Paradise Lost. LA Fires

 

The first job of the government is to keep people safe. 

Failing that, its job is to show that someone is in charge when crisis erupts. On 9/11, there was nothing then–Mayor Rudy Giuliani could do to keep the World Trade Center from falling. Yet he became, in that long-ago era, the most popular person in America by staying on the scene and leading at his city’s moment of greatest danger.

That brings us to the fires in Los Angeles—the most devastating in the history of the city, with a reported 27,000 acres burned and the fires mostly uncontained. There, authorities have failed not only at protecting its residents but at inspiring confidence that they had the situation in hand.

We start with Mayor Karen Bass. As the Palisades fire began to consume wide swaths of America’s second-largest city, she was in Ghana to watch the inauguration of that country’s new president.

Bass left Los Angeles on Saturday—two days after the National Weather Service warned that strong winds and “extreme fire weather conditions” would soon threaten the city. On Sunday, the NWS announced a fire weather watch. By Monday, the warnings had become much more urgent, with the NWS tweeting in all-caps that “A LIFE-THREATENING, DESTRUCTIVE, Widespread Windstorm” would hit L.A. imminently.

Yet Bass remained halfway around the world, effectively leaving the crisis to her deputies. They, in turn, insisted Bass could run the city from anywhere via phone and tablet.

The fires raged. They spread, eventually engulfing the upscale Pacific Palisades. Bass left the glittering entertainment capital of the world—a paradise that, for all its many faults, is arguably one of the nicest places to live on the planet. When she finally returned on Wednesday, much of that paradise had been reduced to rubble.

Since Bass began her long trip back, her responses to reporters’ questions have oscillated between stone-faced silence and stammering, borderline-incoherent answers. Bass couldn’t even tell residents the name of the website where emergency resources could be found—sticking to a script provided by aides, she said it could be found at “URL.” Since her reemergence, she has done nothing to restore public trust.

But this isn’t just about Bass. A great city can survive a bad mayor, or even a series of bad mayors. This is a story about the failure of California to prevent, or capably mitigate, a long-predicted catastrophe, and how a state that was once a model of good governance came to prioritize the boutique concerns of ambitious politicians over the basics of what government must do.

There are always excuses in moments like these, some more valid than others. California is, in a sense, built to burn: Its warm climate and vast woodlands can, and often are, a deadly combination. Any city, regardless of who’s running it, would struggle with winds reaching 100 miles per hour, especially one sitting on a tinderbox of dry vegetation. Climate change exacerbates the issue.

But none of that explains how one of America’s great cities—the biggest in the fifth-largest economy in the world—is burning to the ground. The failure here, at heart, is an entirely human one.

California loves to spend, increasingly moving toward a model of governance where good money constantly chases after bad. Newsom has spent some $22 billion to combat homelessness since he took office and yet, there has been a 3 percent increase in homelessness in the last year. Newsom also made California the first state to have its Medicaid program cover illegal immigrants. This blatant sop to progressive activists is now expected to cost Californians $6.5 billion a year.

Los Angeles has the same problem with nonessential spending, albeit at a smaller scale. The city allocated $1.3 billion to combat homelessness last year, although the city comptroller found that half of that money has gone unspent. The Los Angeles Fire Department got a good deal less than that—$837 million—a budget that has since been cut by $17 million.

Would that $17 million have made a difference? Who knows. Answers are increasingly hard to come by in California. When asked by Anderson Cooper why the fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades had run dry, Newsom responded that “the local folks are trying to figure that out.” The buck always stops somewhere else in the Golden State.

There have been many proposals in recent years to make fighting—and preventing—massive fires easier and more effective in California. Yet for some reason they never go anywhere. California seemingly always has money for expensive Band-Aids and pricey, ineffective NGO grants. But they’ve neglected the basics: crime (the murder rate is up more than 15 percent since Newsom took office); public education (per-pupil spending has gone up under Newsom even as test scores have plummeted); and now firefighting. The Pacific Palisades fire alone has consumed some 17,000 acres as of this writing. The whole island of Manhattan is 14,000 acres.

In 1969, New York mayor John Lindsay—like Newsom, a young and attractive liberal who dreamed of the presidency—saw his political career effectively end when a blizzard dropped 15 inches of snow on the city. Streets went unplowed for days, leaving the city paralyzed. Lindsay’s White House dreams ended then and there, amid heckles from his constituents. He’d lost his focus on the basics.

None of Lindsay’s successors ever let such a weather disaster occur again. Big Apple politicians had learned a lesson. Now it’s the California political class’s turn.

https://www.thefp.com/p/paradise-lost-karen-bass-los-angeles-fires?utm_campaign=email-post&r=rd3ao&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email