by Susan Crabtree
While the world watches thousands of acres of some of Los Angeles County’s most beautiful landscapes incinerate, a shocked nation asks how this third-world catastrophe could take place in one of the most affluent areas of the country.
Fueled by Santa Ana winds that reached 90 miles per hour in a drought-afflicted region, five separate wildfires raged down from the mountains in populous towns and neighborhoods, destroying thousands of homes and other buildings, taking at least five lives, injuring many more, and leaving a pall of toxic smoke over the Los Angeles basin.
While California citizens experiencing the loss of their homes and loved ones are traumatized by the devastation, many aren’t shocked after years of watching blaze after blaze destroy communities across the state while the governing class fails to take meaningful preventive actions.
Instead, politicians and their followers retreat to ideological corners.
For Democrats, climate change was the go-to talking point. “Eight months since the area has seen rain,” Sen. Bernie Sanders tweeted. “The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax.’ Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is.”
Republicans, starting with the president-elect, instantly identified another culprit: the Democratic Party leaders in this heavily blue state, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom.
But behind these predictable rhetorical excesses and tactical finger-pointing are long-smoldering questions about public policy, ranging from land-use decisions to competent governance. The fires raging across California this week are a perfect storm of years of inept preparation, combined with overzealous environmental and water policies, a failure to rein in monopolistic utilities spreading special-interest money across the state, and a political insurance crisis.
Unusual high-wind conditions and an ultra-arid environment certainly created the conditions for these infernos to spark and rapidly spread. But California has been down this road before, watching whole communities wiped out by these blazes that rip through thousands of acres, leaving charred remains in their path.
In 2018, it was the bucolic town of Paradise in Northern California, when a poorly maintained PG&E utility transmission line failed during strong winds. The entire town was wiped out – 85 people died, and the blaze destroyed 153,000 acres and 18,000 structures.
This week, it was the upscale swath of beachside neighborhoods, stretching from Pacific Palisades to Malibu, where the flames jumped the Pacific Coast Highway to immolate a stretch of some of the most iconic and expensive homes in the state just steps away from the ocean.
Even though California’s emergency services have decades of experience predicting wildfire conditions and issued dire warnings for this week’s high winds, Democratic politicians appeared woefully unprepared for the onslaught.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was caught flat-footed when the fires began to rage late morning Tuesday. Despite explicit warnings that higher-than-normal Santa Ana winds and the dry conditions made the change of dangerous fires likely, Bass flew off to Africa to witness the inauguration of the president of Ghana.
A video that went viral Wednesday night shows a Sky News reporter asking the mayor if it was appropriate for her visit to fly overseas after the National Weather Service issued its warnings. Bass simply refused to respond to a question, although at a press conference hours later, she boasted about returning to Los Angeles quickly – she said one leg was a military plane – and said she was in constant communications with state and community officials during her return trip.
Gov. Newsom, however, was on the scene Tuesday night just hours after the fires broke out. After meeting with President Biden, who was in the area to visit family members, the governor praised him for immediately approving his text request for federal disaster relief funds without playing politics.
That provision is particularly important, Newsom said, considering where we are in “the history of our nation,” an apparent reference to Trump’s election and his history of questioning the provision of federal disaster relief to California to help compensate for the most devastating wildfires.
Later that evening, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Newsom why hundreds of fire hydrants early Wednesday morning were out of water. Newsom responded that he didn’t know, stating that local officials would have to figure it out.
“It’s not dissimilar to what we’ve seen in other extraordinary large-scale fires, whether it be pipe or electricity or the complete overwhelm of the system,” Newsom told Cooper. “Those hydrants are typical for two or three fires, maybe one fire, but when you have something of this scale … but again, that’s got to be determined by the local officials.”
President-elect Trump, meanwhile, publicly blasted Newsom for years of water policies that he said prioritized environmentalists’ desires, such as protecting the Delta smelt, an endangered fish species, over protecting people in fire-prone areas.
In a post on his social media network Truth Social, Trump said Newsom refused a solution negotiated during the first Trump administration that would have helped fire-fighters combating this week’s blazes.
“Governor Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North and flow daily to man parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,” Trump wrote.
In his post, Trump referred to the smelt as a “worthless fish” and argued that Newsom didn’t care about Californians.
