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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

From Fires to Progressive Politics, Disasters Ravage California

Fire prevention or Trump-proofing, which was more important? 

By | Jan 13, 2025 | Articles, Opinion, Politics

 From Fires to Progressive Politics, Disasters Ravage California

As strong winds return, fires continue to ravage Los Angeles County. They’ve displaced tens of thousands of people, damaged roughly 12,000 structures, and ravaged nearly 40,000 acres. Twenty-four people have died as of Sunday, January 12. The situation is dire and shows no sign of ending anytime soon. But could it have been prevented – or, at least, handled less disastrously?

Fires, Malfeasance, and Other Disasters

The Fourth Estate wants Americans to believe “climate change” is to blame and that there was nothing anybody could have done to prevent the fires from happening. Meanwhile, new information floods the internet daily, showing Americans what those in charge of California have prioritized in recent years. Wildfires should have been at the top of the list. Instead, the Golden State’s leaders have slashed funding to key programs, diverted water to protect fish, shipped firefighting equipment to Ukraine, ramped up “green policies,” and focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). A trail of remiss acts stretching back years shows a picture Californians will never forget. Was this an unmitigable disaster, or did California Governor Gavin Newsom’s negligence cost lives and homes?

On his first day in office, Newsom signed an extensive executive order to change California’s approach to wildfire prevention. “Everybody has had enough,” he said before cameras, surrounded by emergency responders. He budgeted an extra $305 million for fire prevention and preparedness, even promising more trucks and aircraft for firefighters and better mental health care. But what he said he would do and what he then did were vastly different.

In 2021, Capital Public Radio (CapRadio), California’s National Public Radio, did a joint investigation with NPR’s California Newsroom and discovered Newsom had “misrepresented his accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention.” He inflated “the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities.” He didn’t just exaggerate a little, though. Newsom overstated the acreage by a whopping 690%. His executive order called for 35 “priority projects” for fire prevention meant to cover 90,000 acres, of which, two years later, only 11,399 had been treated.

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It’s News, Captain – But Different!

In 2020, one year before the investigation and one year after Newsom took office, 4.3 million acres burned in California. “[D]ata obtained by CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom show Cal Fire’s [Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention] fuel reduction output dropped by half in 2020, to levels below Gov. Jerry Brown’s final year in office. At the same time, Newsom slashed roughly $150 million from Cal Fire’s wildfire prevention budget.”

The governor reportedly also cut more than $100 million in June from seven wildfire and forest resilience programs. He vehemently denies this and has even started a new website, californiafirefacts.com, to counter the assertion and other “misinformation.” The site seems to serve as a way for him to defend himself without being challenged. At the top of the homepage is an X post from Fox News that points out his budget cuts. Below it, the site claims Cal Fire’s budget has doubled since 2019 but offers no evidence to prove it.

Mayor Bass and the LAFD

A few months ago, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass eliminated $17.6 million from the fire department’s funding for the 2024-25 fiscal year. Some news outlets have reported that, compared to the last fire budget, this year’s had actually increased by about $50 million. What they are referring to is the $53 million Bass approved in November to raise salaries. How much has that helped in the last week? Not much, apparently, considering Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) Chief Kristin Crowley has been sending warning memos to the fire commission for months, claiming the department was “underfunded, understaffed, and under-resourced.” In an interview with KTTV of Los Angeles, a West Coast flagship of Fox News, Chief Crowley said the city has fewer fire stations than it did in 1960 despite its population doubling. Since 2010, she said, LAFD’s call rate has doubled, yet it has 68 fewer firefighters than it did then.

The following is an excerpt from a memo Chief Crowley sent to the Board of Fire Commissioners on December 4, 2024:

“The Los Angeles City Fire Department (LAFD) is facing unprecedented operational challenges due to the elimination of critical civilian positions and a $7 million reduction in Overtime Variable Staffing Hours (V-Hours). These budgetary reductions have adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations, such as technology and communication infrastructure, payroll processing, training, fire prevention, and community education. … In addition to these impacts, the reduction in v-hours has severely limited the Department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires, earthquakes, hazardous material incidents, and large public events. Specialized programs and resources, such as Air Operations, Tactical EMS Units, Disaster Response, and Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT), which rely heavily on v-hours, are now at risk of reduced effectiveness.”

All this talk about funding is just one small aspect of the catastrophe demolishing Southern California right now. The state’s water infrastructure is already under immense scrutiny. It apparently couldn’t handle the high demand, and countless fire hydrants went dry mid-week in some of the worst-hit communities. It didn’t help that a large reservoir near the Palisades was offline and empty when the fires turned more aggressive. “The state has dealt with water scarcity issues for years,” explained the Daily Caller, “and it has not built a new major reservoir since 1979 despite major population growth over the same period of time.”

And the list goes on. The state’s progressive bureaucrats will blame climate change and hope to ignore their own disastrous forest management and neglect of the water infrastructure in favor of “green” initiatives and counterproductive DEI programs. There’s no denying the city was unprepared. Maybe instead of trying to “Trump-proof” the Golden State – as California assemblyman Bill Essayli put it in the Los Angeles Daily News – Newsom should’ve focused on fireproofing it.

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Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

Read More From Corey Smith National Correspondent

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