For God's sake, can we stop this nonsense?
People gobsmacked by empty fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades have wondered, why not just stick a hose in the ocean? Well, salt water can be very damaging to equipment (including firefighting machinery) and all sorts of other things as well, so the Pacific's bounty can only be used against conflagrations sparingly. But desalinated water sure could have come in handy this week.
How many coastal desalination plants are there between Santa Barbara and San Diego counties? Zero.
The problem isn't—and never has been—lack of water. The problem is pumping water up the hillside, where Pacific Palisades is. Seawater, whether desalinated or not, would be of no help.
The desire to prove that everyone else is incompetent is stupid bar stool talk. Smart people need to knock it off. The real story here is simple, even if no one wants to hear it: LA's system of water cisterns was built to manage a disaster, but not the worst possible disaster ever. Nobody does that because it would cost a fortune.
For example: California codes require buildings to withstand roughly a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Quick: is that enough for Los Angeles? The Newport-Inglewood fault runs about ten miles from City Hall and can produce a magnitude 7.5 quake—but only every few hundred years. The San Andreas fault can produce earthquakes above magnitude 8.0, but never gets closer than 50 miles to LA.
So is 7.0 a high enough standard? Increasing it to 7.5—three times bigger—would be enormously expensive. And it's a pretty unlikely event in LA.¹ Should we do it anyway? You need to answer now, not after a worst-case event happens. It isn't easy.
Unprecedented disasters will always strain resources to the breaking point. There might be incompetence or ordinary mistakes involved, but usually not. The Pacific Palisades fire, whipped up by 60 mph winds, destroyed the entire neighborhood in a day. Nothing would have stopped it. LA firefighters were like a squirt gun in the face of something like that. In terms of the immediate response, there's no one to blame and no incompetence at play. Everyone needs to quit looking for politically convenient scapegoats.²
¹Though more likely in San Francisco, which sits right on top of the San Andreas fault.
²More than likely, we'll eventually know what caused the Palisades fire. A downed power line? A spark from some kind of machinery? A kid and a magnifying glass? When we figure it out, we'll be able to blame someone for starting the fire. But that's all.
But I am assured we just need to move water from North to South and presto chango, problem solved.
I've seen people over the years in various online forums ask -- in all seriousness -- why you can't just build a big ol' water pipeline from the Great Lakes down to southern California or something to solve those pesky droughts. The water will just flow naturally, right? Just like the water from NoCal flows down the California Aqueduct to SoCal.
Problem solved!
You can't run a country with idiots like this and a lot of them are (or think they are) in charge now.
As a Michigan native, California can have our water right after they send us their sunshine.
Technically... yes. You just need to invent a way to create a straight pipeline through the lower crust and gravity will do a good deal of the work.
But we don't know how to build tunnels like that yet.
At 15m a day, and 2.8 million meters (1800 miles) away, it would only take 500 years to do it. Maybe if we had a hundred machines doing it we could complete it in ten, but...
Like I said, we don't know know to make a tunnel that doesn't follow the crust.
We already do that. Enough water for 23 million people each year, plus irrigating a huge number of acres in the valley.
I recall a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche dropping off a flyer at our house when I was a teenager, and it included a plan for building a vast pipe network to bring water from Canada to the southwestern states -- so clearly a genius idea. 😛
It turns out the idea goes back to the 1950s, and according to Wikepedia, it must have been around 1982 or soon after that the LaRouche flyer was dropped off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance
We hear this lazy old thing every time it floods in the midwest. That's because Americans are innumerate and ignorant about things like water treatment, contamination, etc.
Sure, we have built pipelines for oil. People will pay $100 / bbl for oil (don't know the current rate, but it's probably half that). So an expensive pipeline could be worth it. But water?
Do you want to pay $2/gallon for water? When you water your lawn and landscaping? (hundreds of gallons) When you shower? Run the dishwasher? Howza bout a monthly water bill in the thousands?
Of course, this precludes the TAX MONEY it will take to build the several pipelines...
And that's why there are no coastal desalination plants. They use a lot of energy so the water costs four or five or six times as much as other sources.
The one reservoir that was empty was because it needed some repairs or upkeep and this time of year is when there is the least chance of fires. Except for now. Maybe if it wasn't an emergency they should have noticed that there was a lot of plant growth because of a lot of rain, then no rain for most of a year. Maybe it had to be done. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered much.
