This is an extract from a National Review article that explains much about the causes of the devastating LA fires:
“And while the topography is different - the fires around L.A. are burning the chaparral landscape in the mountains and foothills around the city, not in forests — the lesson is the same, said Edward Ring, director or water and energy policy at the conservative California Policy Center: The L.A. fires have gotten out of hand largely due to poor land management.
"Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed or it would be sparked by lightning strikes," said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land's oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.
But that hasn't happened, he said, due to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists. The result: The L.A. foothills were primed to burn.
But Ring and others say the biggest problem that has allowed the fires to do as much damage as they have is tied to a lack of land management in the L.A.Basin. He blames the problem on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.
Environmental groups, including the California Chaparral Institute, the Sierra Club, and the California Center for Biological Diversity, have aggressively fought against thinning and burning that state's chaparral landscape. In a 2020 letter to lawmakers, they argued that "adding even more fire to native chaparral shrublands" is not an acceptable policy.
"They make it virtually impossible to do controlled burns of any kind. They make it virtually impossible to do mechanical thinning. And they make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to even have grazing on your property," Ring said.
"Everything requires an environmental impact statement, and everything requires permits from the [South Coast] Air Quality Management District," he continued. "All of these things are just impenetrable bureaucracies. They just tie everybody up in knots."
Ring said a focus on single-species management, rather than total-ecosystem management, makes it easy for environmentalist lawyers to find a single bird or lizard that could be affected by a land management project to put the project on hold.
"The Endangered Species Act and the California Environment Quality Act have both turned into monsters that have not only prevented any kind of rational land management, but they've actually had the perverse, opposite effect in many respects," he said.”
Trump’s claims about the delta smelt being the cause of water shortages in the Palisades and Eaton fire regions were pure, uncut stupidity. They demonstrate (yet again) that he has no ability to develop an actual understanding of an issue, and he has no substantial knowledge beyond sound bites that resonate with the type of people who watch Fox News.
The facts are these:
There is no shortage of water in the reservoirs of Los Angeles. There is plenty of water flowing from the Sacramento river delta (the smelt’s habitat) to the aqueducts in the central valley that bring water south. Most of this water is used for agriculture anyway, and wouldn’t be of much use in fighting fires more than hundreds of miles away from the San Joaquin valley. Los Angeles is surrounded by very tall mountains, and many neighborhoods are located in the foothills of these mountains. Trump probably can’t intuit this, but water does not flow up hill. It must be pumped into storage tanks, and these are what supply water to the neighborhoods most impacted by these fires. During a fire, power outages are common. Pumps require power. There is limited backup power, so the pumps have not been able to keep up with the intense demand that firefighting puts on the supply of water in these tanks. This has nothing to do with environmental policy, or dam removal, or any of the other brain-dead reasons certain right-wing politicians and media personalities are pointing to.
A former DWP commissioner certainly seems to think under-investment (not building piping or pumping stations or water tanks) was a factor. I think that’s difficult to argue at this point. Perhaps you disagree…
I don't disagree that under-investment in infrastructure in general is a problem, nor do I disagree that CA regulations make building new infra much more expensive and time consuming that it should be. I was commenting specifically on some of the dumbest theories about why there have been shortages of water in Los Angeles during these fires. And the two dumbest theories are that this had something to do with the environmental protections around the delta smelt and the dismantling of the Klamath river dam. Trump himself posted about the former, and a bunch of his fans and social media influencers posted about the latter.
Also, if we're going to talk about under-investments in infrastructure, its important to recognize that this isn't unique to California. The Texas power grid didn't hold up so well during the freeze a few years ago. 231,000 bridges across all 50 states need repairs or replacements. Every western state has water issues and needs more infrastructure. Maricopa county in Arizona can no longer allocate water rights that use ground water (also called "prehistoric water" as it cannot be replenished). The great Salt Lake in Utah is drying, leaving toxic deposits of arsenic and other heavy metals that get carried in the air on windy days to Salt Lake City, the most populous area in the state. Several towns outside of SLC have run out of water completely.
I know people like to paint California as the poster-child of government mismanagement of resources, but to be honest, these problems impact the entire west.
I’ve known that California was wasting billions on homeless nonprofits for years, while building and environmental policies worsened the situation. Where are the UC studies to that effect? Where are the Dateline or CNN specials? Where are the brave CA Democrat legislators? This is an entire complex built to take money from the middle class and siphon it to universities and non-profits and favored client groups. I wish firefighters and police were among them… but those functions aren’t compelling for people trying to radically remake society while preserving their class privileges. Such people feel nothing but contempt for us.
