Escape from L.A.

The failure of Los Angeles is, at heart, a human one.

Jan 11, 2025

It is hard to fathom. The scope of the devastation is apocalyptic. Pacific Palisades looks like Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. Five other locations have huge gigantic plumes of smoke streaming towards the heavens.

Southern California is a hellscape.

The fires in Los Angeles—the most devastating in the city's history, have scorched a reported 36,000 acres. As of this writing, the inferno is mostly uncontained. Thousands of Californians are discovering that their homes, businesses, and prized possessions have been destroyed. A heroic effort by firefighters, undermanned and underequipped, fighting fierce winds, has proven futile. They are battling the impossible.

The first reaction was panic, then shock, that hopeless feeling that somehow a garden hose would suffice against the Devil’s breath. Next week will be sadness. Sooner than later, there will be anger.

The focus of attention (and blame) is already being firehosed toward local and state government, two elected officials in particular: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Mayor in absentia

Start with Mayor Bass. As the Palisades fire began to consume large 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. By Monday, the warnings had become much more urgent.

Yet Bass remained halfway around the world, effectively leaving the crisis to her deputies. The fires started around 10 a.m. Tuesday, raged and spread, eventually engulfing the upscale Palisades and several other areas. For all its many faults, the suburb just northwest of the city is arguably one of the nicest places on the planet to live. Many of Hollywood’s royals resided there. (That is, used to live there).

When Bass finally returned on Wednesday, much of that paradise had been reduced to rubble. As she deplaned, she was confronted by a journalist who asked her all sorts of uncomfortable questions. She froze … as if hit by a taser, unable to speak for a full 90 seconds. In the following press conferences, Bass appeared like a “dead woman” walking on her way to the gallows.

But this isn’t just about Bass. This is a story about the failure of California to prevent, or capably mitigate, a long-predicted catastrophe, and how a state came to prioritize the boutique concerns of progressive politicians over the basics of what government must do. Of what the government has to do. What it was voted in to do.

California is built to burn. Its warm climate and vast woodlands can and often are a deadly combination. Regardless of who’s running it, any city would struggle with nature with winds reaching 100 miles per hour, especially one sitting on a tinderbox of dry vegetation.

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, at its heart, is an entirely human one.

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, at heart, is an entirely human one.

Infrastructure

California loves to spend, increasingly moving toward a model of governance where good money constantly chases after bad. Governor Gavin Newsom has spent $24 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 bow to progressive activists is now expected to cost Californians $6.5 billion a year.

Infrastructure that could have provided more water for those fires has been on hold, tied up in red tape. Ten years ago, California voters approved Proposition 1, the Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act which allocated $7.2 billion to build water storage and improve state water facilities.

At the end of 2024, not one dam had been finished. Not a single one.

Meantime, the Los Angeles Fire Department got a good deal less than that—$837 million—a budget that has since been cut by $17 million. When asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper why hundreds of fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades had run dry, Newsom responded that “the local folks are trying to figure that out.”

Great answer. A helluva thing to say to people who are losing everything,

In recent years, many proposals have been made to make preventing massive fires easier and more effective in California. Yet, for some reason, they never happen. The state always has money for expensive Band-Aids and pricey, ineffective NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) grants, especially those housing illegal migrants. Clearing brush and undergrowth in the canyons and ridges circumjacent to all construction was tedious and had no P.R. value. Most were either abandoned or ignored.

With all the spending, they’ve neglected the basics. Crime is skyrocketing — the murder rate is up more than 15 percent since Newsom took office. And we’ve all seen the videos of smash-and-grab fiascos and countless displays of shoplifting. In education, spending per pupil has gone up to $23,791 under Newsom even as test scores have plummeted.

And then there’s the 13-digit bullet train to nowhere.

Now firefighting.

Last word

So what is Newsom doing this week, aside from his usual mugging in front of TV cameras? He is gaveling a special legislative session he called immediately after the November election to "protect California values" against the scourge of Donald Trump.

Showily opposing MAGA has been the modus operandi for Newsom and other California politicians, at least until this week.

But there is something about a catastrophe, and a reality check of the government's role in preparing for and mitigating disaster, to prioritize other values.

Like competence.

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