See if you can identify the issue in this Internet News update that I received this week: Amazingly devastating flames are burning in Los Angeles typically unchecked, destroying entire neighborhoods.
As of that report, thousands of acres of fire burning into ( and then straight through ) districts, 1, 400 paramedics. We are under one firefighter for every two acres of fire in Pacific Palisades only, where the biggest fire started the second. I’ve spent most of my living in California, and a very common practice is to be in way-Northern California, for instance, and see a line of fire vehicles go racing past from San Diego and Newport Beach, 500 miles from home. We deal with big flames with quick nationwide mutual support, a well-practiced system.
I listened all Tuesday evening for the army to appear near the Eaton flames, which is burning in the rocks above Pasadena. The army, strangely, did not seem to appear. And so I watched homes burn, on the news, with reporters existing but no rescuers.
This is becoming a common problem, so significant and visible that actually the , Los Angeles Times , has noticed, writing:
As , fires raged across Los Angeles , on Tuesday, crew battling the , Palisades blaze , faced an extra problem: Ratings of fire extinguishers in Pacific Palisades had little to no fluids flowing up.
” The extinguishers are over”, said one firefighter in inner radio contacts.
” Ocean provide only dropped”, said another.
By 3 a. m. Wednesday, all water storage tank in the Palisades place “went dry”, diminishing the flow of water from sprinklers in higher altitudes, said Janisse Quiñones, deputy executive and chief architect of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the state’s power.
Where I live, in the western San Gabriel Valley, a large group of suburban fire departments has built an effective system of integrated and automatic mutual aid, the Verdugo system, run from a , shared dispatch center , in Glendale. I was listening to Verdugo dispatch Tuesday night, and the dispatchers gave up on dispatching. They broadcast calls in sets of 10 or 12, without assignments, so firefighters could hear what was happening, in case anyone could get to any of it: homes burning at the following addresses, brush burning at the following addresses, wires down at the following addresses…
The fire departments aren’t the problem, and the firefighters on the ground are very much not the problem. A cluster of headlines this morning at the , highly alert news aggregator Rantingly , begins to get at the underlying reality:
After cutting fire department funding to pay for social justice initiatives, the mayor of Los Angeles traveled to Ghana with the help of the city. How important.
As a matter of symbolism, the destruction of Pacific Palisades ( and, as we saw Wednesday morning,  , big stretches of Malibu ) is a gut punch. These are the most comfortable places in Los Angeles, and one of the discussions on social media this week is about , which celebrities , have evacuated or lost their homes. (” Oh my God, Tom Hanks”! ) The places that are burning are the Democrat Party’s ATM machine. One wonders if the purpose of the fires will be understood.  , Meanwhile:
So yes, the ability of leftists to miss the point appears to be infinite. California has enormously expensive and intrusive government that , can’t provide firefighters or water , when your neighborhood burns down, which proves that Orange Man Bad.
I’m more than a mile from the edge of the nearest evacuation warning, so we’ll be fine. However, that’s due to the accident we experienced in relation to the fire, and not because anything here actually works.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack,” Tell Me How This Ends”.
Chris Bray, a former infantry sergeant in the United States Army, holds a PhD in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of” Court-Martial: How Military Justice Has Shaped America from the Revolution to 9/11 and Beyond”, published last year by W. W. Norton.