I live in the Bay Area, and the outsourcing of government functions - particularly social services - to a network of NGOs - is deeply corrupt. Fortunately, there are some signs that this is changing. For example, Collective Impact, an NGO that was given a large allocation of funds after the George Floyd shooting for various social-justice related initiatives has been banned from working with the city. The director of the city government office responsible for auditing and allocating these distributions of funds was living with the executive director of the NGO itself. This was a major conflict of interest, and from what I've seen so far the people of SF are fed up with this crap, and city officials are responding, albeit slowly. But some progress is better than none.
There are signs everywhere that some of the progressive excess of the 2010's has ended. Fare-evasion proof gates are being installed at the BART stations. As someone who takes the train to work at least 4 days a week, anecdotally, this seems to be having a noticeable effect on the number of homeless fentanyl addicts riding the trains. Combined with many tech companies now demanding "return to office" policies, life in downtown SF feels pretty close to normal again.
The other day, while in San Leandro, I actually saw city cops pulling over a car without license plates. Many cities in the wake of the George Floyd killing implemented policies that disallowed "discretionary traffic stops" for non-moving violations, like broken windows, lights, or expired/missing registration. This basically allowed thieves to drive around in stolen cars with impunity. Not so much anymore apparently. These are small things, and its too early to tell if they'll have a lasting impact, but I'm personally more optimistic about the direction things are going since I have been in a long time.
Two things can be true at once. Infrastructure is under-invested in many places AND CA has diverted and wasted historic, super-European amounts of money in the past few years… far more than any other state. The difficulty with building and maintenance is an issue far bigger than disaster preparedness. Look at homelessness.
Trump gets so much traction because the media and >50% of US politicians and most researchers and rich voters have ignored and suppressed these concerns for years. If you want to cut Trump off at the knees… govern better. Impose accountability, listen to the working and building classes, and stop wasting public money. Unfortunately those are commandments that modern Democrats simply cannot and will not follow. They contradict their entire worldview.
I know for a fact that you’re (partly) wrong about the water. Water in the reservoirs is irrelevant. You need water PRESSURE for fire houses, and that demands pumping stations or (better) gravity. The failure to build high elevation water capture facilities is a primary reason why there was no water available for fire fighters. I read that CA has had record rainfall during the past two years. Why not install mountain reservoirs or hilltop water tanks for this eventuality? They had the money. They just spent it on other things. Let me ask you: do you think that some of the dozens of billions of dollars spent by CA on worsening their homeless crisis could have been better spent on preparations for inevitable wildfire catastrophe? It’s not like we’re talking about a super volcano here. CA is afflicted with fires every year, and every year policy-making is a contributory factor.
As I said in my other comment, I don't disagree that there have been under investments in infrastructure. It's perfectly fair to argue that CA government has spent money on initiatives that probably would have been better spent elsewhere. It's not fair to argue this is unique to CA. Florida floods multiple times per year due to extreme weather. Condo towers are sinking. One building collapsed and killed 98 people. Maybe Ron Desantis should have spent less time attacking Disney over culture war issues and more time prepping the state for these disasters.
Look, I've lived in California for 30 years. I know first hand how incompetent and misguided the government can be. A few years ago, when the fires were really bad for most of the summer, I researched heavily moving to some other western state, both right wing and left wing in terms of governance. And the conclusion I came to is that climate related disasters like drought and fire are everywhere. You can't escape it, and the government can't stop it. There is plenty of criticism to go around - no state is doing as much as they need to. It's a huge problem.
The smelt and its protections wasn’t specifically named as a major factor by the sources I read. Rather: a California regime which makes building things (and clearing brush, and storing water) harder due to environmental regulations could have had a negative effect on the response to this disaster, as could spending billions of surplus dollars on rail projects and public pensions and salaries… while cutting the FD budget. If you claim that you’re certain that none of these factors has affected the fire response I won’t believe you.
California spends vast amounts of public money and has thousands of pages of regulations. When disaster strikes it’s always good impulse to ask: could they do better? After all, there’s zero chance that their regime is optimal. I don’t take Trump seriously. No one does. But I similarly dismiss anyone whose first reflex in a crisis like this is to scramble to defend a one-party state and its clients and ideology. I’m not saying that you’re such a person but I’ve encountered a few in the last 48 hours. Would you trust the CA state government with your life? Unfortunately, many citizens have no choice.
