The Los Angeles Wildfire Tragedy

National Review Online

Monday, January 13, 2025

 

The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth.

 

The scenes from Los Angeles County are truly apocalyptic — leaping flames and swirling embers, creating toxic, burned-out hellscapes where there had been thriving neighborhoods hours before. As of this writing, at least 24 are dead and 12,000 structures have been destroyed in fires that have hit an area roughly two and a half times the size of Manhattan. With more dry and windy conditions expected this week, sadly, all of those numbers could rise. It will take years for some of these communities to recover, if ever.

 

There’s already an intense political debate over responsibility for the catastrophe and the inadequate response to it, and it’s not just the expected sniping between California governor Gavin Newsom and his preferred foil, President-elect Donald Trump. Kristin Crowley, chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, is publicly blaming the city’s leadership for budget cuts that she says hampered the response and for inoperative fire hydrants.

 

The first thing to observe is that this event is an act of God that would have strained even more competent, better-prepared authorities. It is extremely difficult to fight multiple large fires, fueled by nearly 100-mph winds in drought conditions.

 

That said, the posture of California officials has basically been, “Climate change is threatening life on the planet as we know it, including by creating vastly more dangerous wildfires, but we can’t be bothered with preparing a more robust response because we are too busy subsidizing windmills and mandating zero-emissions vehicles.”

 

The State of Florida has long been threatened with hurricanes and so has honed how it handles them to an art form, especially under its detail-oriented governor, Ron DeSantis. California should take note.

 

The first rule of disaster response is to be present, which Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass violated by leaving for the inauguration of Ghana’s new president despite increasingly dire warnings about an imminent windstorm and elevated fire risk. It’s not obvious how much this mattered, since Bass is a nonentity, but her absence on an entirely discretionary overseas trip may have delayed the emergency declaration (which had to be issued by the city council president in her absence), which could have triggered federal help earlier. At a minimum, it has become a symbol of L.A.’s failures.

 

Then, there’s the much more important question of water. Trump is correct about California’s moronic policy that wastes vast amounts of water and starves its agricultural areas for no good reason. But the immediate question here was a local one, with Los Angeles shuttering a key reservoir when there was still a fire risk and clearly failing to engage in worst-case planning for water needs during a cataclysmic outbreak. There are reports, as well, that hydrants weren’t properly maintained. Newsom has ordered an investigation, but this looks like grotesque mismanagement.

 

Authorities have also been reluctant to engage in controlled burns to deny wildfires the fuel that they need to spread, and there the necessary brush-clearing hasn’t occurred.

 

California officials portray themselves as the victims of climate change. The issue here was an excess of rain, which led to the growth of vegetation, followed by a drought. Both rain and drought, as it happens, are now attributed to climate change. We are eager to hear how progressives are going to micromanage the earth’s climate such that it produces a moderate amount of rain in California at all times. Also, the Santa Ana winds played an enormous role here, and there is no remotely established link between this longstanding weather event and climate change.

 

There has been no trend in annual rainfall in Los Angeles over the last century or more, and the global trend in wildfires is down. The fact is that the climate and topography of California is uniquely vulnerable to wildfires. Estimates say that up to 12 million acres of what’s now California burned every year in prehistoric times. As development pushes further into hilly, woodland areas, it is inevitable that more housing becomes vulnerable to fire.

 

California is going to have to hire more fire personnel, spend more on pre-positioning assets at times of elevated risk, and build more reservoirs much more quickly than its self-defeating red tape currently allows. Given the state’s already exorbitant taxes, that likely means cutting spending on less consequential priorities. In short, its core competency needs to be responding to predictable natural disasters rather than virtue-signaling about climate change that its expensive (but piddling in the global scheme of things) green-energy initiatives are powerless to affect one way or the other.