My family lives in the northern Santa Monica, adjacent to the Palisades fire. We had to evacuate for a couple of nights but are home now. Thankfully, our neighborhood was spared.
A couple of observations:
Republicans and the lazy news media will gaslight us with stories of what went wrong and who’s to blame, in order to distract us from the real cause of this firestorm: climate change.
Fires like this are exactly what scientists warned us would happen if we didn’t get serious about climate change. That should be the story. Any other story is a (purposeful?) distraction.
The fossil fuel industry is to blame for the Palisades fires. Everyone else, from firefighters, to police, to local and state politicians, did their jobs.
Los Angeles has a black, female mayor who was visiting Africa at the time. That’s catnip for a racist GOP.
The winds that came through the Palisades were epic and of such intensity that putting out a fire would be impossible. Embers blew for blocks and started new fires wherever they landed. In those winds, there was no technology, or mayor, that could have stopped it.
We haven’t had ANY rain this season. Zero. Everything is very dry. Neither the Los Angeles mayor nor California governor control the water content of our foliage.
City water systems are not designed to address entire neighborhoods catching fire at the same time. Water systems are designed to fight house fires, or worst case, a fire that engulfs an entire block. This fire engulfed a city.
The people who complain the loudest that the city didn’t provide enough resources to adequately fight the fires are the same ones who want to cut taxes for the rich and starve government of resources.
There’s a good chance there will be no federal aid coming to California to help rebuild because the GOP and Trump will hold such aid hostage. The State needs to have a plan B for how it will cope without federal dollars, perhaps by confiscating the federal taxes Californians pay to Washington (to subsidize red states!).