“Now the ultimate price is being paid,” he wrote. “I will demand this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is [to] blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, [no] firefighting planes. A true disaster!”
Newsom’s office immediately pushed back against Trump’s claims about his opposition to a water-sharing deal Trump tried to strike. His aides issued a statement to ABC10, arguing that there was no such “water restoration declaration.”
“That is pure fiction,” the office said in a statement. “The governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.”
A spokesman from the Trump-Vance transition countered in a statement to RealClearPolitics that Trump was referring to an executive memorandum Trump issued in 2020 that would allow the federal government to redirect millions of gallons of water to the Central Valley and Southern California. The majority of that water, managed by a large network of dams, canals, pumps, and tunnels, was being “needlessly flushed” into the Pacific Ocean, Trump said at the time.
Newsom reacted to Trump’s action by suing the administration to stop the order, siding with environmentalists who opposed it because they believed it imperiled the smelt and other endangered salmon and steelhead.
“President Trump signed an order to redirect water to the Central Valley and Southern California, but Gavin Newsom sued him – choosing his radical left environmental interests over Golden State farmers and families,” a spokesman for the Trump transition said.
Later Wednesday, Trump issued a tweet calling on Newsom to resign.
“One of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States is burning down to the ground,” he said on Truth Social. “It’s ashes, and Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!”
Newsom and Biden, however, reversed course in December and reached an agreement to transfer water from Northern California to the Central Valley and other parts of the state, defying environmentalists’ efforts to protect the Delta smelt and other fish species but timing the water releases to try to mitigate the harm.
That policy wasn’t implemented in time to boost water supplies in Los Angeles this week. And Trump was correct that water supplies to fight the Pacific Palisades fire ran short this week. By Wednesday night, local officials were openly acknowledging the problem of hundreds of inoperable fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades in the previous 24 hours because the continuous demand for water had simply depleted nearby water cisterns supplying those hydrants.
But it was hardly the only challenge firefighters faced.
At least one C-130 on Tuesday managed to drop a water payload on the Palisades blaze, but officials said winds blowing up to 80 miles an hour prevented other planes and helicopters from flying Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning. By Wednesday afternoon, fire and rescue helicopters were regularly dropping water on the fire.
“Because the winds were severely limiting our air operations, the number of fire hoses connected to the fire hydrants depleted our tanks in the area, specifically in higher elevations, but we immediately implemented our contingency plans to provide water trucks to support our fires,” Denise Quinones, CEO and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said at a Wednesday night press conference.
As of Wednesday night, Quinones said DWP engineers were still weighing the best options to fill the water tanks faster.
Earlier in the press conference, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kirsten Crowley acknowledged that firefighting in some areas in Pacific Palisades overnight had to be shut down because of a lack of water. Crowley said her department has the ability to pull water from ponds and backyard and recreational pools in the area and was weighing their best option. Crowley, however, departed from the press conference before reporters were given a chance to ask questions.
One of those queries likely would have focused on a Dec. 4 Crowley memo in which she complained to Bass that the mayor’s cuts to the city’s fire budget “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scaled emergencies, including wildfires.”
“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,” Crowley wrote.
The depletion of water in holding tanks in the area hardest hit by the fires raised other questions. Among them, why didn’t Newsom deploy the National Guard much sooner than Wednesday after the Palisades had already ripped through thousands of acres? The National Guard has the ability to pump salt water into numerous 400-gallon truck trailers known as “water buffalos” that it could have deployed to areas where the infernos were most intense. While firefighting and dropping water from fixed-wing planes and helicopters is a highly skilled operation, National Guardsmen also could have easily provided extra support for evacuation efforts, critics argued on social media.
Quinones and other DWP officials faced criticism from residents and from Rick Caruso, a former DWP commissioner and real estate developer who owns the Palisades Village Mall and ran an unsuccessful campaign against Bass for mayor. Caruso so said he believed the vegetation in the area hadn’t been trimmed for 30 years and put the blame for the lack of water to fight the fires squarely on the city.
“This is an absolute mismanagement by the city. It’s not the firefighters’ fault, but the city’s,” he told Fox11 news. “It is like a third-world country… there is no water coming out of the fire hydrants. L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is on a foreign trip to Ghana.”
