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Southern Californian troubadour Jackson Browne offered an apt epiphany for Southern Californians in his song After the Deluge:
“And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings
And exchanged love’s bright and fragile glow for the glitter and the rouge
And in a moment they were swept before the deluge.”
No sooner had the forest fires desecrated Pacific Palisades, Eaton and Malibu (PEM) then torrential rains came and washed away many of the homes that had been destroyed there. As Jeffrey Tucker opined in the Epoch Times about the Southern Cali fires,
“The combination of folly, tragedy, and suffering is painful to watch…It now occupies the ignoble status of history’s exhibit A of how bad decision-making, messed up priorities, the exaltation of incompetence, high taxation, hyperregulation, and rule by woke bureaucracy end up creating apocalypse.”
Importantly, it is also an object lesson of race trumping merit in government, elevating people of color to unmerited positions while ignoring their incompetence.
DEI’s Sunk Costs
Sunk costs have permeated Los Angeles County government in the form of appointing administrators who are obsessed with making diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) instead of competent decision-making, the key metrics of their respective departments. Los Angeles County Fire Department (LACoFD) Marine Battalion Chief Danielle McMillon was chosen to suffuse DEI into her fire department and was awarded the Woman of the Year in Public Safety for being an “Influential DEI Trailblazer.” The award read, “With over 25 years of LACoFD service, she has achieved great success and overcome challenges, but her dedication to uplifting women is unwavering.” Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) manager, Shawna Lewis, was also awarded at the Los Angeles County African American Employees Association meeting. One doubts the value PEM homeowners saw in these awards given what little help they received from the fire, then flooding in their neighborhoods.
Conversely, to ensure DEI doesn’t poison Florida government, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law banning DEI across the state university system and state government. Christopher Rufo reveals that DEI is simply “discrimination masquerading as equity.” President Trump immediately rescinded Biden’s DEI executive order, instructing his Cabinet to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, environmental justice offices and positions, and all equity action plans, equity actions, initiatives, or programs. It must be supplemented with Congressional legislation persuading the American people never to go back to discrimination under the guise of “equity.” Sadly, this came too late for Palisades, Eaton and Malibu homeowners.
Are Humans This Powerful?
Sunk costs pertain to government expenditures related to natural disasters like the PEM fires and flood. Twenty three thousand four hundred and forty-eight acres were razed, including 6,837 PEM structures destroyed and 1,016 damaged in the three affected areas; many of the homes not destroyed by fire were flooded weeks later.
At least 29 people were killed in these three fires that destroyed or damaged more than 18,000 structures, and 9 more fatalities from the flooding that including an L.A. County Fire vehicle swept away inro the Pacific ocean. The latest estimate from weather forecasting service AccuWeather puts the total expected damage and economic loss to over $280 billion. These efforts and costs of handling the fire and flood could hardly make whole what was lost in them. Much of the contestation involves embarrassingly wrong claims like that of climate scientist Michael Mann who recently warned that the Southern California fires are due to faulty climate policy and fixing it is the “only way” to reduce fires. Thus far, California’s extant climate policy hasn’t had a significant positive effect on its climate. Yet climate activists continue to do something even when it is wrong.
The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), wanting to have their cake while eating it too, warns that droughts will lead to soil erosion as well as reduced crop yields, while floods and landslides can destroy agricultural lands and infrastructure. Climate change experts apparently give Californians both too little and now too much contained water. A huge problem with the recent PEM fires was the fact that power lines serving the Topanga and Malibu canyons to the beach haven’t been upgraded nor has L.A. County dealt effectively with insufficient water to extinguish fires.
Forest fires are the most destructive natural phenomenon in both acreage lost, and buildings destroyed. Competent fire management holds that when wildfires begin, two major questions must be asked: 1) Does the wildfire threaten people and/or their personal property? 2) Is the wildfire located in a forest or grassland, or in a human-dominated landscape? Sadly, the PEM fires offered an affirmative yes to both questions.