Just take over Canada and open that giant faucet they have. Easy peasy. Trump will do it on day one with an executive order.
And a hundred years of industry contributing to climate change. We can blame it because it was all of us. For a while. When a few of us starting caterwauling about the outcomes and the rest of us pooh poohed them, we can heap a tiny bit more on the pooh poohers. Maybe we can blame the greed of planers and developers too. But this day was coming.
The comparison to earthquakes is exactly spot on – this was a natural disaster. Throw in tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, avalanches, floods. And all turbo charged by climate change.
Blaming everyone alive now or anytime in the past century is not that analytically useful.
It's not analytically useful, but it might save us. Everyone should personally be involved in this course correction. Whether through taxes, actual labor, jail time, coordination, charity, or actually being mature enough to understand that things need to be changed instead of fucking off.
If not we can analyze the economics of disasters, the profits of corporations, the body counts of wars over water, land, and probably nutrition. Maybe not this decade, maybe not the next, but probably the following.
Or not.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The lack of taking responsibility for the problem and the consequent failure to take sufficient mitigating actions not only precisely describes the cause but also directly implies the solution -- so therefore quite "analytically useful."
The American people just choose a leader (in)famous for never taking responsibility, not to mention he views CA as a blue state that deserves to be punished. Looks like as a nation we will put off doing anything constructive on the problem for another our years at least.
And a hundred years of industry contributing to climate change.
Industry is really just "us."
I think the right is dead wrong (as Kevin points out) in their efforts to point a finger. Once upon a time we used to pull together during times of crisis. Then along came Murdoch and Musk.
But the Democratic instinct to immediately blurt out "climate change" is tone-deaf, too. Brush fires have been occurring since long before the industrial revolution. And, while climate change surely exacerbates these fires, it didn't create the Mediterranean climate, or flammable plants, or large population densities in these areas, or failure to clear brush. Or what have you.
Anyway, what's really driving climate change isn't nebulous "industry" but rather the fact that there are now 8.2 billion of us, and we all want heat in winter, AC in summer, flat screen TVs, meat-laden meals, long haul flights, commuting via car, etc.
It is not our number that does this, it is the process of our survival. The process of industry. Currently it is extractive, wasteful, risky, and polluting. We build in floodplains and fire hazard zones, change seismic profiles, alter rivers and aquifers, we build high-rises on SAND. The waste pushed into the environment by industry in the pursuit of survival but more for profit is the reason we pollute as individuals. It's not us specifically, it is industry and profit themselves. The moment you move the goalposts to overpopulation is the moment you become a fossil fuel shill, a shill for profit over survival, a shill for Capital.
If the fire hydrants had never run out of water a few random houses might have been saved, but really there is no stopping a fire fed by 100 mile per hour winds. What works is water and chemical drops from airplanes and helicopters. When aircraft are grounded and winds are blowing hot embers all over the place there is noting to be done except evacuate people and save lives.
How are aircraft able to deliver more water per unit time than a hydrant network?
https://x.com/bigfish3000/status/1877501898632176077?s=46
Tell me what you think would have happened to those homes if the wind was blowing 80-100mph.
There was a fire a couple of nights ago in the Hollywood Hills around Laurel Canyon. It was put out by helicopters. I know the area. A disaster was averted. Two houses in Studio City were on fire (near where my niece lives). The houses were really torched, completely engulfed. Helicopters put out the flames. I’m sure things would have been much worse, perhaps disastrous if the winds were blowing and helicopters grounded.
You made it sound, or perhaps I over inferred, that aircraft deliver better - I took that to mean more water. Perhaps you meant more targeted. That said, if the aircraft are grounded it would seem the hydrants are all that are left.
When the wind is blowing and aircraft are grounded it’s true that all that’s left is hydrants. But what I’m saying is that when it gets to that point hydrants can’t stop it. Nothing can, as Chip Daniels notes below.
Water mains are only so big. If you open up one fire hydrant to put out a house fire, pressure is fine. If you open all of them up, none will have pressure.
Not water, retardant.
Airborne firefighting methods are generally about preventing things from catching on fire (retardant, or lots of water) and not about putting out things already burning (though occasionally that can be a thing too).
In the context of climate change, I tend to think of this like the 100-year floods that seem to be happening much more frequently. The lack of water that contributed most to these fires was that which did not fall from the skies for the last 8 months in LA.
