By Noah Rothman
Friday, January 24, 2025
The word “bombshell” is often strewn about rather
recklessly these days, but a Friday report in the Los Angeles Times certainly fits that bill. It 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.
It’s a difficult read but a vital one. 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. “It is absolutely possible that it would have been able to help a
little bit.”
The LA Times piece will help establish a predicate
for holding local officials to account for their maladministration — a vital
corrective that helps establish and maintain the public’s trust in their
elected officials. That trust is a commodity in short supply these days, and
it’s no wonder why. Consider the lengths to which California politicians and
their allies in the press went to persuade the public that the details revealed
in this report amounted to “misinformation.”
“President-elect Donald Trump has blamed the state’s
water policies for fire hydrants running dry — claims the facts do not
support,” read an ABC News dispatch published only ten days ago. It’s more
complicated than that, according to the experts. “The local reservoirs in turn
are fed by larger regional reservoirs, which are close to full capacity,” the
report added — an assertion that has since been cast into doubt. Likewise, the fire was simply too big
for what “the local storage systems were designed for,” said UC Davis professor
Jay Lund. That claim, too, is in conflict with the documents Sheets reviewed.
“The weak water pressure that firefighters encountered in
the afflicted communities was mostly caused by simultaneous demands on urban
water systems that were designed for fighting house fires one at a time, not
huge wildfires,” Cal Matters opinion writer Dan Walters declared. This refrain was common among
defenders of Southern California’s political culture. But, in light of the LA
Times’s reporting, it’s less of a defense than an indictment. To the extent
that California’s infrastructural deficiencies were broadly known, they were
also an acknowledged liability.
Some media fact-checks made little sense even at the time
of their publication. “Other social media users claimed slow construction of
California’s reservoir led to the hydrants running dry,” PolitiFact’s sleuths scowled. “But local infrastructure
failures, not regional water storage, caused the hydrant problems, so it’s
wrong to blame them on these projects’ construction timeline.” Not only do we
now know that it is not “wrong” to blame construction delays for the scope of
this debacle, but that was an obviously sound inference even before the LA
Times confirmed its wisdom.
“Claims that the tanks weren’t full are false,” LA mayor
Karen Bass told reporters at an emergency January 9 press conference. But if
those tanks are inaccessible, damaged, or incapable of meeting the potential
fire threat that government contractors identified in writing, the only
purveyors of “misinformation” here are Bass and her stenographers.
From the outset of this disaster, local and state
officials fed reporters dubious but exculpatory narratives and political media
outlets ran with them in service to their foremost objective: impugning the
credibility of the Democratic Party’s critics. They laundered inaccurate claims
into the national conversation under the guise that it was all a propaganda
campaign waged by their enemies. Today, that accusation has been exposed as
little more than projection.
“I think most of us know that the Internet is not always
the best place to get accurate information,” Bass scolded reporters even while
she was actively misleading the public. It takes a lot of chutzpah to say
something like that, but Bass’s audacity is typical among California’s elected
leaders. If only their outsize self-confidence were proportional to their
competence.
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