I was thinking of California and Angela Merkel today.
Los Angeles County is being hammered by wildfires, causing damage on an epic scale. The destruction is heartbreaking and it will only get worse in the coming days. There are stories of bulldozers being deployed to push aside cars abandoned by fleeing residents so that emergency crews can be deployed.
For California, like much of the West, fire and water are a fact of life. However, California has a very poor track record when it comes to wildfire mitigation tactics, allowing fuel loads to build on forest floors and in canyons.
Then there is the issue of water. In a state where five years of precipitation can fall within a single year, dams and water systems are essential to capture that bounty before it flows into the Pacific. Yet it will take nearly 20 years, if ever, to build water systems that are already funded. A dam may be made of of concrete but it is constructed through red tape.
All of this lack of preparation is combined with a dearth of first responders, fire hydrants running dry, and a lack of crisis leadership. Watch the following clip of the LA Mayor, trying to respond to a reporter’s questions.
Compare and contrast the lack of preparation, execution, and leadership with Florida, which deals with large, catastrophic events called hurricanes. Southern California wildfires are known knowns and there is no excuse; these are not black-swan events.
So why Angela Merkel?
I was perusing a list of past Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients and saw that Obama awarded her one in 2011. Merkel has a reputation that has far exceeded her performance.
To say Germany is a mess right now is an understatement. Its economy is hovering on the edge of a recession that’s driven by the lack of affordable and reliable energy, and it’s experiencing an explosion of violence and social problems traced back to immigration from Third World countries.
So why think about someone, Merkel, who has been out of office for more than three years? Because it was during her 16-year-long chancellorship that those disastrous energy and immigration policies were largely implemented.
Merkel’s government implemented Energiewende in 2011, phasing out Germany’s nuclear power plants in favor of renewables. As a transition fuel, Germany would use natural gas imported from Russia.
From 2015-2017 Germany processed 1.4 million asylum seekers, seven times the rate of the next most welcoming European country, based on Merkel’s insistence that “we can do this.” These immigrants were part of an overall influx of five million immigrants.
So what do California and Merkel have in common?
Mad dreams. Mad, utopian dreams.
California, a state with a largely dry, Mediterranean climate, depends for its existence on large-scale water projects and also on reducing fire hazards by mitigating forest fuel loads. Yet it has placed environmental concerns about culling dead trees from forests, and about smoke from prescribed burns (not to mention the welfare of smelt and other water life), above the safety of its people.
The disaster unfolding in LA County was as predictable as hurricanes in Florida. However, California chose to look away and to prioritize other concerns, and in doing so made the risk of fires even worse. It made the choice to dance with a train.
Germany under Merkel decided to make its energy future, meaning its economic future, dependent on Vladimir Putin and the reliability of the wind and sun. Just to be clear, Merkel authorized construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in 2019, five years after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine.
Immigration? She gave little thought to how millions of people from cultures very different from that of Germany were supposed to integrate and share the same physical space. Just to be clear (again), this is not a new issue. Merkel could have asked her fellow Europeans in France and the UK what the social effects were of large-scale immigration from Muslim countries
These were, for Merkel, known knowns. The current chancellor, Scholz, is the one who is taking the political hit for it, because he just happens to be the one left on the dance floor when the music stops. In reality these problems can be traced back to Merkel.
I am a native Californian – like to look at old series like Perry Mason to see the Los Angeles I grew up in. I believe California started changing to the way it is today with the election of Jerry Brown back in 1974.
Not everything is the fault of our executive and legislature. Some of it is self-induced by our initiative process. It was started around 1910 by then-Govenor Hiram Johnson to fight the chokehold the SP Railroad had on the legislature.
You get a certain number of registered voters on a petition (I think it is around 700,000), and it will go on the next ballot. Yjat is how we got the infamous Prop 13 passed.
The problem with that is that these days there are companies that pay signature gatherers and people tend to vote with their emotions rather than logic. But still as an outlet it can surprise you, About 10 years ago voters approved an initiative that would have redefined a felony to over $1000 – with the result that stores are closing, thieves would steal stuff with calculators adding their value and store owners would just let them walk out because the cops wouldn’t do anything.
I believe that has been reversed with a recent initiative.
We haven’t built a reservoir in decades, and the recent drought showed that weakness. Fresh water was literally going straight to the ocean.
It has been disheartening to see a California that once was the envy of not only the nation but the world become the butt of jokes. But sometimes the voters can surprise you.
I was surprised to look at a “red and blue” map of California. The coast is predominately blue but the interior, other than Sacramento, is red. Maybe after this fire the blue will start changing.
“The disaster unfolding in LA County was as predictable as hurricanes in Florida, but California chose to look away …”
No, not California — Californians. It is a democracy. People voted for wildfires — they might not have thought through the consequences of what they did vote for, but they might as well have voted directly for wildfires. Universal suffrage is a disaster!
Remember when California was the End of the Rainbow? Now it is the End of the Sewer Pipe. And only Californians could fix this. Although it is likely that a lot of the Californians will blame Trump.