"The desire to prove that everyone else is incompetent is stupid bar stool talk."
Too late. Stupid bar stool talk won His Felonious Excellency the presidency - twice.
+1
Australian ex-prime minister John Howard claimed he applied "the common sense pub test" to policy proposals. Yes he was a right-winger, since you ask.
I wonder what changes were made in and around the Oakland hills after the fire in ‘91 and how many of those if any were implemented around LA?
A big problem in the Oakland hills fire was eucalyptus trees all over the place. They make exellent huge and rather explosively burning torches. Probably either don't do well in Los Angeles or are banned.
I suppose one way to vet that would be to look at images via online maps. I’d not heard one way or the other whether the now invasive (?) eucalyptus were strictly a Northern California thing.
This is... only vaguely true.
They also resisted fire, since they're fire adapted. Much like our native bay, live oaks, and knobbly cone pine.
These trees encourage stuff around them to burn so they can take over the empty space left behind.
tl;dr? It's not the eucalyptus trees.
paine......
"And a hundred years of industry contributing to climate change"
I don't know whether you wrote that as a tease or not
One ONLY has to look at ONE industry to see how we are dealing with the ramifications of climate change and that is the insurance industry. It seems as though they exist only to reduce their exposure to risk! Here along the SE Coastline its flood insurance because of hurricanes which are made worse by climate change
We have heard that there were numerous policy cancellations as soon as this fire started- much the same for us on the coast who are at risk for damages caused by hurricanes and/or the subsequent flooding. Policies were cancelled at the very last minute due to higher than normal risk exposure
And what do these industry titans do when the risk is too high? No longer underwrite OR make it so expensive that homeowners go without or self insure, ask Floridians about that.
There are no easy answers - sure we can cut emissions but the affects of climate change would be felt for decades after we cut back on them - THEN the natural cycle of climate change would STILL be there albeit at a much slower pace.
Government is not the answer of course
(heck they profit from the higher tax revenues those expensive seaside villa's bring in).
It is a big mess imho
Yeah, let's let it ride.
🙂
" It seems as though they exist only to reduce their exposure to risk! " they can't exist if they don't turn a profit. Because of climate change, there are any places (Florida and California) they can no longer charge high enough premiums to turn profits.
"We have heard that there were numerous policy cancellations as soon as this fire started" Insurance companies cannot cancel policies after a fire breaks out. They were cancelling policies a year ago.
The sole reason you say government can't solve the problem is you are a worthless imbecile.
So lets try this without being insulting to one another
The Government (probably federal government) provides insurance
To protect state and county (and municipal government) investments that generate HUGE sums of property tax dollars
And you see no problem with that?
So, the feds pay money to get expensive houses repaired after a storm so they maintain their value so the state and counties can tax them "fairly".
Lets say there's been no hurricanes that hit the east coast. Suddenly the insurance fund is awash with money because of limited claims payouts. So a MAGA Republican senator decides "hey. why not raid that fund to pay for DJT's excesses" !!! (Kinda like raiding social security). The DEMs get in and have to raise taxes to rebuild the fund. Lather, rinse repeat. We cannot say that this hasn't happened before!
And ALL of this is for the 1% folks who are wealthy enough to build expensive properties along waterways and so on.
Kevin did touch upon one subject that does need exploring. Why not build a duplicate water system using desalinated water along with water towers built on hills. Fill them all with desalinated water used exclusively for fire fighting. I would go so far as to say they could be powered by building a nuclear power plant that provides power to this firefighting system in the event of an emergency but during non emergency situations provides power to cities and counties.
This does the following:
Makes CA accept nuclear power (a bugaboo for republicans who think CA is FULL of enviro-nazis)
Gives CA a means to provide viable fire fighting water without taking away from valuable drinking water supplies
And protects the investments of the gazillionaires who live in this area
(It also provides power in non emergencies that Californians could use to build a EV charging system state wide.
The question is would Californians accept a nuke plant in their area? Would they accept those ugly water towers that are essential for storing non-potable water to protect their homes from fires?
That's why it was at 0% containment for a while. In the face of a fire like that - something that can jump a ten-lane highway and force water-drop planes out of the air - you focus instead on evacuating people .
The Ft. McMurray fire (Alberta, 2016) lept across a 1km wide river!
The CZU fire jumped 17 miles of forest in a day and if the fire fighters hadn't been changing shifts, would've been trapped.
B b b but woke liberal DEI Soros BLM? What about that?
