The recent Los Angeles wildfires killed at least 29 people, forced over 200,000 evacuations, burned over 57,000 acres of land and destroyed more than 18,000 homes. But, contrary to what the mainstream media and the green left would have you believe, this catastrophe was not all “climate change.”
And the woke, virtue-signalling green lefties in the City of Los Angeles (and the equally left-wing state government of California) “shoulda seen it comin.’”
The Santa Ana, or “devil winds,” have hurricane-level wind speeds of 80 to 100 miles per hour, are highly predictable and seasonally common in the region, and have caused massive wildfires since records have been kept. The southern California coastal region sees, on average, ten of these windstorms every year.
But L.A., one of the first U.S. cities to declare a climate emergency (in April 2018), is run by woke leftists: award-winning actors at virtue-signalling. They are, predictably, also sufficiently corrupt, lazy, or incompetent enough to ignore the consequences of their own rhetoric.
For if there truly was a climate emergency – one that justified all their hot air and bombast for the past many years – then shouldn’t the City of Los Angeles have done more to prepare for the recurring natural disasters, climate change-induced or not?
Notwithstanding the best efforts of the media to paint a climate change narrative, some commentators were quick to reveal L.A.’s spectacular failures to prepare for the wildfires. Consider the many reports of empty water reservoirs. Once the nearby 3 million-gallon tanks were tapped, the water pressure needed to send the water uphill to the fire hydrants in the higher-elevation neighbourhoods (like Palisades, which was decimated by the fires) was insufficient. The 117 million gallon supply of water in tanks further away had been allowed to dwindle over time, lowering overall system pressure and resulting in multiple instances of fire fighters finding their hydrants had run dry.
Multiple fire hydrants drawing water from the system for several hours was not sustainable as the system was “not designed to fight wildfires,” said L.A. County Power and Water Director Mark Pestrella.
With the Santa Ana winds as regular occurrences, why not?
Then we had the drama between woke mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass and woke Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley. Midway through the wildfires, and after weeks of climate change headlines, Chief Crowley exposed what the Mayor was trying to conceal: that L.A.’s budget cuts had “adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations.”
It turns out, according to Chief Crowley, that L.A. city council, doubtless still on high alert after their climate emergency declaration of seven years earlier, cut the emergency services budget so deeply that they “severely limited the Department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies” and, further, affected its capacity for brush clearance inspections and residential inspections.
L.A. city council cut the L.A. Fire Department’s budget by 2%, about $17 million dollars in 2024 alone. In fact, the LAFD has only half the number of firefighters per capita compared to other major U.S. cities: less than 1 instead of close to 2 per 1,000 residents. The city has fewer firefighters in total today than it had in 2010.
I wonder why they made these cuts without first declaring an end to the climate emergency? Hmmm.
A very defensive Mayor Bass pushed back, at first by clinging to the climate change narrative, and then by adding “[t]here were no [budget] reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we’re dealing with.”
After more words between L.A.’s wokesters, Mayor Bass finally, in late February, silenced her fire chief by, well, firing her. “We know that 1,000 firefighters that could have been on duty on the morning the fires broke out were instead sent home on Chief Crowley’s watch.”
Ouch. On display in this she said/she said exchange, you can see that the left has been forced off of the man-made climate change narrative and has moved on to a man-made (or, in this case, woman-made) colossal bad judgement and incompetence storyline.
The climate change narrative in the media covering L.A. brought back memories of last year’s catastrophic fires in Jasper, Alberta, as well as the western fires in 2023 and the 2016 behemoth in Fort McMurray.
Many of the reports about the Alberta wildfires predictably pinned the cause as climate change, in the same way that the U.S. media initially portrayed the L.A. situation. But stories are now coming out about poor planning and insufficient funding around natural disaster emergencies. Last year, Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland admitted to “the compelling need to invest together in training, preparation, mitigation and adaptation, ensuring that we not only respond effectively but that we also build a more resilient future.”
In other words, climate crisis declarations or not, it makes more sense for cities to focus on core needs – like planning for real natural disasters and protecting the budgets of emergency services – rather than hollow declarations about potential crises, and irresponsible attacks on oil and natural gas and the countless beneficial goods and services we derive from them.