Life-threatening' windstorm fans fires in Southern Calaifornia as blazes burn in Los Angeles

Sounds like "let's not question things and let's wait until we get the official government version of the events".

 

Is that what you think you're doing? "Questioning things"?

Haha, ok.

An official government version of the events, along with a government-critical version of the events, would be more illuminating to me. These tweets are mostly noise.

 

good article. gift link will work for everyone

L.A. Fires Show Limits of America’s Efforts to Cope With Climate Change
California has focused on fortifying communities against wildfires. But with growing threats, that may not be enough.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/...e_code=1.oE4.yiIy.i3_MqDBtxWiu&smid=url-share

excerpt:

Perhaps the most aggressive type of adaptation is simply being honest. Officials should start telling people in dangerous areas that their homes can’t be protected, according to Michele Steinberg, the wildfire division director with the National Fire Protection Association.

She cited the example of Hollywood Hills, which was built up a century ago without wildfires in mind, and has been threatened by the Sunset fire. “It’s not a place that I would ever develop homes,” Ms. Steinberg said. “It’s not safe.”

It may be necessary to tell homeowners in the Hollywood Hills, where the median sales price was $1.8 million in November, that the wildfire risk is so great, they may not be able to protect their properties, Ms. Steinberg said.

“Elected officials, the fire service, the insurance industry, needs to let folks know,” Ms. Steinberg said. “You say, ‘There’s not a way — in a major event, in a very extreme wildfire — that we can do anything for you. You just need to know that.’”
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more at the link

 

link will work for everyone

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/califor...5?st=58qkmc&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

California’s Climate Time for Choosing
Sacramento tilts at reducing temperatures while its cities burn from failure to adapt to a variable climate.
By The Editorial Board
Jan. 10, 2025 at 5:43 pm ET

The Los Angeles wildfires are awful to behold, and perhaps they are bad enough to cause some rethinking by California’s political class. Instead of trying like Don Quixote to change the climate, they could spend their money on mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change.

Democrats blame the L.A. blazes on the changing climate, which is a convenient excuse as citizens rage against the failures of state and local government. The evidence doesn’t support the climate explanation since (among other reasons) California has had a dry climate and Santa Ana winds, even with hurricane-force gusts on occasion, for centuries. If the Democrats who run the state believe their own advertising, why not spend money in useful ways rather on a green-energy transition to nowhere?

***
Start with water, which has become a political flashpoint after fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods ran dry. Donald Trump in particular is blaming Gov. Gavin Newsom for scrapping his first-term plan to ease fish protections to let more water flow from the north to farmers and cities in Southern California. He’s half right.

Mr. Trump has a point that Democrats in Sacramento have badly mismanaged water. The state never has enough to go around because much of the Sierra Nevada snowpack—one of the state’s largest natural reservoirs—gets flushed out to the Pacific Ocean rather than stored for dry years.

Farmers received only 50% of their allocation this past year despite two wet winters. Mr. Trump is right that the species protections he cited are largely to blame, and Democrats refuse to take on the environmental lobby.

But increasing water flows from northern California wouldn’t have helped firefighters in L.A. since the problem there was an overwhelmed local water system.

The region’s water infrastructure was built more than a century ago to fight house fires, not conflagrations like this week’s. Water tanks were filled to capacity before the fires, but three that supplied the Palisades were quickly tapped out. Huge demand caused a loss of pressure, which made it harder to pump water uphill to refill the tanks.

As a result, firefighters had to rely on massive tanker trucks—powered by good ol’ diesel fuel—to deliver hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. A nearby reservoir that was undergoing repairs might have helped maintain pressure somewhat longer had it been full. It’s also possible larger pipes and tanks could have helped firefighters at the margin.

But renovating the water system to bolster its firefighting capacity is costly. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the local municipal utility, is struggling merely to maintain its sprawling system. Its 7,337 miles of pipes on average are more than 60 years old. Most older water systems in California also aren’t equipped to fight wildfires.

If fires are going to be more common, then overhauling water systems will be essential. But governments have limited resources and need to set priorities. And California’s politicians—state and local—prefer to spend money on income transfers and green subsidies that buy votes rather than infrastructure that pays off in the future.