I blame Mrs. O'Leary's cow.
"For God's sake, can we stop this nonsense?"
Oh..but what fun would that be?
"The Pacific Palisades fire, whipped up by 60 mph winds,
Try 100 mph wind gusts! That's hurricane/tornado force. I watched a brief video of the fire spreading Tuesday with all those burning embers flying all over the place, there's no way anything could have stopped something in motion like that. Nothing! Other than you change the climate back to where such occurances rarely took place. Instead, you've have 15 of the worst 20 first in state history in this century alone!
If you wish to mitigate the danger that exists now, then you've got to pay for it or don't live there, one or the other. Quarterbacking-after-the-fact may make you feel all superior but it doesn't change anything. Doesn't make the rain fall, doesn't make the winds lessen.
Government is not the answer of course
Oh, but it is, because I guarantee you if you want to keep building those expensive houses somebody's got to pay for the insurance or there won't be any mortgages made. So why not the state? Yes, have the state be insurer. It will be cut-rate coverage of course, but at least the homes will get built!
Yep, governments aren't the only part of the solution, but definitely the primary part (and by extension the people aka voters), at least when it comes to these disasters, and any potential to steer ourselves clear of the worst.
Keep the fuel loading down (plants) and make the houses significantly more fire resistant. Then fhe fire will move across the develoment without setting many (any) houses on fire. You can't stop such a fire, plan to survive it. Most of these areas are not dense forest, where structural survivability is much harder to establish.
It's pretty hard to make wood framed houses fire resistant. Steel siding and roofs help a lot, stucco is somewhat more resistant than wood siding, but if it gets hot enough, the wood behind it will ignite. There is also the problem of wind driven sparks getting into the roof through the ventilation system. Covey Park in Santa Rosa was not heavily wooded nor was there any brush but the houses all burned down anyway.
When I was a young architect, I thought all the code provisions concerning hi-rise buildings were overkill; The structure is all steel, the walls are glass and metal and gypsum! What is there to burn, I thought.
Then I witnessed an actual hi-rise fire, the First Insterstate building in downtown LA in the 80s; It was astonishing. https://www.lafire.com/famous_fires/1988-0504_1stInterstateFire/050488_InterstateFire.htm
Thant's when I learned about the "fuel load"- the fuel in the form of furniture, carpet, drapes, files full of paper, etc- that cause the inside of a building to become an inferno.
Well, there's less paper in fewer filing cabinets these days.
Agreed. All you are doing is buying time. You can add a layer of high temperature insulation to buy a bit more time. Intumscent paint is more expensive than normal paint but can buy time, perhaps 15 to 30 minutes before it burns through. Most windows are a fire problem, you will want insulated fire shutters, which will have architectural implications.
But if you can buy 30 minutes of light fire exposure, the risk of massive fires is much reduced. It wouldn't work for houses embedded in a heavy forest, but for houses without heavy adjacent vegetation and fuel stores, it should make a big difference.
Typical houses in Germany are built of (CO2 emitting when drying) concrete with slate or equivalent roofs and many have steel window shutters that roll down, similar to what many small stores have for when they aren't open.
Decades ago roofs of many ranch style houses in Los Angeles and elsewere were charmongly covered with cedar shakes. I think that got outlawed a long time ago.
Code already is 30 minutes pf brands.
But this fire was hours and days of it.
Wood frame houses are generally built to be fire resistant on the inside. Interior walls and ceilings are generally gypsum board with, most commonly, a 45 minute burn-through rating (of course, actual time to burn-through depends on how hot the fire is). The outsides, on the other hand, are commonly sheathed with combustible plywood or oriented strand board, covered with combustible vinyl siding. If the outsides of wood frame houses were sheathed with cement board covered with aluminum siding, preferably painted white, the roofs covered with tile, shutters on the windows, and spark suppressors in the air intakes, they would be extremely fire resistant. Keep brush cleared away within 50 feet of the house, and you would have a house that would survive all but the very biggest and hottest fires.
No, homes in California generally don't have wood for sheathing unless they'e a statement or were built forty years ago.
Houses send up more brands, and further, than forests do.
Tile roofing is great against fire.
You know what it's bad at? Wind.
Concrete and cinderblock slow fire...
You know what they're bad at? Insulation and earthquakes.
We have a chance to do something smart. Rebuild the burned out areas, but full of duplexes. Underwrite the construction loans, make the homeowners whole and put a dent in the housing shortage.
