California Fires - Politics of Blame

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Ramrouser said:
A few days (like for hurricane prep) gives you time to:
Call up the national guard - to prevent looting
Organize law enforcement for traffic control for evacuations
Get shelters prepared and stocked with supplies

Mayor Bass was more concerned with her junket to Africa than bothering with basic prep.

Let’s return to this issue in a few months and see if the local residents are placing medals on the politicians and officials who were in charge.
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Victims of fire in California routinely sue everyone and then let the various insurance companies sort it out.

I 100% guaranty City/County will be sued. As will power companies, and anyone with even a tenuous connection to the fires.

Not sure what those complaints will prove other than deep pockets are always probed after fires in California.

I am sure MMQB will show that mistakes were made. That is always the case. Take a look at what caused the airport fire in Orange County a couple of months ago.
 
Ramrouser said:
The beauty is that this debate (who to blame?) is going to play out in real time over the coming weeks and months. Let's see if the local residents, particularly the ones who lost everything, are receptive to Bass, Newsome and the other local officials simply blaming this on "climate," Trump or "we-couldn't-possibly- predicted-this type of natural disaster." Lots of wealthy and important people impacted by this including celebrities - who have access to the media. I predict there's going to be major pushback from these victims and the officials are, for once, going to have to account for their actions and policies and have to answer tough questions from the public and press.

Fast forward 6 months from now, you're going to have tremendous frustration of the public in dealing with California's notoriously rigid permitting and zoning regulations which will slow down, if not halt, these residents from rebuilding their homes.
What’s wrong with Episcopal and Woodberry? Great student pipelines for UNC.
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Newsome going to be knocking on trump's door for money to bail him out of the insurance mess he and the legislature made.

 
rodoheel said:
The idea that any of us can sit here from thousands of miles away and decide right now, while the fires are still raging, what state and local officials could have done differently, and whether they acted "appropriately," is insane. This is part of the problem with modern society generally, and MAGA world specifically: we are so overwhelmed with real-time information (good and bad) that people have this constant urge to rush to judgment and assign blame when in reality it will take weeks and months to gather the information needed to fully assess what went wrong and what could have helped. Many people simply don't have the patience or discernment to wait for further information before heading online to vomit takes everywhere, especially given that modern social media (and, increasingly, modern politics) incentivizes constant screeching invective far more than sober and nuanced judgment.
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While you are correct about some disasters, this particular one doesn't fall into that category. CA deals with this in some form almost every year. This isn't a "nobody could have seen this coming" event. The state and local officials dropped the ball in a huge way. Especially given the recent history from which to draw upon.
 
Ramrouser said:
A few days (like for hurricane prep) gives you time to:
Call up the national guard - to prevent looting
Organize law enforcement for traffic control for evacuations
Get shelters prepared and stocked with supplies

Mayor Bass was more concerned with her junket to Africa than bothering with basic prep.

Let’s return to this issue in a few months and see if the local residents are placing medals on the politicians and officials who were in charge.
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1. Looting? WTF are you talking about? Who is looting burned down stores?

2. Do you have any reason at all to believe that there is a shortage of supplies in the shelters, or are you making things up again?

3. I hate to tell you, but the mayor is not involved in stocking shelters.

4. Guarantee you that the local residents understand the real problem. It isn't going to work out the way you think it will.
 
BoonetheAiredale said:
Is it your contention that state and local officials didn't handle this correctly? What does "correctly" even mean in this case, what does "incorrectly" mean? What multi-year set of decisions do you see as creating an environment where this was handled incorrectly?

Humans often learn from events. Human often prepare for what they know and what they think they know, they rarely prepare for things they never thought of. This rush to assign blame reeks of our human desire to control (and where convenient, to score some political points). Why didn't we know about that asteroid? Why didn't we know about that undersea earthquake that created a tsunami, why didn't we handle covid perfectly, why did we use DDT? Where to put the blame??????
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Yea, they handled this incorrectly. They have a very recent history of wildfires. Like every year. Plus learning from the lessons from Hawaii and other places. This should have been on every elected officials radar given how frequently that area incurs fires. Making sure you have infrastructure, basic traffic management, the correct personnel, etc., isn't asking them to be clairvoyant. Its asking them to be competent.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
It's the Republican way - use whatever argument works at the time to attack Democrats. It's literally a no-win scenario with them - Democrats use government power and get attacked, they don't use it and get attacked. Very neat system for them.
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You might be the biggest hypocrite on the zzl and that is quite an accomplishment.
 
superrific said:
1. Looting? WTF are you talking about? Who is looting burned down stores?

2. Do you have any reason at all to believe that there is a shortage of supplies in the shelters, or are you making things up again?