This is an extract from a National Review article that explains much about the causes of the devastating LA fires:
“And while the topography is different - the fires around L.A. are burning the chaparral landscape in the mountains and foothills around the city, not in forests — the lesson is the same, said Edward Ring, director or water and energy policy at the conservative California Policy Center: The L.A. fires have gotten out of hand largely due to poor land management.
"Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed or it would be sparked by lightning strikes," said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land's oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.
But that hasn't happened, he said, due to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists. The result: The L.A. foothills were primed to burn.
But Ring and others say the biggest problem that has allowed the fires to do as much damage as they have is tied to a lack of land management in the L.A.Basin. He blames the problem on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.
Environmental groups, including the California Chaparral Institute, the Sierra Club, and the California Center for Biological Diversity, have aggressively fought against thinning and burning that state's chaparral landscape. In a 2020 letter to lawmakers, they argued that "adding even more fire to native chaparral shrublands" is not an acceptable policy.
"They make it virtually impossible to do controlled burns of any kind. They make it virtually impossible to do mechanical thinning. And they make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to even have grazing on your property," Ring said.
"Everything requires an environmental impact statement, and everything requires permits from the [South Coast] Air Quality Management District," he continued. "All of these things are just impenetrable bureaucracies. They just tie everybody up in knots."
Ring said a focus on single-species management, rather than total-ecosystem management, makes it easy for environmentalist lawyers to find a single bird or lizard that could be affected by a land management project to put the project on hold.
"The Endangered Species Act and the California Environment Quality Act have both turned into monsters that have not only prevented any kind of rational land management, but they've actually had the perverse, opposite effect in many respects," he said.”
Trump’s claims about the delta smelt being the cause of water shortages in the Palisades and Eaton fire regions were pure, uncut stupidity. They demonstrate (yet again) that he has no ability to develop an actual understanding of an issue, and he has no substantial knowledge beyond sound bites that resonate with the type of people who watch Fox News.
The facts are these:
There is no shortage of water in the reservoirs of Los Angeles. There is plenty of water flowing from the Sacramento river delta (the smelt’s habitat) to the aqueducts in the central valley that bring water south. Most of this water is used for agriculture anyway, and wouldn’t be of much use in fighting fires more than hundreds of miles away from the San Joaquin valley. Los Angeles is surrounded by very tall mountains, and many neighborhoods are located in the foothills of these mountains. Trump probably can’t intuit this, but water does not flow up hill. It must be pumped into storage tanks, and these are what supply water to the neighborhoods most impacted by these fires. During a fire, power outages are common. Pumps require power. There is limited backup power, so the pumps have not been able to keep up with the intense demand that firefighting puts on the supply of water in these tanks. This has nothing to do with environmental policy, or dam removal, or any of the other brain-dead reasons certain right-wing politicians and media personalities are pointing to.
A former DWP commissioner certainly seems to think under-investment (not building piping or pumping stations or water tanks) was a factor. I think that’s difficult to argue at this point. Perhaps you disagree…
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-08/lack-of-water-from-hydrants-in-palisades-fire-is-hampering-firefighters-caruso-says
I don't disagree that under-investment in infrastructure in general is a problem, nor do I disagree that CA regulations make building new infra much more expensive and time consuming that it should be. I was commenting specifically on some of the dumbest theories about why there have been shortages of water in Los Angeles during these fires. And the two dumbest theories are that this had something to do with the environmental protections around the delta smelt and the dismantling of the Klamath river dam. Trump himself posted about the former, and a bunch of his fans and social media influencers posted about the latter.
Also, if we're going to talk about under-investments in infrastructure, its important to recognize that this isn't unique to California. The Texas power grid didn't hold up so well during the freeze a few years ago. 231,000 bridges across all 50 states need repairs or replacements. Every western state has water issues and needs more infrastructure. Maricopa county in Arizona can no longer allocate water rights that use ground water (also called "prehistoric water" as it cannot be replenished). The great Salt Lake in Utah is drying, leaving toxic deposits of arsenic and other heavy metals that get carried in the air on windy days to Salt Lake City, the most populous area in the state. Several towns outside of SLC have run out of water completely.
I know people like to paint California as the poster-child of government mismanagement of resources, but to be honest, these problems impact the entire west.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/helping-the-unhoused
I’ve known that California was wasting billions on homeless nonprofits for years, while building and environmental policies worsened the situation. Where are the UC studies to that effect? Where are the Dateline or CNN specials? Where are the brave CA Democrat legislators? This is an entire complex built to take money from the middle class and siphon it to universities and non-profits and favored client groups. I wish firefighters and police were among them… but those functions aren’t compelling for people trying to radically remake society while preserving their class privileges. Such people feel nothing but contempt for us.
