The LA wildfires are now becoming old news, despite the fact that they are still active and, in some cases, still expanding.  While the winds have calmed to some extent, they are expected to come back before the weekend is over.  We may have grown accustomed to the nightmare, but the nightmare continues.  As extremely damning reporting and commentary stacks up it is having less and less impact.  As the fires grow so does the jurisdictional responsibility until eventually all this will end up with a bunch of agencies pointing fingers at each other effectively maintaining the status quo – exactly the opposite of what needs to happen if anything is going to get any better.  But then there is a reason Southern California has descended into the dystopian, now literal, hellscape.

I have a huge pile of reporting and commentary this morning.  I am going to try and organize its presentation in a fashion that will permit us all to not lose sight of the forest for the trees.  It’s not just about brush clearance.  It’s not just about water policy.  It’s not just about fickle elected officials.  It is a large jigsaw puzzle of policies and jurisdictions, municipalities, counties and mindsets combined.  Let’s start with

SCALE

Los Angeles is unique among very large cities; it sprawls like no other.  When I first moved there in the early 1980’s it was described as “countless suburbs in search of a singular identity.”  The cleanest discernable boundaries are between LA County and neighboring Ventura, San Bernardino and Orange counties.  There is a City of Los Angeles within Los Angeles County, but it is an amorphous blob, containing other municipalities within its confines, squeezing narrowly between others, and competing with the county and some of those other municipalities for regional dominance.  Visitors never really know when they leave LA and enter Burbank (or Glendale or Pasadena or….)  Nor do they know what is a neighborhood (Van Nuys or Hollywood) and what is an actual city (Beverly Hills.)

So, while we think of the multiple fires ravaging the area as the “LA fires” they aren’t, really – they encompass an extremely large, governmentally complex region.  The Palisades Fire, currently at 21,500 acres and growing, is largely within the City of Los Angeles.  The other very large fire, the Eaton fire at 14,100 acres and growing, is in multiple municipalities (Pasadena, La Canadã-Flintridge) and named-but-unincorporated neighborhoods within LA County (Altadena.)  And so it goes.

Which brings me to this fascinating piece graphically comparing the size of the Palisades fire to other major cities in the country.  They are, in fact comparing apples and apples – cities to cities – creating a devastating picture (For example the Palisades fire area, at 1pm yesterday California time, had already consumed more territory than is occupied by the entire city of Miami, FL.) but LA has to really be considered as a region.  And that is where the dissembling will begin.  The problems that created this catastrophe are regional, but with no single regional authority, and each of the smaller partial authorities able to point the finger at someone else, any effort to fix this is likely to end up as a colorful phrase once uttered by Clint Eastwood.

Jurisdictional Nightmares

Much is being made of the bureaucracy and red tape that has led to this situation, but we need to bear in mind a huge part of the problem is not just that “the government” has erected a huge bureaucracy.  It is that multiple governments, with overlapping jurisdictions, at least in some areas of governance, have created countless bureaucracies – each which must be satisfied and none of which are willing to cooperate with each other fully.

Simply as one example.  Decades ago, Pete Wilson laid out an initiative called “CUPA” – Certified Unified Program Agency.  The idea was to cut down on red tape and identify a lead agency in any area to handle the specific regulated topics for all agencies that had a stake.  The idea was to help a business that had to file the same basic information and reports to multiple agencies to only file it once and then the agencies would bear the burden of sharing.  Well, here we are decades later, and now the filings are made on a state-run internet database, but reviewed and approved, or not, by multiple agencies.  The filer often does not know, unless they are a highly trained specialist (such as me) which agency is making what comment and to who they must respond.  They are also inspected physically by multiple agencies based on the same filing, one inspection finding no issue but another giving quite contradictory rulings.  It’s infuriating.

Here are a couple of articles about multiple agency issues related to brush clearance policy:

• Bureaucracy, Red Tape, and a Failed Gavin Newsom Project: Why California Moved Slowly in Wildfire Prevention
• California’s ‘Impenetrable’ Environmental Bureaucracy Left L.A. Hills Primed to Burn

And one on how water delivery jurisdictions and the lack of cooperation between them that lead to dry hydrants:

• Biden claim about empty hydrants undermined by LA water utility’s lack of common wildfire safety protocol

Looting

Los Angeles County just threw out, ejected, puked up, soundly defeated its very liberal, very light on crime prosecutor.  But his tenure has set a tone that will take years to undo.  Thus you see stories like this:

• 20 looters arrested for raiding homes amid L.A. wildfires
• LA Descends Into Chaos as Looters Exploit Wildfires
• Nat’l Guard hits ground in LA, curfew enacted to try to help curb ‘despicable’ looting after fires

L.A. can be its own worst enemy.  This situation is also grossly exacerbated by the fact that if one were allowed near their seared property to defend it they would not be allowed to do so – it is, after all, illegal to discharge a firearm in Los Angeles County save under very, very limited circumstances.  And breathless reporting on ammo going off in the fire is quite likely to make the restrictions worse, not better.

Politics

Let the games begin.  DEI is huge in LA.  Disney, chief amongst those shoving DEI down America’s entertainment throat is there and they are, in the end, simply reflecting this milieu.  That said – this is utterly contemptible.  It’s a video promoting and praising diversity in the LAFD.  They interview a female assistant chief who, paraphrasing, poses the hypothetical “Can a female carry a male out of a burning building?” and responds with “Well, the guy got himself in the wrong place to begin with.”  I am not taking any liberties with the paraphrase here, follow the link – just have your blood pressure medication at hand.

Here is another piece lambasting LA Mayor Karen Bass for cutting the fire budget, amongst her many other leadership sins – we covered it Thursday.  Those budgetary cuts become even more angering when you consider what is left of the budget is spent to hire people that cannot do the job and then blame the victim. (See preceding paragraph.)

And Mayor Bass is not alone.  “Gov. Newsom cut fire budget by $100M months before lethal California fires.”  And how does Newsom respond?  “While California Burns, Gavin Newsom Begs Biden To Silence ‘Disinformation’.”  I s*&^ you not.  This situation is so bad that even the California-typical circular blame game may not suffice, and Newsom knows it.  So he takes a play right out of the communist totalitarian playbook and calls for the “control of information.”  I’d say he ought to be recalled but that did not work out so well the last time California tried it.  It is no secret I have held Newsom in enormous distaste for a long time now.  His actions in the pandemic were unconstitutional (SCOTUS did sit him down forcefully at least once on restricting churches) and ugly – but this is contemptable.

In Other News

The LA region fires have consumed this blog and the show this past week – justifiably so.  But other things have been happening.  Here’s just a couple of stories worth considering.

One of the ways California got into this mess is listening to malcontents.  People who just can’t get over it.  Consider this story:

A new plastics plant in Pennsylvania that had promised to be an economic boon is turning into a nightmare for local residents as it spews toxic chemicals into the air and water, The Guardian reported.

I had been saving this for a full analysis and there is no space for that in this already way-too-lengthy post, but I can assure you that in modern-day American this plant meets the standards for discharge into the air and water – the regulatory processes, even outside of California, are such that you can rest assured.  But within standards does not mean there will never be odors or other unpleasantries.  You see, toxicity is not just a matter of the presence of a toxic material, but how much, how long the exposure is and the pathway of that exposure.  Not to mention there are a lot of things in this world that smell awful but are not toxic.  I am sorry for these people’s discomfort, but spare me the cries of “deadly toxins.”

Finally, think about this – “17 Modern-Day Societal Trends We’re All Experiencing That Are Actually Seriously Concerning.”