Fires, Floods, and Fools: Rhetoric vs. Disaster

by Andy Caldwell

Back in the 1990s, I penned my first in a series of articles dealing with the subject of “Fires, Floods, and Fools,” a never-ending cycle in California. Having lived through the 1969 flood and countless fires, it was a painful but easy column to write. Now, after revisiting this subject again and again and again over the years, the pain of watching tens of thousands of people lose everything they own is too much to bear. Nonetheless, will our government recognize this never-ending cycle of fires and floods, including the horrific Montecito debris flow, and begin to address the real problem that has absolutely nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with managing natural resources in a prudent and competent manner?

I am going to digress here a little and demonstrate that the rhetoric of climate change is just that: rhetoric. The fact is the doomsayers themselves claim that climate change will result in greater catastrophes in the future, meaning we will experience worse droughts, floods, and fires, than ever before. Yet, what have they done to prepare for the same? Have they built more dams and reservoirs to alleviate floods and help us through droughts?

No.

Have they built fuel breaks throughout the “wildlands?”

No.

Have they conducted regularly scheduled controlled burns?

No.

Have they thinned the trees and brush and created a significantly wider buffer zone between the urban/rural interface?

No.

Have they deployed thousands of goats and cows into our foothills to help manage the fuels?

No.

Moreover, have they compared the ghg emissions from wildfires to that of the transportation sector to affirm they are focusing on the biggest emission source?

Resoundingly No!

Check out this chart that indicates our rainfall amounts haven’t varied in 150 years:

Downtown LA has received an average of around 14 inches of rain a year since records kept in 1887 . Source: Los Angeles Almanac

Many Lost Homes with Little To No Insurance

Meanwhile, what has our government done? Besides spending billions on high-speed rail, tens of billions on the homeless (ironically at least two homeless people in L.A. were detained by law enforcement as arson suspects), and millions on charging stations and the like, they set up an impossible scenario for the public at large via what they have done to our utilities and insurance carriers.

They have prevented our utilities from clear cutting the areas through which our power lines run and then sued the bejesus out of them for the ensuing fire storms. This leaves the utilities with little choice but to turn off power in the middle of a windstorm or face the threat of bankruptcy from the ensuing lawsuits. And what good are charging stations that won’t work when people need them most, as when their power is cut off during an emergency?

Moreover, the state would not allow insurance companies to raise rates in a timely manner to cover the never-ending stream of claims from natural disasters, so they were forced to cancel coverage. So now, a significant number of the people who lost their homes have no insurance coverage to cover their losses or begin the rebuilding process as you normally can’t get loans to construct without fire insurance.

Of course, since the 1990s when I first wrote on this subject matter, our government’s failure to adequately safeguard our communities from fires and floods has gotten progressively worse, pun intended. That is, progressives in city and county governments and our state government have placed undue emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion in their hiring and promotional practices as competence is lower on the list of priorities than ever before.

Using Gay Men’s Chorus to Fight Fires

Specifically, as LA County spent more than a billion dollars on the homeless, millions on electric vehicles, including an electric fire truck and EV charging stations, and hundreds of thousands on various DEI programs, they cut the fire department budget some $17 million this past year. One expenditure stands out to me: $14,010 to the "Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. Maybe Nero should have thought of hiring a choir while Rome burned. See here.

Our government needs to come to grips with reality, but that won’t happen until we start electing people with real world experience that breeds competence in managing priorities versus the ability to virtue signal. There are myriad local, state, and federal laws, that prevent us from thwarting out-of-control wildfires by reducing fuel loading. Nobody should have to get a permit to thin trees and brush on their property, or maximize flood control capacities in rivers, streams, and ditches; the government should be required to do the same on an ongoing basis on the property under its control. California also needs to quit wasting billions of gallons of water on fish and make it a priority that every community in this state has more water than it needs including by constructing multiple desal plants along the coast, along with a significant number of new dams and reservoirs.

Andy Caldwell, Executive Director, COLAB