They Call the Wind Santa Ana
Santa Ana winds are dry, powerful winds (often as strong as 110 miles per hour) that blow westerly from the mountains to the Southern California coastline, desiccating much of the plant life and buildings in its path. Any natural or man-made spark can feed on this dry tinder causing a forest fire to erupt and spread. The region sees close to 10 Santa Ana wind events a year on average, typically occurring from fall through winter months. As the Santa Ana winds rush down-slope from the San Gabriel Mountains, the eastern most mountain range in southern California, they become drier and hotter as a function of the physics of air masses; the possibility of fire accentuates. Over the past four decades researchers have found similar amounts of Santa Ana wind activity, but the timing is shifting from fewer to more events in December and January.
The desiccated scrub brush and trees carelessly co-habitating with homes and businesses, become the perfect starter kit for forest and brush fires, though increasingly often, the resulting fires from this wind phenomenon are set purposively by humans.
When Southern California wildfires begin, three major questions must be asked: 1) Does the wildfire threaten people and/or their personal property? 2) How did the wildfire begin—natural causes or by human activity (arson)? 3) Will flooding be a consequence of the fires?
Powerful Santa Ana winds, with gusts reaching hurricane strength, sweep down the coastal mountains into the canyons, spreading wildfires into neighborhoods like PEM in January 2025, creating a conflagration. While these fires have been successfully extinguished. The answer to the two questions above is: 1) Yes, the PEM fires are a significant threat to people who live in those areas; 2) These fires are located in areas with very expensive housing and property, giving them even more destructive force.
Thousands of homes and other structures, including several schools, had burned by Jan. 21, and at least 28 people had died. The fires, which started Jan. 7, were still burning days later. History has shown that prescribed burning, improved zoning and enhanced land management are much more effective and cheaper solutions to fires than politically-driven climate policy. Environmental Protection Agency modeling showed that even with a drastic reduction in emissions it would take 50 to 80 years before we’d see a small impact in area burned in the U.S.
In the case of western-American fires, most of the problem is faulty land and people management. A century of fire suppression has left more fuel for stronger fires. Even so, last year U.S. fires burned less than one-fifth of the average burn of the 1930s and one-tenth of what caught fire in the early 20th century. Land is valuable and the 85 million acres of undeveloped federal land designated as national parks underscores this point, but is a sunk cost, largely associated with the actual improvement of this land for public use.
DEI Hiring Lunacy
Part of the PEM fire puzzlement is Los Angeles County’s DEI hiring policy, placing its racialist tenet of being a person of color as a fundamental hiring qualification. When asked about the rationale for DEI hiring in the Los Angeles Fire Department, Deputy Chief Kristen Larson said: “You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency, whether it’s a medical call or a fire call, that looks like you.” While firefighting competence for the rank and file seem never to have been a problem, as you ascend the ranks, racialism become increasingly more important, and racialism in the upper ranks is ascendant. I was a Los Angeles County beach lifeguard, a division of the Fire Department, for 8 years in my distant past and can attest to the fact that when I rescued rip-current victims in the surf, no one ever complained about my being a different race than (s)he was. My priority and theirs was them not drowning in the surf. Could the L.A. County racialist hiring policy affect fire-fighting competency as much if not more than the Santa Ana winds? L.A. County is tone deaf to such questions.
Cost-Benefits Analysis
Land with a history of fire-proneness, should be evaluated on an actual cost-benefit basis. For example, the recent PEM fires were the direct result of dry, accumulated brush that surrounded homes and businesses. When this dry brush habitat meets the Santa Anna winds and some igniting spark (frequently arson but as yet undetermined), a fire is spawned that can traverse westward more than sixty miles from the inland San Gabriel mountains to the beaches of Malibu and Zuma. Anything and anyone in the way of these fires can be incinerated.
As uber liberal Bill Maher concluded about the recent Malibu and Palisades forest fires, “California is the place that spends money and gets nothing, which is why you may have noticed when the fires broke out, no one escaped by high speed rail…it’s also not wrong to associate some of the unforced errors our government made with the things normies see as hallmarks of uber-progressive politics. Questionable budget priorities, high taxes that get you nothing, making everything about identity politics, virtue signaling overseas instead of tending to the nuts and bolts [fire proneness] at home.”
With the assured frequency of Santa Ann winds in Southern California and the region’s priorities for DEI, the area will continue to be its own worst enemy. Given its woke sensibilities and left-liberal perspective, and the fact more often than not incineration has human causes. As Bob Dylan once so eloquently concluded: “Here I sit patiently, trying to find out what price, you have to pay to get out going through all these things twice.”