Recently, fires in the Los Angeles area destroyed thousands of homes and inflicted tens of billions of dollars in damage. When President Trump criticized the response to the fires and “blamed” California’s “water policies for fire hydrants running dry,” media outlets such as ABC News claimed he was mistaken. But he was mostly correct, as a recent article in the Los Angeles Times shows.
As the National Review notes, a January 24 report in the Los Angeles Times
presents readers with a tableau of administrative incompetence, short-sightedness, and a level of NIMBY-ism that more resembles a suicide pact — all of which contributed to the scale of the conflagration that consumed so much of Los Angeles earlier this month.
Reporter Connor Sheets’s review of “thousands of pages of state, county and municipal records” reveals how thoroughly officials in Southern California dropped the ball when it came to fire management. Plans to upgrade “aging and severely deteriorated” and “leak-prone” pumping stations were never realized. Modestly priced “fire flow enhancement” projects were abandoned. New connection systems designed to meet emergency needs were delayed and delayed again. Malibu residents, fearing increased water costs and a more robust infrastructure that could support additional construction (and additional neighbors), balked at their obligations.
“In 2019, the county compiled a new ‘Priority Project List’ that included several action items left over from six years prior,” the report observed. That $59 million project should have been completed by September of last year, but it went unfinished. The same could be said for $2.8 million for a stretch of Pacific Coast Highway with “leak-prone, aging, and severely deteriorated” water lines. Officials flagged that problem area multiple times, but to no avail. “Several years ago, a county document listed a $4-million plan to replace the ‘aging and severely deteriorated 300,000-gallon concrete tank’ with a larger steel one,” Sheets reported. “One goal of the proposed fix was to ‘improve fire-flow.’ The upgrade, which the county had identified as a “priority” project in 2019, never happened….The sizable but relatively insignificant cost of these improvements pales in comparison to the billions of dollars in damages the fires left in their wake. “Some homes could have been saved,” one University of California, Los Angeles, professor confessed.
Some California environmental laws encouraged fire-prone development, making the fires more destructive. And the California Coastal Commission blocked some fire-prevention efforts near the huge Palisades fire. The California wildfires have resulted in enormous pollution, resulting in California being worse at fighting climate change, despite the high electricity bills and billions of dollars extra California consumers pay under the state’s costly climate policies.
As Claire Lehmann noted about the wildfires near Los Angeles, “insured losses from these fires will exceed $20 billion, setting a new record for wildfire-related insurance claims in US history. The total economic loss could reach $57 billion. A UCLA study found that California’s wildfire emissions in 2020 were twice the total greenhouse-gas reductions the state achieved from 2003 to 2019. Decades of Californian climate change advocacy has, quite literally, gone up in smoke.” This year’s wildfires will likely be even more devastating, and have resulted in far more people being left homeless.
In the southeast, unlike California, states do a sufficient amount of controlled burns to get rid of flammable material, and keep wildfires from raging out of control, as NPR explained back in 2021.