3. I hate to tell you, but the mayor is not involved in stocking shelters.

4. Guarantee you that the local residents understand the real problem. It isn't going to work out the way you think it will.
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There’s looting. There is always looting in LA. It is as much a Southern California tradition as flocked Christmas trees. But it is not disproportionate. And it is mostly in the Altadena area.
 
Callatoroy said:
Newsome going to be knocking on trump's door for money to bail him out of the insurance mess he and the legislature made.

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No, he's not going to be knocking on Trump's door. Maybe this is another thing that you fail to understand, like gravity or timeouts. He might asking the federal government. Trump is not co-extensive with the government.

The problem here isn't the insurance mess that CA made any more than the property insurance debacle in Florida is primarily the fault of DeSantis. The main problem is that these places have become uninsurable because of extreme weather.

People have been warning you for three decades about this. For three decades, scientists have been warning that extreme weather events like fires and hurricanes will become more common and more severe because there is so much more energy on Earth now, in the form of heat. You and the GOP refused to listen. You denied and denied. Your team passed laws to prevent states from even considering climate change when making future plans (which is one of the stupidest own goals in history).

And now the scientists' predictions are coming true, and you want to blame the governor of California. Hey, you know what? California has been leading the charge against global warming and all other forms of air pollution for almost half a century. If we all emulated California (and by all I mean Europe and China too), then we wouldn't have uninsurable properties.
 
Anybody that says State officials "dropped the ball" is a farggin' eejit. It was a lack of rain which usually precedes the usual Santa Ana winds. That said, some local officials may be blamed for building homes deep into the fire zones. We know they’re fire zones, we know they’re dangerous, and yet City Hall and county government has constantly greenlit development in places of greater and greater risks. Local decisions, not State level. Newsom is held blameless there. "Fire experts, past reports and risk assessments had all anticipated a wildfire catastrophe to some degree." But, duh. I could have told you that. But what to do at the State level?

The local water supply system in the Palisades area is designed to flow with enough gallons a minute to fight a house fire or a blaze in apartments or commercial buildings, but that's it. Again... local level issues, not State. Then you have a massive fire over the whole community and you have 10 times as many fire units, all pulling water out of the system at once. Of course the hydrants ran dry.

It was/is a perfect storm of events. But Newsom mandating water "pulled from NoCal to SoCal" like trump suggests is total B.S. California officials and experts say that's totally bogus.
 
Callatoroy said:
While you are correct about some disasters, this particular one doesn't fall into that category. CA deals with this in some form almost every year. This isn't a "nobody could have seen this coming" event. The state and local officials dropped the ball in a huge way. Especially given the recent history from which to draw upon.
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You should probably learn how water pressure works before continuing to opine. Nobody dropped the ball, except the GOP for three decades.

The LA municipal water supply is not and can never be designed to fight wildfires. I read an estimate of the cost to store enough water to be prepared for this sort of thing: at least $10B a year. So yeah, that's not feasible.

Everybody saw this coming. The problem is that there is no actual solution that can be implemented over any reasonable time frame. This is a long-term issue, not a short-term issue.

Apparently Trump has caused such brain rot that MAGA thinks everything can be solved with a phone call, when in fact nothing can be solved that way. Have you noticed that Trump is all of a sudden realizing that ending the war in Ukraine will be very hard; prices aren't going to drop (they are in fact going to increase, probably rapidly), etc.? Guess what? You can't fix the problem of scrub brush fires in a few days.
 
Centerpiece said:
Anybody that says State officials "dropped the ball" is a farggin' eejit. It was a lack of rain which usually precedes the usual Santa Ana winds. That said, some local officials may be blamed for building homes deep into the fire zones. We know they’re fire zones, we know they’re dangerous, and yet City Hall and county government has constantly greenlit development in places of greater and greater risks. Local decisions, not State level. Newsom is held blameless there. "Fire experts, past reports and risk assessments had all anticipated a wildfire catastrophe to some degree." But, duh. I could have told you that. But what to do at the State level?

The local water supply system in the Palisades area is designed to flow with enough gallons a minute to fight a house fire or a blaze in apartments or commercial buildings, but that's it. Again... local level issues, not State. Then you have a massive fire over the whole community and you have 10 times as many fire units, all pulling water out of the system at once. Of course the hydrants ran dry.

It was/is a perfect storm of events. But Newsom mandating water "pulled from NoCal to SoCal" like trump suggests is total B.S. California officials and experts say that's totally bogus.
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1. It wasn't just a lack of rain. It was a lack of rain after the tremendous rain last year. So lots of vegetation grew, and then died and dried out. It's the combination of the two and of course that's not something that can be managed.

