Are you sure about all this? It actually may have all been unavoidable because of man made climate change. Well, let's ask the real experts...See what they say:
"Many say that the catastrophic fires ravaging Los Angeles weren’t the fault of Governor Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass. Fires are inevitable in Los Angeles, and the water ran out because no water system could withstand that many fires simultaneously, they add.But LA firefighters themselves disagree.
They say the reason they arrived too late to stop the fires from becoming catastrophic was because of severe budget cuts. The Fire Department did not pre-deploy fire engines to strategic locations, and helicopters arrived half an hour too late to put out the Palisades.“That [Santa Ynez] reservoir being closed did not allow helicopters to drop and suck water up from five minutes away,” a new firefighter whistleblower, the third who has come forward, told me. “Instead, they had to fly 10 to 15 minutes away to go get water somewhere else.”The problem is that the LA Fire Department is one of the most severely understaffed of America’s 10 largest cities. It has less than a single firefighter per 1,000 residents compared to Chicago, Dallas, and Houston, which have twice as many.“ In 1960, our city population was 2.5 million, and we had 112 fire stations. In 2020, our city population was 3.9 million, and we had 106 stations,” a representative of LA’s firefighters ’ union testified last month. “That's 1.4 million more people and six fewer fire stations.”This undermines the Department’s ability to respond to emergencies.
“In 2020, the average emergency response time was seven minutes and 53 seconds, nearly double the NFPA recommendation.”Part of the problem is that the number of homeless fires in LA doubled between 2020 and 2023 to an astonishing 38 per day. They start dangerous fires in many ways, including by breaking through the sidewalk into the city’s electrical system, which can result in explosions and death.Still, many say, it is wrong to blame homelessness for LA’s fires. They are victims of trauma and poverty.But the research is unequivocal. Over half of all fires that the LA Fire Department responds to are set by a homeless person.
"There were two huge explosions, and when I looked out my apartment window, I saw plumes of black smoke," a resident told NBC-Los Angeles. "People are literally dying in the streets, in tents burning down around them.”And the evidence is clear: leaving homeless people on the street makes them three times more likely to die than people required to come inside to sleep in shelters.The third firefighter whistleblower says the firefighters are being put in danger by budget cuts. “Even last week,” the person said, “I wanted to work and I was told, ‘Sorry dude, we don't have a seat for you to fill because there's not enough apparatuses,’” meaning fire engines or other equipment.One hundred fire engines and other apparatus are currently out of service because the city cut the Fire Department’s budget, and it couldn’t afford to hire mechanics to fix equipment.“We have a crack about halfway down our water tank. Half of our [engines and other] apparatuses are broken.
They were sending rookies, new probationary firefighters, out to the field last year with no department-required brush jackets.”The firefighters lack life-saving equipment. “We were running out of electrodes to do EKGs,” the person said. “We've been running out of gloves. We've been running out of drugs, you name it. There's been ambulances that have been having to steal stuff or borrow stuff from the hospitals just to stay available.”At the meeting last month, the president of the city’s firefighters union warned, “If we cut one position, if we close one station… the residents of Los Angeles are going to pay the ultimate sacrifice, and someone will die.”
All this and yet Los Angeles is one of the richest cities in the world. Eighty-four of America’s richest 400 people live in California, and LA is home to 26 billionaires who collectively possess a net worth of approximately $185 billion.“It kills us when we see holes in the system,” said the whistleblower, “and we aren’t able to do the job we expect of ourselves, and if we had the appropriate resources and staffing, I don’t think any of the fires were inevitable. I know for a fact it would not be what it is. We saw my particular fire engine in maintenance for a year and a half.”Some politicians are demanding reform. ”There are large swaths of the city with no emergency response resources available,” said Councilmember Traci Park, who urged more funding for firefighting last year. “ I think that people are rightly upset, not only that this happened, but there is a sense that we as local leaders needed to do more for them. I feel like I let them down, and I've been screaming about it from the day I came in.”As such, the problem is not poverty, it is severe mismanagement and bad governance.
Not only is the city’s mismanagement to blame for LA’s disastrous response to the fire, but it’s also responsible for the city’s ongoing homelessness disaster.Why is that? Part of the reason is the city’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) programs. “The city will only purchase from vendors that support DEI,” said the firefighter. “So we'll go with a vendor that we have to pay twice as much, or the shipment may take twice as long, in order for it to be a DEI vendor rather than the vendor who has it at half the price and can get it to us tomorrow.”The whistleblower said that DEI programs put firefighters and the public in danger. “I personally witnessed in my own drill tower them making and passing women just to get their [female quota] numbers even though they didn't have to meet all the criteria the men did....”
