On the menu today: Los Angeles County is burning, tens of thousands are evacuated, and we’re a long stretch away from the end of these devastating wildfires.
‘We’ve Got a Mayor Who’s Out of The Country, and We’ve Got a City That’s Burning’
As of this writing, zero percent of the three major wildfires ravaging Los Angeles County is contained; the images on social media of the Los Angeles area are downright apocalyptic. The Palisades Fire has ravaged more than 2,900 acres, the Eaton Fire has destroyed 1,000 acres, and the Hurst Fire has affected 500 acres.
Tens of thousands of Californians have been forced to evacuate; there are three large mandatory evacuation zones at this time: a large stretch surrounding Topanga State Park and Tuna Canyon Park, a smaller stretch northwest of San Fernando and southeast of Santa Clarita, and a longer, thinner stretch east of Pasadena. Evacuation warning areas include Malibu, Pepperdine University, and Olive View UCLA Medical center. You can find a list of alerts from the Los Angeles County Fire Department here. My guess is, if you live anywhere near these fires, you already know how much danger you and your home are in right now.
The only silver lining is that, as of this writing, no deaths have been reported.
For those not familiar with southern California, Los Angeles County is huge — more than 4,700 square miles, roughly the size of Connecticut — and encompasses a massive chunk of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. It is the most populous county in the U.S., with more than 9.6 million residents. If you look at a topographical map of Los Angeles County, you’ll notice an odd feature different from most American cities — you’ll see fairly large patches of green, like the 1,500 acres Westridge-Canyonback Park or the 605-acre Franklin Canyon Park, right alongside densely packed urban areas. This means you’ve got a lot of people living close to dry, wooded areas.
In his song, “I Love L.A.” — intended as a satire, contrasting very wealthy neighborhoods and very poor neighborhoods — Randy Newman sings of the “Santa Ana winds blowing hot from the north.”
Air in the Great Basin of the western U.S., incorporating Nevada and part of Utah, warms as it descends closer to sea level and gets compressed. As Robert Fovell, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA explains on his website, “dry (unsaturated) air warms on descent at a rate of 10 degrees Celsius per kilometer km or almost 30 degrees Fahrenheit per mile — an incredible rate. That means if you take a piece of air located only a mile above your head, and brought it down to your feet, it would wind up 30 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than when it started. You don’t need to change the altitude of air very much to alter its temperature significantly.”
This makes the wind hot, dry, and often intense, and Los Angeles County is in drought conditions. Take dry vegetation that makes perfect kindling, add intense, hot dry winds and a lot of flying and floating embers, and you have a perfect formula for severe wildfires spreading exceptionally quickly.
As of 4:06 a.m. this morning, the National Weather Service warned, “Widespread damaging north to northeast winds and extreme fire weather conditions will continue through mid-afternoon. Downed trees and power lines, power outages, hazardous driving conditions, increased traffic, and airport delays should be expected across the Southland. Any wildfires that start will likely spread rapidly with extreme fire behavior. Otherwise, dry conditions are expected with warmer conditions to develop for late week.”
This is first and foremost a tragic human story of innocent people losing their homes, often forced to evacuate with whatever they could grab within a few minutes. But there are at least two angles relating to the performance of government, and depending upon what fire investigators find, perhaps a third.
Mickey Kaus, who lives in Venice, Calif., has described the neighborhoods who saw the flames approaching and waited in vain for firefighters to arrive. “Residents whose homes have burned to the ground are understandably pissed that no firefighters showed up to try to save those structures. Not enough personnel, apparently. Seems like some kind of failure in planning. Newsom made it sound like the cavalry had arrived. It didn’t.”
Kaus is referring to California governor Gavin Newsom’s Monday declaration in which he said that “the state is taking early, proactive steps to coordinate with local partners to protect communities as dangerous weather enters our state” and boasted that he “directed state departments to coordinate and strategically position fire engines, hand crews, aircraft and additional support in key areas.”
Maybe the scale of this disaster is so large that no local or state preparation would have been sufficient. But there will be hard questions about whether the state deployed every resource available.
Meanwhile, as Los Angeles is facing one of the most severe crises in its history, yesterday evening, the city declared a state of emergency. Notice which city official made the announcement:
The city of Los Angeles has declared a state of emergency for the wind event, the L.A. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson announced during a press conference Tuesday. He added that the most severe part of this windstorm is yet to come, but the city has “all resources on deck.”
“We want everybody to know that the city is well prepared and has a tremendous emergency management infrastructure,” said Harris-Dawson. “If you can stay off of our roads, please do so to allow emergency vehicles to go across the city.”