Dumping thousands of gallons of salty sea water on the landscape -- well, it might put out the fire, in spite of the 100mph winds, but what is it going to do to the soil? Can vegetation survive or come back? And without vegetation, what about the rest of the ecosystem?
Wasn't "sowing fields with salt" used as a death sentence to an enemy, back in ancient times? (And really dumb, because if your side was in it for territorial conquest, you just rendered your new lands worthless.)
I doubt dropping seawater during a fire is going to harm plants. People have long put salt on sidewalks during winter, and the grass still comes up next to it, even after years of salting.
That's... not the come back you want it to be.
Invasive plants love when you do that.
But yeah, for the purposes of a fire, the salt load would be minimal.
Yeah, our house was flooded by Hurricane Sandy. Fortunately, we are about ten feet above sea level, but the waters completely surrounded the house and soaked the ground for many hours. Some of the trees died, and some survived, but the overall vegetation completely recovered within a year or so.
What few people outside of us who have lived through firestorms realize, is that the Fire Department doesn't make any attempt to put out a firestorm pushed by Santa Ana winds.
It can't- the leading edge of a brushfire fanned by 80 MPH winds is too hot, too large, moving too fast to be fought with any technology we currently have.
What they do instead is evacuate, dig firebrakes where possible, and attack the flanks where the fire is moving slowly.
Sometimes if they are lucky and conditions are right, they can move ahead of it and spray water in isolated structures in hopes of sparing them but even then they have often lose and have to retreat.
When you are up close to a firestorm, fire sucks the oxygen out of the very air, and the smoke is so thick that they air is unbreathable- without an oxygen tank you will suffocate before the fire reaches you. The radiant heat from such a fire ignites buildings before the flames reach it.
Even before the fire erupted, everyone knew this was going to happen in some location or another; Tinder dry brush, no rain for months, high winds- we've seen it before and know there isn't anything to be done but run.
Also, to my knowledge there wasn't a dry hydrant problem in the Altadena fire and you basically have the same outcome (maybe even worse).
They did have low pressure in Altadena. One of the fire chiefs in that area said that even with normal pressure, it wouldn't have aided given the rapid and wide spread of the embers.
Well in 9 days and 17 hours from now, those illegal firefighters and tanker aircraft from those 2 shithole countries (Mexico and Canada) will absolutely need to be arrested and deported by ICE.
Besides, its only those woke, liberal, transgender, DEI, LGBTQ, traitors living in that god forsaken Sanctuary City of LA, so just let it all fucking burn down.
Sorry for the outburst, but I spent the day in my mom's hospital room with Faux News blasting and it had an impact on my mental health.
Hospitals and nursing homes really should banish that...just re-runs of Matlock and Murder, She Wrote.
And PBS. If need be, PBS Kidz.
Shorter KD:
If we were to assume the government had a clear mandate to protect Americans against long tail risks, Americans would start bitching when they saw the bill.
___
Having said that, climate change mitigation is required, because the tail has shifted a skosh and that shift means we're in a new normal. In a new normal, we either need to adjust our expectations or we need to pay up for mitigation. And of course in another 15-20 years, the tail will have shifted further, requiring additional mitigation.
The plurality of american voters have convinced themselves the concept of climate change is a scam. They have also convinced themselves that life long con artists like Donald Trump will never attempt to scam them.
Of course if the city had levied some kind of supplemental property tax or something on those neighborhoods to build more tanks and reservoirs, forward position extra fire-fighting equipment, trim trees way back every year, etc., everyone would have pitched a fit about that and complained that they were being soaked to build a bunch of ugly water tanks in their neighborhood and destroy their pretty trees, yada, yada, and so on.
You just can win. People are idiots.
...And it still wouldn't have stopped this.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that over the years, Americans increasingly expect infallibility and perfection from public servants. Americans want to blame bad things on failures by people. So when something bad happens, SOMEONE should get fired and sued into oblivion.
They expect perfect protection (although rarely are willing to pay for it) and refuse to accept that relatively competent people make decisions all the time for good and reasonable reasons at the time of the decision but sometimes bad things just happen anyway.
Soon we'll be arresting geologists after earthquakes, like Italy.