2. Obviously building in fire zones is a problem, but it's also true that the fire zones have moved and continue to move. Was Palisades actually a fire zone when it was built up? Or has it become that way as the climate has changed? Serious question, 'cause I don't know the answer.
 
superrific said:
1. It wasn't just a lack of rain. It was a lack of rain after the tremendous rain last year. So lots of vegetation grew, and then died and dried out. It's the combination of the two and of course that's not something that can be managed.

2. Obviously building in fire zones is a problem, but it's also true that the fire zones have moved and continue to move. Was Palisades actually a fire zone when it was built up? Or has it become that way as the climate has changed? Serious question, 'cause I don't know the answer.
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Palisades is a very, very old neighborhood (by LA standards). This is not a new situation where they just started building houses deeper and deeper into the hills. And it certainly wasn’t considered a high fire risk when those houses were originally built.

But times have changed. Any community with any kind of elevation near a canyon or wilderness is at a great risk of fire. The insurance companies have figured that out and stopped writing policies for anything even near the hills. So the palisades are definitely in a fire zone now - but so is a great deal of Southern California.
 
I’m going to be honest - a giant fire is probably the most reasonable reason to loot a store. Decorum goes out the window when everything feels like it is about to burn down around you. Hell the store might be there in a couple of days. I’m not saying it is right, but I kind of get it.
 
sringwal said:
I’m going to be honest - a giant fire is probably the most reasonable reason to loot a store. Decorum goes out the window when everything feels like it is about to burn down around you. Hell the store might be there in a couple of days. I’m not saying it is right, but I kind of get it.
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Most of the looting is usually houses, not stores, and often they are houses that did not burn down. The looters know homeowners likely evacuated and police will not have time for calls.
 
Callatoroy said:
Yea, they handled this incorrectly. They have a very recent history of wildfires. Like every year. Plus learning from the lessons from Hawaii and other places. This should have been on every elected officials radar given how frequently that area incurs fires. Making sure you have infrastructure, basic traffic management, the correct personnel, etc., isn't asking them to be clairvoyant. Its asking them to be competent.
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Again, define correctly. What does basic traffic management mean in the middle of a firestorm? What infrastructure, where, when? What are the national standards for infrastructure during events like this. What level of public safety personnel should any local government carry to protect against black swan events? Why wasn't WNC prepared for the inevitable catastrophic hurricane.

You're just saying words...after the fact...because you have slightly more information than officials did before this happened. There may certainly be areas for improvement, there always are...everywhere. Simply launching hindsight aided blame bombs just reeks of politization of an extraordinary event.
 
BoonetheAiredale said:
Again, define correctly. What does basic traffic management mean in the middle of a firestorm? What infrastructure, where, when? What are the national standards for infrastructure during events like this. What level of public safety personnel should any local government carry to protect against black swan events? Why wasn't WNC prepared for the inevitable catastrophic hurricane.

You're just saying words...after the fact...because you have slightly more information than officials did before this happened. There may certainly be areas for improvement, there always are...everywhere. Simply launching hindsight aided blame bombs just reeks of politization of an extraordinary event.
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www.nationalgeographic.com

Here's what really caused L.A. fire hydrants to run out of water

As unprecedented wildfires raged through Los Angeles, some firefighters suddenly lost access to water. City officials called one shortage a “worst-case scenario”—one they expect to see again in the future.
www.nationalgeographic.com www.nationalgeographic.com

“It was like a worst-case scenario, but I think we should be planning for those worst case scenarios,” she said. “You can't predict everything, but also, I do think this is where we're headed.”

Competent leadership has a plan for how to manage evacuations. I don't know what basic traffic management would be in PP but there should have been a plan for how traffic was going to be dealt with. You can't just say "Leave now" without knowing people will be leaving by car and the traffic problems that will create. This is CA. Where Malibu burns almost every other year it seems like. This is like a hurricane in the south. One would expect LA to have a comprehensive plan for dealing with wildfires just as you would expect FL to have a plan for dealing with a hurricane. Running out of water is mind blowing. Apparently Gavin thinks so to because he has used this event to call for an independent review. Wonder why so quick to announce it? Nothing political there to see.
 
Calheel said:
Most of the looting is usually houses, not stores, and often they are houses that did not burn down. The looters know homeowners likely evacuated and police will not have time for calls.
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I get that. With that in mind, I almost died in a fire (spent 10 days in the Jaycee burn unit) and my neighbor’s house burned down in a separate fire while I watched, across the street, as the fire got close enough to our house to melt the windows.

There is nothing in this world like watching fire consume things.

You get a pass from me if you steal a few things when coming to grips with its raw power.

Not with the law if you get caught, mind you, but yeah.
 
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