As the California wildfires began tearing through vast swaths of Los Angeles last week, a troubling reality emerged: The officials responsible for safeguarding the public were woefully unprepared, lacking a comprehensive disaster response plan to address the crisis.
Firefighters in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, where the first fire broke out, faced a critical obstacle: no access to water. Many fire hydrants, which had not been tested since the previous January, were discovered to have little or no water pressure.
Further crippling firefighting efforts, the Los Angeles Times reported that the 117-million-gallon reservoir in the area was empty and offline.
On Jan. 2, the National Weather Service issued an urgent warning about the extreme fire danger posed by the hurricane-force Santa Ana winds expected in the area over the next week. In light of this forecast, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass might have reconsidered her scheduled trip to Ghana the following day. At the very least, she should have ensured emergency responders were on high alert and prioritized inspecting the city’s fire hydrants.
Additionally, Bass must answer for her decision to cut the city’s fire department budget by $17.6 million in the current fiscal year. During a press conference Thursday, Bass assured reporters that these budget reductions did not affect the city’s ability to respond to the crisis. However, according to the New York Post, Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley warned Bass in December that the budget cuts would compromise the department’s ability to combat wildfires effectively.
Instead of allocating resources to mitigate disasters with a high likelihood of occurrence, state and local leaders prioritized matters such as the burgeoning homeless crisis and supporting illegal immigrants while paying mere lip service to the residents’ most fundamental need — water.
A closer look at the state’s efforts to address its water problems reveals a glaring lack of seriousness.
For example, in 2009, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife designated the longfin smelt as “threatened” under the state’s Endangered Species Act. The measures implemented by the state to protect the smelt were at direct odds with the water needs of the state’s human population.
At the time, conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson raised concerns, warning that state officials “worry more about a three-inch fish than the farmers and farm workers who keep us alive one more day — and so divert fresh water out into the bay to keep the delta smelt alive.”
Five years later, in 2014, California voters approved Proposition 1, the Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act, a $7.5 billion water bond intended to modernize the state’s water infrastructure. While some small-scale projects have been completed over the past decade, the larger initiatives remain “in development,” delayed by extensive planning, permitting, and construction requirements.
And last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), yielding to pressure from local Native American tribes, ordered the removal of four dams along the Klamath River to protect salmon.
While environmental groups and tribal nations celebrated these actions, local residents, especially farmers, faced significant water and energy challenges as a result.
The worst-case scenario materialized last week in Southern California, and critics are calling out the failure of government policymakers to anticipate the consequences of their decisions. This has drawn sharp criticism from Republicans, who argue that the misguided decisions by the state’s current governor and those who came before him have led directly to the disaster currently unfolding in Los Angeles.
President-elect Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Wednesday to blame Newsom for the wildfires. He noted that the governor “refused to sign the water restoration declaration … that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, … but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid.”
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While Newsom and Bass blamed climate change for the wildfires, the current crisis can be directly attributed to a series of woke policy decisions made by Democratic state and local leaders.
After years of virtue signaling, the doomsday scenario that progressives never thought would actually occur has come to pass, and the result has been catastrophic.
Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner and the Western Journal. Follow her on X or LinkedIn.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