I think that, prior to Watergate, the government exercised sufficient control over the press to prevent too many questions being raised. So after Pearl Harbor, everyone was free to hate on the Japanese (maybe with reason), but there weren't too many inconvenient questions raised about how the Roosevelt administration could have let this happen. But in more recent decades, for better or worse, those restraints are gone.
There were a lot of government investigations into pearl harbor. From wikipedia "They included an inquiry by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox (1941); the Roberts Commission (1941–42); the Hart Inquiry (1944); the Army Pearl Harbor Board (1944); the Naval Court of Inquiry (1944); the Hewitt investigation; the Clarke investigation; the Congressional Inquiry[note 1] (Pearl Harbor Committee; 1945–46); a top-secret inquiry by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, authorized by Congress and carried out by Henry Clausen (the Clausen Inquiry; 1946)" But at that time we didn't have a party that had sold it's soul to satan.
Those were GOVERNMENT investigations, carefully designed to exonerate higher-ups or anyone else the Roosevelt administration thought it politically advantageous to maintain in position. There was not any aggressive press investigation--nobody wanted to hamper the war effort.
Is the suggestion that FDR "never told a lie"? I think you have him confused with someone else.
it's = it is
Well said Kevin.
Strangely enough, winds have mostly died down so we have full air support, unlike the first night, and the Palisades fire has massively expanded again, with parts of Brentwood and Santa Monica now under mandatory evacuation orders, and even UCLA tucked just under and east of the mandatory evacuation zone.
Speaking of earthquakes: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
Essay Kevin excerpted was from Reason magazine (libertarian) with the title & subhead:
Fires Incinerated the Facade of California Governing Competence
Virtue-signaling is no substitute for disaster preparedness.
written by MATT WELCH
(The comments were overwhelmingly in favor of the essay - only Reason Plus subscribers can comment.)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Which is like slamming the mayor of Hiroshima for not establishing robust building codes.
I thought libertarians would be against government doing stuff like that.
They're against government requirements and them paying for it.
Not getting handout themselves and forcing their neighbors to do stuff.
Have you met today?
Because you wouldn't ask that if you had.
"why not just stick a hose in the ocean? " Someone should point out to the worthless shit for brain buffoons at Reason that the water bombers are doing exactly that. Of course, the water bombers couldn't fly when the hdrants ran dry because of the 100 mile an hour winds. Flying in those conditions would risk starting additional fires when they inevitably crash.
Plot thickener: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flames-raged-in-palisades-a-key-reservoir-nearby-was-offline
Note the story explicitly says that the reservoir would have delayed the loss of pressure but not prevented it. And reservoirs need maintenance and will all eventually need to be emptied to be emptied at some point.
So by extension we could say there was no need of any reservoirs up there since it wouldn’t have made (enough) of a difference. And in a semi-perverse/ironic way that is probably true because then there wouldn’t be (m)any people and houses there…
Yet the reservoirs are there, and from what I could read before the paywall kicked in, it was a year (?) before the repair contract for that one was in place.
It is one thing to have a reservoir empty during repairs. In a place like California so heavily dependent on water storage it is another to have it down for a year before repairs even start.
You have to empty it before the repairs start. It's not like there's another shelf you can just set all that water upon.
And if the thing which necessitates repairs got worse while it was holding water..,
The MAGAverse hasn't had so much fun mocking the libs since Joe pulled out of the presidential campaign. These are just from the New York Post:
Blaze of infamy How Gavin Newsom has failed California and set fire to his own political prospects
The disaster of the LA fires “reflects the failure of the one-party progressivism currently dominating governmental structures”
In LA fire horror, California elites face the consequences of blue misrule
On LA fires, Dem incompetence runs all the way up to Joe Biden (shocking absolutely no one)
Blame LA fire horror on the woke religion's ruin of our cities
Bad leaders — not climate change — are the reason the LA fires are burning California
LA fires show deadly results of voting for Dems like Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass
That's in just two days.
As best I can tell, Kevin’s post and most of the comments seem inspired more by a desire to refute criticism (of a blue city in a blue state) than to acknowledge reality.
But this sort of statement just isn’t convincing:
“There might be incompetence or ordinary mistakes involved, but usually not. The Pacific Palisades fire, whipped up by 60 mph winds, destroyed the entire neighborhood in a day. Nothing would have stopped it.”
I find it difficult to unravel every layer of denial, gaslighting, and/or willful blindness in these words. But a major American city is burning down. It just doesn’t matter if it’s a blue city in the bluest state in America: city and state leaders should still be held to account. Even if we like them. Even if we voted for them.
