“Though many factors contributed to the devastation (such as fire hydrants without water, too few controlled burns, and insurance price controls),” explains Jack Nicastro at Reason, “it was also exacerbated by land-use policies that pushed homes and residents away from the city center and closer to the wildland-urban interface (WUI). The U.S. Fire Administration defines the WUI as ‘the zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development … where structures … intermingle with undeveloped wildland or vegetative fuels.’”
President Trump has talked about California’s environmentalist hegemony, preventing the routing of huge amounts of water in the north of the state to the desertified south. Trump, and many people online, blame protection of a specific small fish, the delta smelt. Some or all of Trump’s claims have been “fact-checked” by news media outlets, such as CNN.
Meanwhile, to those keeping their eyes peeled to major media coverage, global warming started out as the chief cause of the fires. This seems shaky at best, however, and has been repeatedly been debunked, such as by the Heartland Institute. California has a long, long history of forest fires, and the Santa Anas blow fires into conflagrations, and have been doing so for ages.
Since wildfires are a continual problem for California, governments can hardly be exonerated on account of being “surprised.” And if governments exist to provide the most basic of services — as many argue — surely fire protection would be high on the priority list.
But it wasn’t on Los Angeles’s mayor’s list, apparently. She scuttled off to Ghana to celebrate the continent’s first woman president. But her glorying in a feminist moment was marred by pestering questions about fire protection, and why so much money had been [allegedly] cut from fire-fighting budgets.
And then there has been the talk of arson. January is not the usual time of year for out-of-control fires, so one naturally wonders what ignited the holocaust. And there has been more than one arrest for arson.
Unlike in the fires that raged farther north, in 2020 (after the George Floyd riots), there does not seem to be a blanket denial in the media of arson, and even celebrities are spreading rumors about widespread firebug activity.
1 reply on “Los Angeles Burning — Who’s to Blame?”
Fire-protection is not part of the natural duties of the state; though, so long as the state taxes to provide such protection, claims overt ownership of so much land, and imposes so much control over the remainder, the state develops an unnatural duty to provide fire-prevention and fire-fighting.
Still, note that private fire fighters have saved properties during the present holocaust.
In the fight to advance a narrative about who bears what responsibility, the corporate left is ham-strung by the wide-spread low regard in which the main-stream media is now held, by the hoisting of celebrity-propagandists on their own petards, by the ability of everyday folk to post charts and songs (“It Never Rains in Southern California” [1972]) and old news reports on-line, and by Trump’s use of his bully-pulpit.