Democrats have in particular given priority to reducing CO2 emissions over mitigating the effects of a variable climate. The state’s renewable-energy mandates have forced Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to spend heavily on wind, solar and battery power, at the expense of upgrading its aging power lines that have sparked some of the state’s most catastrophic fires.

Mr. Newsom has lately increased spending for wildfire mitigation, including tree thinning, though it may be too little, too late to prevent new and raging fires. Given the hurricane-force gusts, it’s hard to know whether more fire breaks and brush clearing might have reduced the damage from the Los Angeles fires. Even so, the state spends more on “fighting” climate change than preparing for it.

The Governor’s budget last year included $2.6 billion for “forest and wildfire resilience”—far less than the $14.7 billion provisioned for zero-emission vehicles and its “clean energy” transition. California’s $100 billion bullet train and offshore wind turbines will do nothing to prevent fires or protect communities. Rooftop solar subsidies are no consolation for people who lose their homes.

***
More broadly, nothing California does to subsidize EVs or punish fossil fuels will have any effect on global temperature. Its CO2 emission reductions are dwarfed by increases elsewhere, including emissions from fires. Their climate policies are pure political virtue signaling to please the climate lobby.

But the state can do more to mitigate the harm from future fires and better use its natural water supply to cope with dry years. It’s time for Democrats to choose which is more important: Their climate obsessions or citizens.

Appeared in the January 11, 2025, print edition as 'California’s Climate Time for Choosing'.


​

 

Your biased and uninformed opinion just tells me how ridiculously petty and sickening MAGA folks can be whenever a national disaster occurs. Circumstances are irrelevant if you can find someone to point fingers at instead of understanding why the fires spread so rapidly in 70-100 mile winds on hillsides and drought ridden areas. I can see why people like you believe the words of a pathological lying fraud and con as your new Presidential choice.

As for having nothing to do with sexual orientation, that's exactly what AOM's post was about.

 

The leftists in charge will keep turning against each other, and the woke mob here will be confused as to whom to support.

 

If you think about it … really think about it … this lesbo is an old white person … who is into sexy time with women … so not really that big of difference between her and some old white dude … except she has a strap on instead of a d*ck.

 

White conservative dudes can preside over god damn 9/11 and be re-elected and here we are today where whenever something goes wrong and a person that isn't a white male is in charge we suddenly have to tolerate neo-nazi talking points about how colored women are deserving of their positions in society.

Just so you know, I'd jab everyone here in the nose who starts rambling about women fire chiefs being why there are fires in LA in person. Just a light jab and me saying "nope, you don't have the freedom of speech in front of my physical presence if you decide to go on your Nazi rants". I'd assume that would shut the mouths of 90% of the beer belly 50 year old sedentary divorce dads here and understand their place. And no, no one here is capable of shaming me into recanting this.

 

Predictable.

 

lol. that didn't take long. heads will roll

 

What a horrible moment for those that hate DEI and also hate Democratic leadership.

It proves that Democratic leadership will hold those accountable who mishandle their job regardless of minority status and sexual orientation. They aren't Woke.

Or Democratic leadership is petty lashes out at anyone that won't tow the party line. Horrible day for those folks.

 

actually it's pretty damn sad that the mayor is so weak she would think it appropriate to terminate the fire chief right smack in the middle of a catastrophe. Hard to know who has worse judgment: the insubordinate fire chief who thought it was somehow appropriate to complain publicly about her boss on television, or the mayor who has so rapidly lost control of the situation she thinks firing the chief is somehow the right move. What a circus.

 

Yes that mayor is a clown for doing this and it ain't because she's not a white male.

 

MEXICO is sending fire department crews to fight the Eaton fire.

Help from FDNY was rejected.