And the idea that “there’s no one to blame” is an insult to everyone’s intelligence. Sorry not sorry if that means that at least some ostensibly Conservative commentators have a point.
The idea that a major, vital, and famous city like LA just burns down while there’s absolutely no one responsible in any way is perhaps one of the most remarkably obtuse if not outright stupid things Kevin has ever said. And if partisanship is indeed to blame, that’s an utterly discrediting level of partisanship.
For one thing: perceptions matter. The mayor of LA should not have flown off to Africa days AFTER warnings were raised about a potentially deadly windstorm that could produce hazardous fires in dry conditions. It does not matter if the mayor could communicate from around the world. It just doesn’t. If you lead a city and you’re told in no uncertain terms that your city is in imminent danger but you decide to unnecessarily fly off to the other side of the world anyway, you will be blamed for poor judgement and you will richly deserve it.
Character (for lack of a better term) also matters. And that includes the kind of courage, communication, and commitment that inspires others to believe that someone competent is in charge. But from Gavin Newsom to Karen Bass, I struggle to think of any signs that they or other prominent Dem leaders possess the kind of character this type of generation-defining disaster demands. That doesn’t mean they’re incompetent, but it does mean they’re seemingly incapable of rising to meet this moment. At their absolute best, they come across as middling technocrats. But this tragedy demonstrates conclusively that they are not inspiring leaders. And, yes, that’s a devastatingly valid critique under the circumstances.
But here’s where Kevin’s misdirection and/or genuinely misguided commentary bothers me even more: this situation is not so much what could have been done to stop the fire once it had started but what could have been done to mitigate if not prevent it from ever happening in the first place. And on that score, yes, generations of mostly (though not entirely) Democratic leaders have failed. Potentially mitigating factors that could have been more effectively employed over time are pretty well documented in at least some of the coverage I have read. So look it up if you haven’t already. There is indeed plenty of blame to go around. And the only area where we should “just give it up” is in pretending otherwise.
Poor, angry, empty Leo. This is a good example of the type of person who exists only to air their constant grievances and look down on those that they disapprove of. There is always someone to blame for these people. Always. This is why they get up each day.
This culture of whiny grievances was a key to Trumps cult following and it's taken over the GOP and is fueled by major media corporations. While this type of person isn't new, the coordination of a political party, major media, new technology and hundreds of billions spent to keep these people in a constant state of coordinated rage and whining is a new phenomenon.
So while Kevin makes a good point, as shown above, many people just want to whine, scream and cast blame. These empty people need something to fill themselves and get through the day. This is all they have.
Of course people want to blame the politicians. That's far more appealing to them than admitting that climate change is real, and it is a catastrophe of such massive proportions that we cannot reasonably mitigate ourselves out of it at this point.
Massive fires are simply the norm going forward. Canada, Australia, Colorado, Texas...even England!
So instead of having the actual hard conversations about the more drastic measures we should have been taking decades ago - do we need to radically change where and how we build? how do we massively reduce emissions? - people are going to bicker about where the mayor was and how many proscribed burns were done.
It's not even necessary to admit that climate change is real. Just keep in mind that "shit happens" and often there is nobody to blame.
If "Kevin's misdirection and/or genuinely misguided commentary bothers" you so much, either go blather your bile on a Wingnut blog or find some other outlet for this constant resentment of your betters.
Whichever path you take, shut up here.
There's a guy you can blame for this and every other climate disaster. His name is Ronald Reagan, he took the solar panels of the White House roof and reversed every green policy that Carter had put in place.
Who do you think was to blame for the Ft. McMurray fire in Alberta in 2016?
Who do you think was to blame for the Lahaina fire on Maui?
Who do you think was to blame for the two largest city fires to date (though LA may eclipse at least one of them)?
These monster urban fires happen. When they happen, there's very, very little you can do about them.
Mitigating factors? The main mitigating factor is not allowing millions of people to live in an area like the LA Basin. And who was ever going to stand up and sanction that mitigation? So **un-American** Oh wait, we could have forced everyone to spend massively more on their houses. Who was going to stand up for that mitigation? So **un-American** ...
Leo1008, sweeping generalizations from zero evidence. The Antikevin.
How many homes would not have burned if the political leadership had been more ‘inspiring’? You’re demanding performative posing over substance?
Leo would rather lies than reality.