Comments
ACCORDING TO LIZ - The winds were wonderful for surfing off Santa Monica that Tuesday.
Until they became devastatingly dangerous when wildfires started to devour the nearby Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles.
It has now been over a month since flames first engulfed huge portions of Los Angeles County bringing tragedy and heroism.
But it was not an act of God; it was not an accident. Too many of its antecedents had deep roots in poor decision-making.
Not by protecting fish, or being in Africa at the point the Los Angeles fires blew up, but in governments everywhere allowing the fossil fuel industry to accelerate global warming despite the fact that even their own scientists saw the writing on the wall.
Governor Newsom needs to put a Climate Superfund law for California front and center on his agenda, emulating those passed in New York and Vermont.
Leveling substantial damage deposits on fossil fuel companies’ every activity to pre-pay for the inevitable climate and environmental devastation, ones that will ensure that all operations function sustainably, maintain equipment and avoid polluting at every level, must be made mandatory. They can no longer be allowed to rely on industry-accepted practice where shell corporations are folded leaving taxpayers to pick up almost the entire cost.
The tragedy also lies in laggard City funding for infrastructure expansion and upgrades at a time when its population (and tax-base) was growing by leaps and bounds. Then in cutting funds for emergency management and safety during the Great Recession and again in the Covid years.
But what Angelenos should be doing is celebrating is how effectively the Emergency Management Department and the Los Angeles Fire Department have functioned and continued to function in the face of these challenges.
That in a City with a population greater than twenty-two American states and over a hundred countries, plans were in place and resources existed to allow for swift and orderly evacuations from neighborhoods cut into the foothills, and the ingress of emergency responders.
That even with our narrow winding canyons that channeled the Santa Anas and magnified the ferocity of the flames, procedures saved lives and pets, if not property.
That individuals opened their hearts and homes to the dispossessed, that restaurants and food trucks partnered with organizations providing financial support including World Central Kitchen offering sustenance and refuge to firefighters, first responders, and evacuees.
That these fires posed hugely more severe threats than the one that devastated Paradise in 2018, and yet resulted in far fewer deaths.
That, although the physical losses will be astronomical – in large part due to the explosive growth of property values in Los Angeles, the City's location and economic value will almost certainly mean greater resilience in the future with structures rebuilt to stricter codes protecting people against future disaster.
There has been appalling commentary from those outside California shocking Angelenos, much derived from the Felon-in-Chief's ravings and amplified by Fox News talking heads along with right-wing rabble-rousers on X and (un)Truth Social.
In addition to pontificators’ after-the-fact quarterbacking, too often what gets reported are the individual dramas such as the feel-good story from the New York Times glorifying those protecting their Topanga Canyon homes to glue eyeballs to advertising instead of the big picture.
The evolving success in the face of the curveballs thrown by topography, Santa Anas, and climate change.
Biden demonstrated true leadership in the waning days of his administration by immediately releasing federal funds and resources. Trump-targeted Canada and Mexico both sent help.
We need leaders who both learn from the past and lead the charge for constructive change. Moving forward, we need tolerance and understanding. The divisiveness, hate rhetoric, and greed of an instant-gratification government will not help anyone as fires burn, polar ice caps melt, and seas rise.
Lies and misrepresentations, chaos and blatant favoritism, tech billionaires stirring up pseudo-populist narratives. None of these bode well for our immediate future.
It’s impossible to run a government like a business. The goal for the former is quality of life; for the latter profit; the two are antithetical.
Putting Musk’s cronies in charge might save pennies on paper but would they save lives?
Disregard for a balanced ecosystem has historically and continuously come at the expense of middle and working-class neighborhoods in Los Angeles making them more vulnerable to preventable fires, further magnified by combustible chaparral, extremely dry air and 100 mph wind speeds exacerbated by a war economy-driven climate crisis.
Trajectories of any budget are not altered overnight. Decades of mismanagement and infrastructure neglect cannot pivot on a dime. It will take time to pare away
Councilmember pork and reprioritize investment in safety.
Due to a host of recent disasters, the City’s Emergency Management Department demanded, and had in place, the ability to release emergency funding immediately to bridge the time until state and federal relief could arrive.
Given the shakiness of Sacramento finances and the political quid-pro-quo cesspool in the aftermath of the new administration in D.C., this needs to be much more as previously requested by the department and as encouraged by the Budget Advocates.
This time, with the fires raging far from the downtown core of L.A., the City Council had the ability to meet and release more money. This time there was no earthquake or infrastructure-destroying act of terrorism to preclude their meeting.
Next time that may not be the case.
Talking heads on TV exaggerate to sell advertising, claiming tens of thousands of homes lost in the initial days but weeks later the firefighters in the field say under 9,500 structures – everything from houses to detached garages and chicken coops – were destroyed in the Eaton fire, 1,200 in the Palisades, and a smattering elsewhere.
Emotionally, the impact is grievous. There is the betrayal by looters and the unfactual prognostications and blame-shaming that fills too much of the 'news' especially that generated from outside of California.
As Bob Gelfand, scientist and CityWatch writer, so powerfully put it:
“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.”
Winds have no feelings. They only blow.
It is humans that assign them malevolence or celebrate their return to sweep away torpid heat.
It is politicians who sway between the demands of lobbyists and constituents.
But the canyons above Altadena and the Palisades and north near Castaic still reek of smoke while the continued threat of wind-fanned flames still menace southern California.
(Liz Amsden, former Angeleno now resides in Vermont and is a regular contributor to CityWatch on issues that she is passionate about. She can be reached at [email protected].)
