So, like most Americans, I could only sit and watch on television news broadcasts, the horror and devastation of the L.A. fires. As a resident of the Los Angles area for over 40 years, I am very familiar with the areas that I watched go up in flames in a matter of minutes due to 90 to 100 mile an hour winds and a lack of preparation on behalf of state and local governments. As a former firefighter myself, I understood the frustration of not being able to do what we called putting the wet stuff on the red stuff in an extremely difficult situation.
Most typical fire engines you see carry 500 to 750 gallons of water. A pumper can pump 2000 gallons per minute! That means while that 500-gallon supply sounds substantial, it can be exhausted in as little as 15 seconds when fighting a fire. So, when an engine company rolls up on any active fire scene, the first priority is to catch a hydrant so that the engine’s tank has a constant and unlimited supply of water, but time after time, I kept hearing that engine companies were rolling up to a burning structure only to find a dry hydrant. Now granted, the system was heavily taxed. Hydrants are designed to handle 2 maybe 3 structure fires at a time. Here we are talking about whole neighborhoods that were on fire.
Another question that has to be answered was why the Santa Yenez Reservoir, which holds 117 million gallons of water and sits in the heart of the Pacific Palisades, was empty and has been since February 2024.
In November 2014, California voters approved Proposition 1, The Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act. The $7.5 billion bond dedicated $2.7 billion for the public benefits of new water storage projects. It’s been 11 years and not one Reservoir has been built while California continues to burn.
But water is not the only problem here. The removal of decaying vegetation is a key component of brushfire prevention in arid climates, but California Gov. Gavin Newsom repeatedly failed to address the problem, which set the stage for one of the worst disasters in the history of the city. The public hillsides and mountains in this area, have not been managed. The tremendous amounts of brush created fuel that was just unstoppable. It was no secret that the Pacific Palisades were slowly becoming a tinderbox over the years. Newsom himself pledged on his first day in office in 2019 to overhaul the state’s wildfire prevention apparatus. But he never did. Instead, he signed the 2024-25 California state budget, which slashed funding for wildfire and forest resilience by $101 million dollars, which included a reduction of $5 million in spending on CAL FIRE fuel reduction teams, including funds used to pay for vegetation management work by the California National Guard.
Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass slashed 17 million dollars from the Los Angeles Fire Department’s 24-25 budget. She claims that this had no effect on the wildfires. Hours earlier, Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley delivered a scathing indictment of Mayor Bass's administration, exposing a crisis of funding, staffing, and readiness that she says left her department ill-equipped to face the catastrophe. Chief Crowley was fired two days later.
So where does this leave us Californians? I can tell you where it leaves this Californian. I live in the Los Padres National Forest, which is the second-largest national forest in California. Major insurance companies like State Farm and Allstate announced they were pulling out of California or at least not issuing any new fire policies. In 2024, my insurance company, Farmers, informed me it was dropping my fire policy, which forced me to get fire insurance from The California Fair Plan, which is an insurance program backed by the state of California that is used by property owners who cannot find private market insurance coverage. It doubles and sometimes triples fire insurance costs. The plan could have over 24 billion in total losses from the 2025 California wildfires, which would send the price of those policies skyrocketing yet again.
It's A Recipe for Disaster.
Written by Walt Ryba January 13th 2025
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