Trump Vows to Conquer California’s Negligence Spawned Infernos

The same fire that ravaged Malibu in 2018 was just a mere warm-up for the destruction that followed, with over 1 million acres burned to date.

Trump's Direct Actions

President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump swept into Los Angeles Friday, touring by air the former community of Pacific Palisades which looks like a war zone after days of saturation bombing.  

In his meeting with state officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass, Southern California’s Congressional delegation, and local Los Angeles officials, Trump: 

• Declared a federal state of emergency, allowing him to waive any federal permits preventing an immediate start to rebuilding and demanded local officials do the same; 
• Demanded that residents must be able to get to work on their lots within 24 hours, not a week as proposed by Mayor Bass or the 18 months displaced homeowners told him they had been told; 
• Noted that he would personally override the California Coastal Commission, a nest of environmental cult crazies and “thugs” in the words of former Governor Jerry Brown, which controls all land use in Los Angeles County; 
• Scolded the reliably rabid Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman about the California policies which have left most fire victims without insurance, when Sherman whined about Trump’s obvious intent to tie federal aid to demonstrable and real fire prevention efforts;  
• Lambasted California’s current water management policy, which puts protecting rare species, like the Delta Smelt, ahead of the needs of human beings, noting, sarcastically, that water has been found to be a very efficient means for putting fires out;  
• Announced that he was deeply moved by the plight of the victims, that California is worth saving, and he will put his knowledge of building and permits to work for the recovery;  
• Appointed Ric Grennell, former Ambassador to Germany, former Acting Director of National Intelligence, and long-time California resident to be his personal representative in overseeing California disaster recovery efforts, which he said would now become an Administration priority.

What Caused These Devastating Fires?

Promethean Action activist Pat Ruckert is an expert on all things water management, drought, and fires in California. In his younger days he fought wildfires.

Here is what Pat told us about his latest analysis of the true causes of these fires: 

The warning of what just occurred in Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Altadena, Pasadena, Granada Hills, North San Fernando Valley, Porter Ranch, Lake Balboa, Sepulveda Base, and other Los Angeles environs, was apparent in 2018 as a fire that burned out of control for days destroyed large areas of Malibu, next door to Pacific Palisades. 

The big lie is that current inferno and previous fires were caused by climate change, and that such “natural disasters” are inevitable, and we just have to learn to live with them.

What is not natural is not preparing for such phenomena as hurricanes, floods and fires, and even worse, dismantling the capabilities required to do so, as we have see here. 

There had been almost no precipitation in Southern California for a year. The result is that the chaparral ecosystem, that dominates the plant growth in the hills of Los Angeles, has dried out to the extent that just a spark will unleash an unstoppable fire. 

The annual Santa Ana winds, which have, again, been part of the region for thousands of years, were clocked at 100 miles per hour as these fires ignited. The winds further dried out the brush and drove the fire.  

Thus these fires under these conditions became unstoppable when they were not addressed immediately upon ignition. 

That requires pre-positioning of firefighters, a complete arsenal of fully working fire trucks and equipment, a water system adequate to fighting huge fires, working fire hydrants and fully staffed firefighting forces. 

None of this happened or existed in Los Angeles County when these fires started. 

Firefighters weren’t pre-deployed and they were under-manned. The water system was meant to provide water to homes and businesses, not catastrophic fires.  Hydrants ran dry or didn’t work in the first instance. More than half the fire trucks were out of service.   

A Criminally Negligent Leadership

Chamuth Palihapitiya of the popular All In podcast points out the two big things we know:

• first, these fires were entirely predictable from 2018 forward, and
• second, every effort to address the threat was vetoed for insane environmental reasons by Governor Newsom or the legislature.

The fire budget was also cut by both Newsom and Bass.  That budget itself, as we shall see, did not even contemplate building a firefighting water infrastructure sufficient to fight large wildfires despite years of warnings that this was a public safety necessity. 

A week before these fires broke out, the Weather Service warned repeatedly that there was an imminent extreme fire risk. 

Yet, Mayor Karen Bass took off on a junket to Ghana, 7,000 miles from LA. The state legislature was focused on allocating over $50 million to “fight Trump” through lawsuits and to aid illegal aliens avoiding deportation.   

The hydrants went dry and the reservoirs could not be refilled because urban water systems are not designed to fight massive fires. They service homes and businesses. To handle multiple catastrophic fires which have been predictable in this area for years, you need new water infrastructure capable of meeting this need. These investments were blocked by environmentalists. 

President Trump is right to blame Gavin Newsom and California’s environmental fanatics for the lack of water to fight the fires, based in part on the state not sending water south from the San Francisco Bay Delta in order to save the virtually non-existent Delta Smelt.  But the problem goes even deeper. 

California has the largest and most complex water management system in the world. Major projects, like the Central Valley Project, built by President Roosevelt in the 1930s and the California State Water Project, built by Governor Pat Brown in partnership with President John Kennedy in the 1960s created the first completely integrated water management system encompassing all the rivers in a state.

But the State Water Project was completed in 1972. Not one large water project has been built since 1972 but the population served has doubled. 

As a result the state now has what is almost a permanent water crisis, manifesting itself particularly during regularly occurring droughts. In the 2011-2016 drought about 500,000 acres of the most productive agricultural region in the world, the Central Valley, was fallowed. 

Wall Street’s Ethos Feeds Fires  

The parallel irresponsible financialization of the economy has also driven the large number of destructive fires in recent years. The best example of that is the private utility based in northern California, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E). 

For decades that utility had neglected to inspect, repair and maintain its equipment, including the thousands of miles of overhead wires and their connecting hooks and other parts. They chose instead to devote resources to paying shareholder dividends.  

In 2018, a devastating fire erupted covering hundreds of thousands of acres which evaporated the town of Paradise, California.  95 people were killed.  PG&E was found guilty of negligence for causing the fires and the deaths.  The damage verdict, in the billions of dollars, bankrupted the company.  

Antitrust blogger Matt Stoller’s newsletter, Big, points out that over half of LA’s firetrucks were out of service when these fires hit.

Did a Private Equity Fire Truck Roll-Up Worsen the L.A. Fires?

During the LA fires, dozens of fire trucks sat in the boneyard, waiting for repairs the city couldn’t afford. Why? A private equity roll-up made replacing and repairing those trucks much pricier.

Matt Stoller

That’s partially because one private equity firm, American Industrial Partners, has rolled up almost the entire fire-fighting supply chain for engines and equipment. 

Costs for engines and repair parts doubled as a result.

The Emergency Within

As we stand amidst the ruins of California, it's clear that the real crisis is not just the fires themselves, but the failure of leadership to act with courage and foresight.

We've been told that climate change is solely to blame, but the truth is far more complex - and far more sinister. The fire cult's grip on our state's leadership has allowed environmental extremism to masquerade as science, and the consequences are now being felt in plain sight.

It's time to build the water and forest management infrastructure in California which will mitigate these entirely predictable disasters, and tie federal funding to that task by the state.

The stakes have never been higher - and it's time to stop playing by the rules of the environmental fanatics.

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