Los Angeles.
Make no mistake about it, the scope of the current wildfire disaster in California is not just Mother Nature. It has been the result of progressive policies that put philosophic social and cultural issues ahead of basic essential government services. It is a leadership problem. Newsom survived a previous recall effort. Will there be another? The petitions to recall Bass are already on the streets. (I am betting it will be successful.)
In the days to come — and the media, civic groups and government agencies will dig deeper into the causes of the conflagration. I have no doubt that the woke government policies and priorities will loom large on the list.
So, there ‘tis.