 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/la-mayor-karen-bass-budget-wildfires

L.A.’s Total Leadership Failure
The city slashed fire and other basic services after Mayor Karen Bass awarded fat contracts to government workers.
Jan 10 2025
Steven Malanga

 The devastating wildfires in Los Angeles have spotlighted questionable state and local government policies in California that may have contributed to the blazes and left areas like Hollywood vulnerable due to insufficient firefighting resources. Mayor Karen Bass’s budget cuts to the city’s fire department, enacted just months ago amid warnings about the city’s deteriorating finances, stand out as a striking example of misplaced priorities. The cuts stemmed from a budget crisis triggered by her administration’s decision to reward city employees with rich contracts and benefits—even as it dismissed worries that the reductions would hurt services. “Predictions that city services will be impossible to deliver,” deputy mayor Zach Seidl told the press, “are simply false.” Few public statements have aged as poorly—or as hauntingly—as this one.

Bass took office in December 2022 after a surprisingly close race against real estate developer Rick Caruso, a Republican who had switched to the Democratic Party. A Los Angeles Times poll showed that Caruso did well among voters viewing the economy and public safety as key issues; Bass dominated among voters who prioritized climate change and “coalition building.” Shortly after taking office, Bass began negotiating with public sector unions over expiring contracts. Early last year, those talks resulted in more than two dozen agreements with unions representing the city’s civilian employees, guaranteeing wage hikes of between 20 percent and 25 percent over five years. The contracts raised the minimum wage for city employees from $20 to $25 per hour and also contained rich benefits, including allowing workers to cash in 100 percent of their unused sick time when they retire—an increasingly rare perk in the private sector. An analysis by the city’s administrative officer said the deal would cost Los Angeles $3.5 billion over the life of the contracts. A similar multiyear deal with police unions was projected to add another $1 billion to costs.

The new contracts were the largest, in percentage terms, given to city employees since 2007, when then-mayor Antonio Villaraigosa delivered pay raises amounting to 25 percent over five years. Coming just before the 2008 Wall Street crisis crashed the economy, those contracts helped to blow a huge hole in Los Angeles’s budget—leading to the elimination of thousands of jobs and shrinking investment in basic services. Critics warned that something similar might occur following the 2024 contracts, which could drain the city’s fiscal reserves.

It took just months for those fears to materialize. This time it wasn’t a Wall Street meltdown that busted the budget but a series of unanticipated expenses related to judgments against the city in personal-injury negligence cases arising from dangerous conditions, such as broken sidewalks and inadequate streetlighting, as well as judgments against the police. Under normal circumstances, Los Angeles should have been able to absorb those costs, but its reserves had dropped below acceptable levels, and paying the liability cases without additional revenues or budget cuts would have been enough to force the city council to declare a fiscal emergency. In response, Bass cut the city’s budget to $12.9 billion, down from $13.1 billion the previous year. This involved making reductions in some 20 areas, including a cut of $17.6 million in the fire department—the steepest decline in any area except street services, where Bass reduced spending by $21 million.

“The city is living beyond its means,” the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times notedat the time, adding that the problem was “self-inflicted.” For Angelenos hoping the city would invest in infrastructure—“smoothing busted sidewalks, fixing burned-out streetlights, trimming trees, or any other public improvements”—those hopes seemed unlikely to be realized. Critics also faulted the administration for how it handled union negotiations that led to the budget-busting contracts. Most of the talks were conducted in secret, with little public discussion of the costly perks included in the agreements until they were finalized.

California’s latest bout of horrific fires will reopen debate about the state government’s failures to address a deadly problem. California’s decades-long resistance to boosting its water-storage capacity—what Victor Davis Hanson has described as “the scorching of California”—will face new scrutiny. The state’s land-management practices, which incoming President Trump has already criticized, will provoke more controversy. Los Angeles’s water-management system, lambasted by former mayoral candidate Caruso—formerly a commissioner of the city’s Department of Water and Power—for running dry in some neighborhoods during the current fires, will require new investment. Questions will linger, too, over how much difference the $17.6 million cut by Mayor Bass from the city’s fire department might have made.

What is beyond dispute is that Los Angeles and the surrounding area have a long history of wildfires, including in recent years. That threat didn’t seem to be much of a priority in Karen Bass’s budget.

Steven Malanga is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and City Journal’s senior editor.

​

 

Agreed, but seeing reports she might not have been fired (although she was expecting to be):

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...rowley-fired-mayor-karen-bass-humiliated.html