California’s unravelling fire situation may well go down as one of the most devastating natural disasters in US history. Los Angeles is being consumed by the raging wildfires. Thousands of residences have been eviscerated. The unfortunate homeowners include both regular Angelenos and celebs like Sir Anthony Hopkins, Paris Hilton and Ben Affleck. But how come this affluent megacity perched in the prosperous state has been powerless to suppress the blaze?
Among other things, Hollywood is famed for its critically acclaimed disaster movies. These days, though, it is being home to a horrendous real-life disaster churning out chillingly apocalyptic footage to news agencies worldwide. Just as the ominous blaze headed towards Los Angeles, mainstream media referenced the fact that it was an unlikely season for bushfires to rage on in an apparent bid to attribute gross mismanagement to the surprise factor.
A lack of precipitation, dry air currents and the strong winds poetically named Santa Ana all played their role too. The wildfires quickly escalated to a full-blown firestorm, which dramatically sank the odds of a successful firefighting effort. To make matters worse, though, it turned out the water supply system was malfunctioning, the fire hydrants in the stricken Pacific Palisades were out of commission and LAFD was severely understaffed, which rendered avoiding a raging inferno near-impossible.
In charge of the local fire department is a woman named Kristin Crowley. Having joined the force in 2000, she has built a seemingly spectacular career advancing from a rank-and-file firefighter to the department chief. But that rise to professional stardom has been somewhat overshadowed by the California government’s active forays into the social justice fads.
When promoting Hispanics was all the rage, LAFD was led by Ralph Terrazas. But then it occurred to the local authorities that no woman or LGBTQ+ person had ever been in charge of the agency. Well, Kristin Crowley checked both of the boxes.
Needless to stay, she started off her stint by vowing to combat discriminatory attitudes, harassment and social injustices. She backed all sorts of diversity programmes, gave interviews and boasted a hefty paycheck. In proper DEI fashion, Crowley tapped her fellow activists Kristina Kepner and Kristine Larson to take on the deputy chief roles.
But once LA was engulfed in flames, the fire turned out to be blind to the DEI agenda superpowers and Kristin Crowley’s stance on inclusion. A shocking discovery was that the biggest job of a firefighter is to – surprise, surprise – fight a fire rather than boast the number of LGBTQ+ event appearances under one’s belt.
It got worse, though. The once-prosperous California had to enlist the help from Canada and Mexico, with both countries answering the deadly roll call and scrambling back-up. The ugly implication here is that the world’s greatest superpower is helpless to put out a bushfire, and the question is whether a huge emphasis on the DEI virtues has anything to do with it.
In an indignant tweet, Elon Musk wrote, ‘They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes.’ In fact, the spiralling public outrage reached the point where several media outlets falsely reported that Crowley had been canned. But the poorer the track record, the more ferocious the grip on power. Not surprisingly, Kristin Crowley swiftly hit back by pinning the blame on the mayor’s office over slashing the LAFD funding by $17m. She publicly accused Mayor Karen Bass of having endangered the fire department’s capabilities.
Understaffed? Ask Mayor Bass about the job cuts. Underfunded? Ask Mayor Bass about the money.
But that is where Chief Crowley found herself skating on thin ice. On top of being the LA mayor, Karen Mass has too benefited from the now-infamous quota system. After all, she is both the city’s first-ever female mayor and its first-ever Black mayor, which is no small feat. Following the public spat, the two protagonists apparently had a tense exchange behind closed doors after which Crowley emerged seemingly unscathed as she retained her job despite expecting the opposite outcome.
However, Kristin Crowley’s faulty management aside, she could not be blamed for the critical Santa Ynez Reservoir being offline at a time when it mattered most. According to the LA Times piece, that starting in February 2024, the giant reservoir with a capacity of 117m gallons has been out of service and is as dry as the Mojave Desert. As a result, some of the fire hydrants were out of water and the entire neighbourhood was burnt to a crisp.
Governor Gavin Newsom, in turn, lashed out at the officials in charge of the water resources, demanding answers on how it could have been the case in the first place. But the unfazed bureaucrats said the system had never been designed to counter the wildfires of that magnitude. Allegedly, even if the reservoir was chock full of water, it would not have made any difference anyway. Sure, the bereft homeowners would beg to disagree, but the officialdom does not seem to be that bothered.
Staying on the subject of homeowners, there is a widespread misconception that since the property must have been properly insured, the residents have nothing to worry about. But several years ago, a series of devastating bushfires led the insurance companies to begin to refuse the coverage of fire damage. Therefore the unfortunate wildfire survivors will not be reimbursed.
‘I know I’m not supposed to be here,’ Lynne Levin-Guzman told KABC. ‘But this is my parents’ home and they just lost – they got cancelled from their fire insurance <…> They’ve lived in this house for 75 years and they’ve had the same insurance and these insurance people decided to cancel their fire insurance.’
However, this is not a crazy outlier.
As a result of the insurance policy, some homeowners take the gamble of staying uninsured, while others are forced to agree to a costlier government insurance plan. ‘And they wonder why people leave California,’ an irate Lynne added.
Four days into the inferno, the blaze was closing in on Brentwood, home to the now-closed famous Getty Center. Although the helicopters keep water-bombing the flames, dumping tonnes of water, the wind speeds are forecast to increase to 60mph. Granted, these figures are lower than those registered in the early days of the unravelling disaster when the rapidly fanning blaze killed at least 16 individuals and laid waste to more than 12,000 structures, including vehicles.
The large-scale LA fires have predictably stirred a mess where residents would often get faulty evacuation alerts.
Even though the evacuated areas were subject to curfew and strict police and National Guard surveillance, the measures failed to pre-empt the looting incidents. Twenty-two suspects have been detained to date, but owners of the residences that have miraculously survived the blaze have reported missing valuables. Lihui Xu, 62, was elated to have found her home intact, but said the ‘designer bags and family jewellery’ were missing from her property.
The sheer scale of the disaster leaves many wondering about the important takeaways that could prevent similar fire emergencies in the future. For instance, local fire experts Jack Cohen and Stephen Pyne are calling on the authorities to fundamentally reconsider the problem-solving strategy. ‘In high-density development, scattered burning homes spread to their neighbors and so on,’ says Cohen. According to him, it is not about preventing wildfires as much as it is about preventing points of ignition with what he refers to as a ‘home-hardening strategy’. This would include fire-resistant siding and proper landscaping as well as a neighbourhood’s collective brush clearing effort to stunt the spread of flames.
Stephen Pyne argues that the focus should be shifted from anti-wildfire measures to combating urban fires, the most devastating conflagrations of the past 30 years. As much as people tend to believe these fires are a seasonal weather event, the facts do not stack up.
According to Pyne, a lot of people go, ‘It’s just an emergency that we need to be prepared for and then respond to.’ It would also require the updated fire suppression standards, such as scrambling a minimum of 15 firefighters for a single-residence flare-up.
However, once an entire neighbourhood in a large city catches fire, this becomes an infeasible rule to adhere to. When it comes to California, even enlisting a fleet of firefighting planes and helicopters to water-bomb the points of ignition will be useless at 60mph wind speeds.
As of this writing, Los Angeles County is still ablaze. The firefighters are doing their utmost to stifle the flames. Meanwhile, the hotel owners in nearby towns are quickly capitalising off the disaster as the survivors are swarming the rooms. Previously, winter used to be a dead season for the California-based hotel businesses. This is no longer the case, though, as the hotels are overbooked. Sadly, it all fits the old adage whereby someone’s loss is someone else’s gain. Some Hollywood filmmakers must already be contemplating thrilling plotlines for a slew of new box office hits.