The Bonfire of the Vanities

Los Angeles is burning. The Daily Mail calls it the bonfire of the vanities, and  I cannot beat that headline. If you would like an alternative, try: Recipe for Disaster or The Fire This Time..

Let’s see. The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, is off in Ghana celebrating… who knows what. She put her own signature on the problem by cutting the budget of the fire department. Great job KB.

When journalists cornered her yesterday to ask whether she regretted cutting the fire department budget, Bass said nothing. 

And let’s not ignore the fact that the current head of the Los Angeles Fire Department is a woman, by the name of Kristen Crowley. Among her innovations has been changing the name of the girls’ youth recruitment program from “Girl’s Camp” to “Camp S.P.A.R. K.” Presumably the new name would create more gender inclusive space.

Among the inconvenient realities in today’s firefighting in L.A. is this: the hydrants are dry. This has happened because the city refused to fill the reservoirs.

California voters approved a plan to build water storage facilities. The state has failed to build anything and the runoff from mountains and streams goes straight into the ocean. It had something to do with the existential necessity to save the smelt.

As for the need to have planes to help the effort, the story is no better. Ari Hoffman reports:

States including California, Washington & Oregon refused to fund the Wildfire-fighting 747 Supertanker in 2021 so it stopped operating Gavin Newsom & Jay Inslee were governors at the time

And also, the Biden administration cancelled controlled burns, the kind that are crucial to preventing such fires.

We would like to think that the people whose homes and memories have been incinerated were at least covered by insurance. Not so fast. When the insurance companies tried to raise their rates a couple of years ago, the state government refused. So the companies withdrew from California. That means, many of the homes affected by the fires were not insured.

Laura Powell wrote:

Last year, State Farm canceled 1,600 policies in Pacific Palisades because the state would not allow them to raise premiums enough to cover their exposure. The affected homeowners would then likely have to rely on the state-run FAIR Plan, an expensive last-resort insurance program. But the FAIR Plan reportedly only had a surplus of $200 million as of April 2024 and was likely to become insolvent if a catastrophic event occurred.

We do not know what started the fires, but homeless encampments were responsible for more than 10,000 such fires in 2023.

The inimitable Libs of TikTok offers this summation:

Don’t you hate it when climate change appoints a DEI hire to run the fire dept, gives away fire equipment to Ukraine, stops critical controlled burns, defunds the fire dept, refuses to build more water reservoirs and store water, cancels fire insurance, mismanages forests and brush, and fires firefighters for refusing an experimental vaccine?

So, the LA FD is led by women. Evidently, the DEI program is not working out very well. Colin Wright recommends a return to sanity, to male firefighters:

Firefighters should be mostly male. The hoses & equipment are extremely heavy, and firefighting can involve carrying incapacitated people out of burning buildings. While some females are capable of doing that, the vast majority are not. Sex differences are real, and they matter.

And then there were the immortal words of California governor Gavin Newsom-- a man whose political future just went up in smoke:

April, 2021. Gavin Newsom explains that wildfire preparedness will be better now that Biden is in office instead of Trump.

Famous last words.

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