by Michael Shellenberger at X
“We don’t have enough engines, and 100 were in the shop” says L.A. firefighter with 40 years of experience. “Lack of leadership” is the problem.
California’s governor and Los Angeles’s Mayor did their best to combat the catastrophic fires raging through the city, they and the media say. Governor Gavin Newsom called out the National Guard on Friday and requested national and international resources. Mayor Karen Bass returned from her trip to Ghana and said she was on the phone constantly during her flight back, coordinating disaster response.
But as fires continue to rage out of control, it’s increasingly clear that the response to the fires by California’s leaders was inadequate. The LA Department of Water and Power had drained the city’s second-largest reservoir of water, which was right near the Palisades fire, and failed to notify the County or City Fire Department. The National Weather Service (NWS) warned of “extreme fire risk” on January 2, the NWS – Los Angeles held a briefing on January 3, and yet Mayor Bass flew to Ghana anyway. Newsom did not call out the National Guard until Friday and did not mobilize national and international help until the last few days.
An aide to a former California governor told me, “Knowing the mayor’s office couldn’t adequately manage the situation, Newsom should have immediately traveled to LA to backstop the mayor’s office.”
To be fair, the catastrophe was decades in the making, and the LA basin is fire-prone. Past city and state leaders had failed to prepare the city despite catastrophic fires every 10 to 20 years in the region. And declining interest among young people in becoming firefighters, increased arsons from homeless addicts, and budget cuts over the years had depleted the city’s firefighting resources.
But none of those failures justify the reactive nature of the response by…
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