I live in California and I have been hearing accounts from people who had to evacuate, from those who were prepared to evacuate (and we had a ‘go bag’ packed) and some people are in a bad place right now. The fires are still going on and while the winds for now are not strong, there are warnings that they might be.

That said this was a manageable disaster that became catastrophic for a number of reasons.

The leading reasons are environmental. California’s Democrat majority refused to conduct basic forestry management and maintain water supplies because of their radical environmental ideology. Its identity politics led to incompetence at every level of city management including at the Los Angeles Fire Department. And its monopolistic energy utilities and tolerance for homeless encampments may have started the fires.

There’s only so much that can be done about the second set of issues by the federal government, but aid should absolutely be conditioned on California performing due diligence to prevent future fires.

That means forestry management needs to return and that water supplies need to be maintained.

It’s insane that neighborhoods burned because the state’s Democrat elites were obsessed with a little fish which had become some absurd symbol and that fires keep happening because forestry management is taboo to environmentalists.

Some House Republicans, including Speaker Johnson, are calling for conditions to be attached to wildfire aid. And while some California Republicans are uncomfortable with that, I agree. Attaching conditions is the best way of preventing future devastating wildfires. California no longer has a functional governance system and its ballot harvesting make it all but impossible for reforms to come from within.

Democrats are protesting such proposals, but they were fine when Biden signed an order expanding the definition of a floodplain in line with ‘global warming’ claims to qualify for FEMA assistance. If towns can’t rebuild their infrastructure unless they move its location, then Dems don’t have a problem with conditioning assistance on what they call ‘climate resilience’. They have a problem with being asked to put public safety ahead of their environmentalist nonsense.

Too bad.

It’s the only way to stop the cycle of disasters from continuing to escalate due to woke incompetence and anti-science dogmas that have become the default under California Democrats.