I live in the Bay Area, and the outsourcing of government functions - particularly social services - to a network of NGOs - is deeply corrupt. Fortunately, there are some signs that this is changing. For example, Collective Impact, an NGO that was given a large allocation of funds after the George Floyd shooting for various social-justice related initiatives has been banned from working with the city. The director of the city government office responsible for auditing and allocating these distributions of funds was living with the executive director of the NGO itself. This was a major conflict of interest, and from what I've seen so far the people of SF are fed up with this crap, and city officials are responding, albeit slowly. But some progress is better than none.
There are signs everywhere that some of the progressive excess of the 2010's has ended. Fare-evasion proof gates are being installed at the BART stations. As someone who takes the train to work at least 4 days a week, anecdotally, this seems to be having a noticeable effect on the number of homeless fentanyl addicts riding the trains. Combined with many tech companies now demanding "return to office" policies, life in downtown SF feels pretty close to normal again.
The other day, while in San Leandro, I actually saw city cops pulling over a car without license plates. Many cities in the wake of the George Floyd killing implemented policies that disallowed "discretionary traffic stops" for non-moving violations, like broken windows, lights, or expired/missing registration. This basically allowed thieves to drive around in stolen cars with impunity. Not so much anymore apparently. These are small things, and its too early to tell if they'll have a lasting impact, but I'm personally more optimistic about the direction things are going since I have been in a long time.
Two things can be true at once. Infrastructure is under-invested in many places AND CA has diverted and wasted historic, super-European amounts of money in the past few years… far more than any other state. The difficulty with building and maintenance is an issue far bigger than disaster preparedness. Look at homelessness.
Trump gets so much traction because the media and >50% of US politicians and most researchers and rich voters have ignored and suppressed these concerns for years. If you want to cut Trump off at the knees… govern better. Impose accountability, listen to the working and building classes, and stop wasting public money. Unfortunately those are commandments that modern Democrats simply cannot and will not follow. They contradict their entire worldview.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flames-raged-in-palisades-a-key-reservoir-nearby-was-offline
I know for a fact that you’re (partly) wrong about the water. Water in the reservoirs is irrelevant. You need water PRESSURE for fire houses, and that demands pumping stations or (better) gravity. The failure to build high elevation water capture facilities is a primary reason why there was no water available for fire fighters. I read that CA has had record rainfall during the past two years. Why not install mountain reservoirs or hilltop water tanks for this eventuality? They had the money. They just spent it on other things. Let me ask you: do you think that some of the dozens of billions of dollars spent by CA on worsening their homeless crisis could have been better spent on preparations for inevitable wildfire catastrophe? It’s not like we’re talking about a super volcano here. CA is afflicted with fires every year, and every year policy-making is a contributory factor.
As I said in my other comment, I don't disagree that there have been under investments in infrastructure. It's perfectly fair to argue that CA government has spent money on initiatives that probably would have been better spent elsewhere. It's not fair to argue this is unique to CA. Florida floods multiple times per year due to extreme weather. Condo towers are sinking. One building collapsed and killed 98 people. Maybe Ron Desantis should have spent less time attacking Disney over culture war issues and more time prepping the state for these disasters.
Look, I've lived in California for 30 years. I know first hand how incompetent and misguided the government can be. A few years ago, when the fires were really bad for most of the summer, I researched heavily moving to some other western state, both right wing and left wing in terms of governance. And the conclusion I came to is that climate related disasters like drought and fire are everywhere. You can't escape it, and the government can't stop it. There is plenty of criticism to go around - no state is doing as much as they need to. It's a huge problem.
The smelt and its protections wasn’t specifically named as a major factor by the sources I read. Rather: a California regime which makes building things (and clearing brush, and storing water) harder due to environmental regulations could have had a negative effect on the response to this disaster, as could spending billions of surplus dollars on rail projects and public pensions and salaries… while cutting the FD budget. If you claim that you’re certain that none of these factors has affected the fire response I won’t believe you.
California spends vast amounts of public money and has thousands of pages of regulations. When disaster strikes it’s always good impulse to ask: could they do better? After all, there’s zero chance that their regime is optimal. I don’t take Trump seriously. No one does. But I similarly dismiss anyone whose first reflex in a crisis like this is to scramble to defend a one-party state and its clients and ideology. I’m not saying that you’re such a person but I’ve encountered a few in the last 48 hours. Would you trust the CA state government with your life? Unfortunately, many citizens have no choice.