Some links…
Steve Heyward at Power Line past rainfalls in California and time to perform USFS fuel treatments
Joan Didion, on California Burning
Timeline of LA Mayor Karen Bass actions.
As I mentioned before, fire is a fact of life out West and different parts have different seasons. Fire crews start off in Arizona in May-June and work their away around the West ending up in southern California in late autumn.
Whether you live in a rural area or your urban/suburban property bumps up against the fringe, as what is happening in LA, you are always at risk when your season rolls around. I’ve driven through p;aces int he morning where all is fine and come back through in the afternoon and they are deploying crews and tankers are flying
What would be curious to know is the disposition of potential homeless encampments in the hills around LA. During fire season, open campfire are a big time no-no and rigorously policed by everyone, uniformed and civilian alike. I wonder if they had a similar protocol in LA
Gavin is correct – Californians voted for these people we have although in general you certainly can’t include me and others in the minority
It’s hard for me being away from LA to get an idea of the enormity of this devastation but some of these pictures are shocking
I think this is going to change some votes but as one Angelina said “don’t look at the “D” or “R” but vote for the person
There was a man running against this Karen Bass supposedly a Democrat but had pretty conservative principles and he didn’t win the primary ..
I wonder how that would be today
There’s a lot of angry people and I was shocked at the celebrity homes in Pacific Palisades like Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. I wonder how their homes fared.
The challenge will be to find the next fire chief. Anyone competent has to realize that he will become the obvious fall guy, as in fall on his sword, after the next uncontrollable fire and that such a fire is a matter of when, not if. Not that the completely politicized hiring process is likely to produce anyone remotely competent.
I was born and brought up in Southern California – and my parents usually chose to live in the hills, or close to them. (I’ve posted here at least once, about growing up in fire country.) The danger of brush fires was a constant worry, especially when the Santa Ana winds dried everything to a tinder. My father was a research biologist — he gave us the most wonderful nature walks imaginable. He told us, repeatedly, that the ecology of a climate like So-Cal is set up naturally to burn, every thirty years or so. The fires clean out the dead brush and germinate some of the native seeds … and stopping those naturally-occurring brush fires WITHOUT manually clearing out deadwood, and overgrown brush means that when the fires do occur (and they WILL) they burn hotter and more devastatingly.
The civic authorities in Los Angeles (to include the current mayor and fire department management) have been criminally negligent in handling these new fires so badly.
My brother and his family are in Santa Clarita – where the current fire there seems to be burning away from residential areas. My sister and her family, in Altadena, have had to evacuate, although it seems from looking at the fire maps, that their house is OK, for now.
The other distressing thing about the Palisades and Eaton fires is that usually, it’s the spread-out neighborhoods actually in the hills themselves which are the usual victims of CA brush fires. Most always, the FD can stop a fire moving into the flat-land, built-up residential areas, on a close grid of streets. The Eaton fire moved into neighborhoods which had been established early in the 1900s, miles from open brush-grown hills at the foot of Mt. Wilson and the Angeles National Forest.
Fortunately for Merkel’s reputation, the competition for Germany’s worst leader ever has a very high bar. She is a solid #2 though.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the $17.5 million removed from the FD budget for pride walks and other virtue signalling. Less is said about that budget starting at $855 million. Anyone want to bet that there was more foolishness than that in the FD budget already and still is? Who would have thought that the most qualified candidates for the upper management of LAFD in the whole country would have been lesbians? Just how lucky can the people of LA county be?
Traditionally, things like fire hydrant testing are done by engine crews in their own district between calls. A call comes in, the truck is there, the crew is there, they’re on the road as fast, if not faster than if they were in the firehouse. They also get familiar with the district, where the fire hydrants are, with the inside of businesses during fire inspections, all for virtually no additional cost except a little fuel. Testing the system of mains these hydrants are connected to is another thing entirely. Any system has limits, drawing water from one hydrant will affect all the hydrants on that particular main. One of the things fire departments have to consider is just how the water system is laid out to know just where the nearest hydrant is that won’t reduce the flow of a hydrant already in use when a big fire is underway. They’ll park a pump next to it and run hoses for a quarter mile or more to supply more water than a single hydrant can. Fire engineering is real engineering.
Shorter version: Every fire hydrant in the Palisades district could have been perfectly functional while the system as a whole failed from too many fires, all at the same time. If your neighbors house is close enough to yours that you can touch both at the same time, the only thing that will stop a fire next door from setting your house on fire is the prompt arrival of the fire department. When you see block after block of such houses, often separated by wooden fences, otherwise known as kindling, and you have dozens of fires being started at once by blowing embers, you’re going to run out of fire engines before you run out of fires. That’s assuming the houses themselves aren’t covered with wooden shingles. Even brick veneer houses with fire resistant roofs usually have wooden or, worse, plastic trim that provide an easy path for fire to attack the underlying wood frame, especially the roof rafters.
For added fun, many of the roofs that burned were covered by solar cells that released numerous obscure but poisonous elements such as selenium into the environment. How green is that?