The Great L.A. Fire

By David Samuel McCalmont

The damage is done. Nobody prayed for an inferno of apocalyptic proportions. Few people thought it possible that one windstorm, even on top of a rainy season that has yet to begin in Southern California, could visit such cataclysmic destruction in such multiple thrusts at one time.

Pacific Palisades is gone – history – leveled to the ground; thousands of homes and businesses reduced to ashes. The area around Altadena above Pasadena will likely deliver similar results when he smoke clears.

The infrastructure of prosperity hung by mere threads before this catastrophe visited the Los Angeles metro area. The entire insurance industry was looking for one major excuse to pack up and leave California for good. It was handed a disaster of monumental proportions gift-wrapped and delivered overnight to the industry’s doorstep.

Without insurance coverage, the façade of wealth turns into the reality of poverty. The U.S.A. without insurance coverage will take on the trappings of Accra, Ghana.

This is a tragedy that didn’t need to happen in such a gargantuan way. The Perfect Storm of abject incompetence and mediocrity was demonstrated and illustrated for all but the deaf to hear and the blind to see.

Who’s in charge?

Who is standing atop a pile of rubble with a megaphone imparting inspiration and hope?

Who is delegating authority?

All I see are beneficiaries of the Graduate School of DEI (Diversity! Equity! Inclusion!). Nobody knows what to do, what to say. Years of incompetence piled on top of itself.

Where are the adults?

Some of us were asking each other during the recent election campaign – when it wasn’t yet apparent that Trump/Vance would walk away with a comfortable national victory – just what it would take to separate diehard Democrats from the abysmal institution their party had become. How far, we wondered, into the dumpster must one-party cities and states fall before the partisan constituencies that vote these people into office every election cycle become openly aware that the tragedy that has befallen them is the outcome and result of the policies and people they have selected for decades without question or challenge?

At 3 am Wednesday morning, January 8, fire hydrants ran dry in Pacific Palisades. It doesn’t get any worse than that. How do you explain such a thing to your voters?

There won’t be change for the better until the registered voters of the political party responsible for the decades of political lunacy stand before the leaders they’ve put in office are held to account.

Then, for gosh sakes, turn around and vote for people in the other party.

It can’t – shouldn’t – take very long.

How long, oh Lord, how long?

A Complete Lack of Leadership

Despite dire warnings by the National Weather Service that serious trouble was brewing, 71-year-old newly elected Mayor Karen Bass left for Ghana. As the Palisades Fire began to consume huge swaths of America's second largest city, she returned to L.A., utilizing a military jet offered by the Pentagon. Since her return, however, her responses to most peoples' questions oscillated between stone-faced silence and stammering, borderline-incoherent answers.

She couldn't tell residents the name of the website where emergency resources could be found. Sticking to a script provided by aides, she said it could be found at "URL." She has done nothing to restore public trust in her handling of an apocalyptic disaster.

Of course, this isn't just about a DEI mayor in way over her head. A great city can survive a bad mayor, or even a series of bad mayors. This is a fable about the ability of the state of California to prevent, or capably mitigate, a long-predicted catastrophe. How could a state, which for the longest time came to symbolize good governance, come to prioritize ideological concerns of ambitious politicians over the basics of what government is expected by the people to do?

Naturally, there are some excuses that can be brought to bear on the subject. Some say California is built to burn: Its warm climate and vast woodlands are a deadly combination. Regardless of who's running it, any city will be a victim of category-one hurricane winds whistling through mountain passes while gaining 30 degrees in temperature on its downward rush, exacerbating tinderbox dry vegetation along the way. But little of that explains how one of the most storied and majestic cities in the world is burning to the ground.

The failure is an entirely human one.

When, for example, Anderson Cooper of CNN asked California Governor Gavin Newsom why the fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades ran dry at 3 am Wednesday morning, Newsom responded that “the local folks are trying to figure that out.”

Democrats in California never heard of Harry S. Truman. The buck always stops somewhere else in the (once) Golden State.

Time is ripe for a stern comeuppance to take place among California's increasingly out-of-touch political class.

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P.S. January 9 is the 7th anniversary of the Montecito Debris Flow in the middle of the night that killed 23 residents, many of them in their sleep. Rest-in-Peace; Memory Eternal.