A year has passed since devastating fires ravaged Los Angeles, scorching over 57,000 acres, destroying more than 18,000 structures, and claiming at least thirty-one lives.
Shortly after the flames subsided, I wrote about how the catastrophe was not primarily a “climate emergency,” as LA officials hastily proclaimed and the media faithfully parroted; rather, the catastrophe was a glaring example of municipal and state governance failures.
One year on, further investigations reveal that my initial criticisms – and the observations of impartial American journalists – have not only been vindicated but amplified.
What we saw in real-time – budget cuts crippling the fire department, empty reservoirs leaving hydrants dry, and woke leaders like Mayor Karen Bass prioritizing DEI deflection over fire-fighting action – has morphed into a full-blown scandal of incompetence.
It’s now clear that what happened in LA was a preventable disaster exacerbated by officials who put virtue-signalling and woke ideology above the public interest.
The empty reservoirs and dry hydrants, for instance, which turned a bad situation into a catastrophe, can be laid at the feet of Bass’s “diversity hire” administration and her progressive predecessors.
As I noted originally, nearby three-million-gallon water tanks were quickly depleted, while the distant 117-million-gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir ran dry, forcing firefighters to rely on tanker trucks instead of dependable hydrants. A year later, it’s clear this was no fluke but the product of chronic neglect: the Santa Ynez Reservoir – holding forty times the capacity of the failed tanks – had been offline for months for what officials described as “minor repairs.”
These repairs were overseen by a woman named Janisse Quiñones, CEO of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Quiñones is a proud leftist who proclaimed, at the time of her 2024 appointment by Mayor Bass, that her role was about “righting the wrongs that we’ve done in the past.”
It’s unclear exactly how her promise to use “an equity lens and social justice” to manage infrastructure was supposed to work but we know that she supported aggressive renewable energy and local water-sourcing targets, framing them as part of correcting environmentally harmful legacy systems. All the woke buzzwords, but not much about actually managing the water supply!
Quiñones was paid $750,000 per year, a salary proposed by Bass – nearly double what her predecessor had made. No doubt those extra few hundred thousand were for “righting” those historical “wrongs!”
Perhaps the least surprising revelation is that this wasn’t some inevitable climate-fueled inferno, as was widely claimed at the time. It was arson. A federal indictment unsealed in 2025 charged one man with maliciously starting the initial brush fire on New Year’s Eve in Topanga State Park, which got out of control, was beaten back by the fire department, only to later rekindle into the Palisades blaze.
This undercuts the knee-jerk “climate emergency” rhetoric from officials and media, shifting the focus squarely to why what started originally as a minor, containable fire wasn’t fully extinguished.
According to City Journal’s Shawn Regan, “Not only was the Palisades Fire entirely preventable, the evidence suggests; it was also fueled by California state policies that, in the words of one attorney representing fire victims, “put plants over people.”’
Regan and others have documented how California’s Wildfire Management Plan for Topanga State Park prioritized protecting rare plant-life and Native archaeological sites over aggressive firefighting. Though firefighters contained the initial eight-acre fire relatively quickly, they were barred from full mop-up operations – no heavy equipment, no retardant, and as little soil disturbance as possible.
Fire victims’ lawyers unearthed one text message in which an LAFD supervisor was asked whether they should deploy bulldozers to stop the spread of the initial fire. He responded, “Heck no that area is full of endangered plants. I would be a real idiot to ever put a dozer in that area.”
The fire was left to smoulder. Park Rangers and local hikers have testified that they saw smoke and other signs that the fire was not contained, but the site went unmonitored for six days.
In short, DEI and woke hiring practices, along with eco-zealotry and plain old incompetence, managed to turn a minor arson incident into a raging inferno.
This saga should serve as an urgent wake-up call to municipalities everywhere: prioritize raw competence above all else when electing or appointing leaders to positions of public trust.
When officials chase “woke” ideas – whether it’s diverting resources to DEI programs over disaster preparedness, prioritizing endangered plants over human lives and property, or indulging in climate virtue-signalling instead of maintaining basic infrastructure – they don’t just fail, they actively betray the citizens they are sworn to serve and protect.
Los Angeles stands as a tragic exhibit of how thoroughly institutions captured by the woke, green left-wing will sacrifice the actual public good in a heartbeat when ideology trumps duty. The results, in this case, are death, destruction, and ruin.
Voters, take note and act: demand competence, accountability, and a relentless focus on the basics over empty ideology, identity politics, or progressive posturing. Hold your leaders to that standard, or the next time a crisis hits, it might be your house that goes up in flames.