The state of emergency was announced by the city council president and not Mayor Karen Bass because the mayor is on her way back from Accra, Ghana. Back on January 3, President Biden named Bass as part of the four-member U.S. delegation attending the Inauguration of His Excellency John Dramani Mahama on Tuesday.
In what must be the most unfortunately timed trip since Texas senator Ted Cruz took his family on vacation in Aruba, Bass was roughly 7,400 miles away from her city as the fires engulfed it, honoring the inauguration of a man most Angelenos have never heard of, in a place most of them couldn’t find on a map.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Emily Hoeven wrote on X last night, “Hearing a lot of frustration right now from Angelenos that Mayor Karen Bass is in Ghana while the massive #palisadesfire is burning, forcing thousands to evacuate amid a ‘life-threatening’ event.”
In 2022, Los Angeles voters picked Bass, a now 71-year-old longtime representative, over billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who is conservative by southern California standards and had been a registered Democrat for about 20 minutes. If you elect the standard-issue creature of the California Democratic machine, you get the results of the standard-issue creature of the California Democratic machine.
Caruso is, unsurprisingly, appalled by the performance of Mayor Bass. In an interview with the local Fox affiliate in the wee hours of this morning, Caruso said:
“It’s a disaster to the hundredth degree. It’s beyond anything, I think, any of us could have ever imagined. My heart goes out to, obviously, to the people and their homes, watching the small businesses around us go up in flames. This is people’s livelihoods. This is devastating. But what is most concerning to me, our first responders and our firefighters, who are trying to battle this, there’s no water in the Palisades. There’s no water coming out of the fire hydrants. This is an absolute mismanagement by the city. Not the firefighters’ fault, but the city.
And I’ve got to be very honest, we’ve got a mayor who’s out of the country, and we’ve got a city that’s burning, and there’s no resources to put out fires. If you look at your pictures, you don’t see the firefighters there, because there’s nothing they can do. And it looks like we’re in a third world country here. And we’ve got a lot of tough questions that we need to ask the mayor, and the city council, and our representatives and the county representatives. Why didn’t you work to mitigate this? What was your brush mitigation program?
Finally, no one should operate under the illusion that the right government policy can stop wildfires. But better government policies and decisions can mitigate the damage of wildfires, and worse policies can exacerbate the damage. In August 2020, ProPublica did an important, detailed, and thorough work of journalism looking at how wildfires in California are seriously exacerbated by national, state, and local policies that minimize the use of controlled burns that would limit the scope of naturally occurring fires.
In October, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future,” a directive that officials said is meant to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed:
A Forest Service spokesperson said that while the agency wanted to return to burning as soon as feasible, too many California-based crews were away fighting wildfires in other parts of the country to safely implement prescribed fire within the state.
“We’re hoping it’s a very temporary blip here. We just don’t have great climatic conditions right now,” said Adrienne Freeman, Region 5 public information officer.
While it’s not uncommon, nor especially disruptive, for individual planned burns to be put on pause due to weather conditions or lack of available resources, a blanket prohibition puts the stops on all federal work around the state. For some observers, that’s frustrating.
“It’s just a reminder that year after year, the Forest Service shuts down their prescribed fire program during really good burn windows,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the University of California Ag and Natural Resources Fire Network.
Would continuing U.S. Forest Service controlled burns have made a difference in the three fires currently bedeviling Los Angeles County? It’s too early to say.
ADDENDUM: Yesterday’s newsletter noted that United Kingdom prime minister Keir Starmer had offered a blistering response to Elon Musk and others who wanted a national government review of widespread child sexual abuse and “grooming gangs.” Starmer stated, “When the poison of the far right leads to serious threats to [government minister] Jess Phillips and others, then in my book a line has been crossed.”
Yesterday, speaking in the House of Commons, Starmer had retreated a bit:
“This morning, I met some of the victims and survivors of this scandal, and they were clear with me that they want action now, not the delay of a further inquiry,” he said. “There have been a number of inquiries, both national and local, including one covering Oldham, and reasonable people can agree or disagree on whether a further inquiry is necessary.”
From “the poison of the far right” to “reasonable people can agree or disagree” in 24 hours.
I keep hearing British officials insisting that if there’s a national inquiry, there can’t be further enactment of previously proposed reforms and changes in the meantime, and that strikes me as excuse-making. Also, as one of my X followers noted, the recommendations made in the aftermath are all fine responses to child sexual abuse after it has happened, but aren’t likely to do much to prevent more cases in the future. Few of them seem to address the core problem, which is that a bunch of Islamist immigrants think that it’s perfectly legitimate to sexually abuse young girls.