In addition to the hundreds of dry hydrants in the Pacific Palisades region, which Quinones confirmed, homeowners over the last 48 hours across California have reported that insurance companies had recently canceled their fire insurance.
The situation is particularly painful for many Pacific Palisades homeowners who lost their homes this week. Thousands of homeowners in the Los Angeles area had their insurance canceled in recent months, especially those covered by State Farm, which fled much of the state. A San Francisco Chronicle investigation found that the insurer had planned to cancel 69.4% of its policies in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood.
Conservative actor James Woods, who was forced to evacuate his house in Pacific Palisades earlier this week, posted on X.com Tuesday that a major insurer “cancelled all the policies in our neighborhood about four months ago.”
California Insurance Commissioner Ricarda Lara had said he would allow the insurance companies to increase their premiums to include “reinsurance costs” – the insurance that insurance companies buy – while requiring insurers to provide more policies in high-risk areas.
Insurance industry officials are warning that the devastation from this week’s fires could be one of the costliest in U.S. history, with the potential to upend an already shaky insurance market by placing it under intense financial strain. The average home price in Pacific Palisades is nearly $3.5 million, and costs to rebuild anywhere in California have faced steep increases in recent years, largely because of the state’s tangled web of environmental laws and construction regulations.
Insurance companies began raising rates over the last few years after a spate of deadly wildfires, many caused by PG&E’s failure to maintain its equipment and trim vegetation in fire-prone areas. Even before the latest Los Angeles-area fires, millions of homeowners across California faced 20% or greater rate increases in their premiums, non-renewals, or a dearth of available private coverage.
Leading insurers, including State Farm and Allstate, simply stopped providing home insurance policies in the state, arguing that rate increases approved by state regulators were not enough to cover rebuilding costs. California had the nation’s fourth-highest insurance renewal rate in 2023, according to a report by the U.S. Senate Budget Committee.
Newsom has faced scrutiny for his close ties to PG&E, especially for his role in helping cut a deal to protect the utility from future wildfire liability and survive beyond bankruptcy. In the months after the utility was found guilty on 84 counts of manslaughter in the fire that struck Paradise, Newsom retained private lawyers in New York to write the legislative language. Those lawyers drafted a bill protecting PG&E in the spring of 2019, before it was introduced in the state legislature, as ABC10 reported in its award-winning “Fire-Power-Money” investigative series.
After the Paradise fire and the company’s bankruptcy, PG&E doled out a total of $2.1 million to politicians and campaigns across the state. Newsom himself has received hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions from PG&E during his first years in office, before pledging not to accept more in 2019 amid more PG&E-sparked fires.
Still, in early 2023, PG&E cut a $250,000 check to help promote Newsom’s signature ballot initiative, an effort to curb homelessness by providing $6.8 billion to address the mental health and addiction needs of those on the streets.
The cataclysmic fires in Los Angeles also ignited another water-supply issue. Newsom and other Democratic officials in Sacramento now face renewed criticism over failing to build a single reservoir since 1979, despite a 2014 voter-passed $7.5 billion water bond ballot initiative that authorized the creation of new reservoirs and several other water infrastructure projects. As of 2022, no new storage projects were under construction, but proponents said there were as many as seven still in the planning and feasibility study phases.
It’s unclear what additional red tape the planned reservoirs still face. In 2022, the Los Angeles Times acknowledged that California’s government bureaucracies move at a “glacial pace,” and in the fall of 2021, Newsom created “strike teams” to help speed up the projects.
Under the proposition, $2.7 billion is slated for water storage, but the state funds can be used for “public benefits” as well, including salmon protection, recreation, and flood control.
A March report issued by the Pacific Institute, a conservative California-based water-focused think-tank, found that California is letting billions of gallons of stormwater wash out to sea each year.
Of the 10 states with the most “untapped potential,” California ranks ninth with approximately 2.27 million acre-feet of urban area runoff each year. (An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons – enough water to supply up to three homes for a year).
The report also found that Los Angeles represents the urban area with the greatest stormwater runoff potential in the West, ranking 19th in the country. That urban area includes L.A., Long Beach, and Anaheim, and experiences approximately 490,000 acre-feet of runoff each year, or roughly 437 million gallons per day.
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