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GELFAND’S WORLD - Apparently, the best time for a politician to kick a man is when he is down. Or in the present case, to kick a mayor or a fire chief when she is down. My view is a little more complicated, but goes something like this: If we are going to apportion blame or even talk about recalling some elected official, the blame goes as follows:
Every City Council member and mayor for the past 20 years
We can't recall the City Council members who are no longer on the Council, but it would be hard to excuse any current member. The reason for pointing the finger so broadly is that successive City Councils -- with the cooperation of their respective mayors -- have voted to increase city employee salaries year by year, knowing full well that the city would have to cut back on other expenses.
What other expenses would those be? Well, when the current Fire Chief met with a local television reporter just a few days ago, she repeated the complaint about budget cuts and attributed lack of maintenance and repair of broken fire trucks to those cuts. She argued that although there were fire fighters from other cities who arrived in Los Angeles during the first hours of the Palisades fire, the broken trucks were therefore unavailable.
That's a pretty extreme case of bad prioritizing -- and if there is blame it falls as much on the chief as anybody else. Why didn't she move money into truck repair from something less critical?. But there are many other examples that have had their effects. For example, the LAFD has been inadequate in providing training to the civilian volunteers who staff what is known as the Community Emergency Response Teams, or CERT for short. CERT volunteers are trained to respond to emergencies when the fire department and police are too busy, which is to say, right after an earthquake or during an overwhelming fire emergency such as we have been experiencing.
Even though the LAFD invented CERT back in the 1970s and has trained thousands of volunteers, we have been hearing reports that CERT training would not be occurring in the 2025-6 budget year due to funding inadequacies. Where did the money go? You know where.
Readers of CityWatch may also remember that we have also been remarking about the inadequate funding of the Emergency Management Department.
All the little nicks and cuts add up. The successive City Councils have weighed their loyalty to the municipal unions who help them stay elected, and thereby have given up on their responsibility to defend the fiscal and security interests of the city's population.
So if some of you want to point the finger and lay blame, point it where it belongs, which is to say, on every single member of the City Council. And yes, maybe the mayor too, if you want to consider the way funding has been prioritized.
On the other hand, I would not jump on any of the current bandwagons that go simply to partisanship. If Donald Trump wants to use the current tragic circumstances to fight his political fights, there is nothing we can do to counteract his statements other than to point out that they are ignorant of the facts and of science. We already know that Trump is a cheap shot artist, and the California fires have been no exception to this rule.
Making Excuses for Stress
OK, it's been stressful for all concerned. That includes the mayor, the fire chief, and the governor. Each one has been guilty of a faux pas of one kind or another. In order:
The Fire Chief agreed to an interview with a local television reporter and, on camera, told him that city budget cuts had made it impossible to repair fire trucks and ambulances, which therefore took them out of action in the early hours of the Palisades fire. This may or may not have been an accurate portrayal of the situation, but it certainly was an attack on the mayor and her budget at a most difficult moment for the residents and leaders of the city. It would have been (and will be) an appropriate topic in the postmortem phase, which is to say when the fires have been put out. Creating a political battle in the middle of a (literal) firestorm was certainly a political faux pas.
Then, in response, the mayor "summoned the fire chief" to a meeting. Television news showed the Chief accompanied by half a dozen or so of her staff walking down the hallway to the mayor's office at a moment when the fires were ongoing and lives were still being lost. Perhaps the mayor doesn't have all that much to do in terms of orchestrating the response to multiple fires, but we have to assume that the fire chief does. It wasn't until a day later that the mayor and the fire chief appeared together at a press conference and announced that they are "in lockstep" over the fire fight. The whole affair would certainly raise doubts as to the mayor's leadership at a most critical moment.
And finally, we have the governor, who is reported to have complained about being out of the loop and suggesting, at least indirectly, that the City of Los Angeles has been inadequate in the way it prepared for and fought the fire. At a moment when Donald Trump was using the fires to point the finger at Newsom, it makes no sense for Newsom to turn around and point his own finger at Los Angeles.
As to Donald Trump, let's just continue to understand that he doesn't really understand things at any level of competence, and the issue of preventing and fighting forest fires is certainly near the bottom of his list. As pundits love to point out, a large fraction of the forests and mountainsides in California are actually federally operated national forests and national parks.
Where the blame really lies
You'd have to say that it is all of modern civilization.
Anybody with one eye and half a brain has to recognize that fires are different from the way they used to be. Think about the Woolsey fire, which began up around the 101 in the area far to the north of the coast. And then it moved at astonishing speed, all the way to the coastline, in just a few hours. Now, just a few years later, we watched as gale force winds pushed the developing Palisades fire alongside and then into housing developments that would not ordinarily have burned a couple of decades ago. The television coverage I watched in the early hours showed dense showers of sparks that were akin to the output of a blow torch, except broken into individual flaming chunks.
And this effect was not localized to any one place, but was a general condition, as the survivors of the Altadena fire have been describing. We hear the witnesses talking about the flaming cinders and we see the resulting loss of square miles of what once contained houses.
Something is different, and it can only be climate change. It is not so much that things are chronically warmer or chronically dryer. It's that things are more variable and more extreme, so that one year we get more rain than we've had in decades, and then the torrents turn into a prolonged drought, and then we get nearly a week of heavy Santa Ana winds. The heavy rains fed the growth of hillside plants, and then the drought turned them into fuel for the next fire, and then the Santa Ana turned our hillsides into something akin to a furnace for making steel. But instead of iron ore, we fed the flames our homes.
This is not merely the result of failing to rake leaves off forest floors or some minor failure to administer reservoir repairs properly. There may be some small contribution in terms of the failure to get one reservoir repaired, but the rest of the Trumpian nonsense is just that. Trump can yammer on with his cheap shots, but serious people should point out that this is what he is doing.
Reporters should be asking Trump, "Now do you accept the fact of global warming?"
Political threats, extortion, and a possible solution
At least one Republican in the congress has suggested limits on relief funding for California. He offered some nonsensical excuses, but it really came down to political differences. Note that the Democratic delegation from California has not been offering similar threats about the recent hurricane damage.
So here is one possible approach. There are 9 California Republicans in the House of Representatives. Reporters should be contacting each one of them -- start with Young Kim, for example -- and ask whether they will go to bat for burned out homeowners in this region. Keep asking. The Democrats should be making it clear that the response will come up in the next election, which is only 22 months from now.
The failure to bring the public into the discussions
Over the years, we on CityWatch have reminded you that the city government isn't very good at communicating with us residents. Yes, we have neighborhood councils, but when I have asked about evacuation plans, the response has generally been pretty thin. (There was one distinct exception, where the LAFD put on a public workshop which included evacuation planning and gave us a map -- reproduced here on CityWatch -- of how an evacuation plan would be generated in real time in response to a developing emergency.)
What's missing is any understanding or agreement about how the rest of us residents will be able to contact and work with the authorities in the event of a major disaster such as a large earthquake. Just look at the way the authorities have been treating people who want to drive back to their homes (to find out if they still exist). It has been patronizing to say the least.
Meanwhile, we have recently heard of a proposal to create some kind of expert taskforce (the fire department, police, sheriff, mayor, Emergency Management Department etc) to do the postmortem, once the flames have been put out. This is fine as far as it goes, but once again it ignores the rest of us. How about including neighborhood council representatives including members of the Neighborhood Council Emergency Preparedness Alliance? Wouldn't we all agree that the people of Los Angeles have some right to observe and participate?
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
*Quote attributed to Pope Francis
