When the Fire Came to Pacific Palisades, Where Was the Water?

Contrary to what you’ve been led to believe recently, the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles is not the exclusive realm of the wealthy and famous. Yes, the Palisades has ( or had ) a healthy share of celebrities, and there are ( or were ) wide swaths of multi-million-dollar homes, but in truth, there are plenty of what we might call regular folks living there as well, even a police officer here and there. It is a group in the best sense of the word, where the rich and the not-so-wealthy go to the same churches, store in the same shops, eat in the same restaurants, and collection Sunset Boulevard every Fourth of July for the annual festival.

I spent my final years as a master living in Pacific Palisades, which is not just one area but a system of adjacent ones sharing the 90272 postal code: Castellammare, the Highlands, Marquez Knolls, the Bluffs, Huntington, the Alphabet Streets, the Riviera, and Rustic Canyon. Of these, only the Riviera and Rustic Canyon have thus far escaped widespread death. Next Tuesday morning about 1, 200 houses stood in the Alphabet Streets area, maybe a half hundred of them remain.

The religion I attended, the eateries and stores I frequented, and the homes of countless of my former relatives, including members of my extended family and some friends, are then ablaze. Now, even as the fireplace continues to burn to the north and east and threatens properties in Brentwood, Encino, and Tarzana, people are looking for a victim to blame. They claim that if this or that politician had just chosen a different path, if only the president or governor had chosen option B more than option A, then everything would be fine.

I ignore such chat. Despite my lack of respect for California governor Jerry Brown and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. The Palisades caught fire, according to Gavin Newsom, because neither of them did not fail sometimes. Any little flames in the area was sure to grow into a big one because of the strong winds. Where they did refuse, incredibly, was in their planning for the flames and their answer right away. A crisis may have been obvious, the size of the one that occurred was no.

Burns are a fact of life in Southern California. Southern Californians don’t know if a fire did commence, only where it will occur when the hot, dry Santa Ana winds blast, as they do every fall and winter, when the moisture drops almost nothing and every piece of paper you hold in your hand seems to be about to crumble to pieces or burst into flames. This is especially true when a dry winter follows a wet one, as this is the case this year. &nbsp,

Given this certainty, one anticipates those with the authority to make the necessary preparations so that the negative effects can be lowered when a fire breaks out. This is where Mayor Bass, Gov. Newsom and their various supporters slandered their supporters and sparked calls for their demise.

Mayor Bass has received a lot of negative feedback for taking the decision to travel to Ghana to meet the president’s inauguration, jetting off even as “red flag” fire conditions were forecast for Southern California. The use of taxpayer funds for a trip that would bring such negligible benefits to the city may be debated, but the Ghana boondoggle is similar to any junket on which public servants spend time sightseeing in exotic locations at public expense. Had it not been for the fire, Bass’s trip to Africa surely would have gone unnoticed.

It’s remarkable that when a reporter confronted her at LAX and asked her how to respond to questions about her absence in a crisis, she went completely silent until she was able to escape with the aid of her LAPD bodyguards.

However, staying silent is perhaps preferable to Gavin Newsom’s custom of speaking his peculiar style of polished, pompadourous gibberish, as he demonstrated when confronted by a distraught Palisades resident.

In truth, neither Bass’s nor Newsom’s nor any politician’s presence or absence in Los Angeles would have been of any consequence when the Palisades fire began on Tuesday. Again, it’s not that any of them could have stopped the fire from beginning, but rather how the government apparatus responded when it did. &nbsp,

The Los Angeles Fire Department is excellent, and when red-flag conditions occur, as they did last week, it redeploys resources where they are most vulnerable to wildfires. Other than those areas that are scattered across a large area of the city in the Hollywood Hills and the San Fernando Valley, Pacific Palisades is just one of those areas. More engine companies were needed to elude the Palisades fire’s eruption, which took time to bring in. Even if all city fire companies had been set up in the Palisades on Tuesday, they would still be powerless if they had been left without water, as the firefighters had done by late Tuesday night.

Three large tanks high in the hills above Pacific Palisades provide water for the area’s fire hydrants because there was a high demand for water as fires were raging in various neighborhoods at the same time, making the hundreds of firefighters who had flooded the area into little more than spectators to the blaze become little more than spectators. They heroically used shovels and buckets of dirt in places they believed might help, exhausting the 500-gallon tanks in their engines and pumping from swimming pools. But in the end, a firefighter without water can’t put up much of a fight.

Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, is paid about$ 750, 000 a year, LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley is paid about$ 440, 000, and her ten immediate subordinates average about$ 320, 000 a year. How long can a fire be fought before the supply runs out, in my opinion, given all this highly paid municipal brainpower never bothers to “war game” a worst-case scenario and ask” If we have X number of hydrants pumping Y volume of water”?

Such convoluted inquiries are not at the forefront of DWP head Quiones ‘ mind, based on a recent interview. Instead, she believes her most important task is to focus on “equity” in the delivery of water and electricity to the city’s four million residents. As they sift through the ashes of their homes, Pacific Palisades residents might find it comforting to know that the water they lacked was better used in a less prosperous neighborhood nearby.

Sadly, it’s not just the DWP that is infected with this mindset. According to her page on the department website, LAFD Deputy Chief Kristine Larson holds administrative positions and spends the least amount of time fighting fires in charge of the department’s Equity and Human Resources Bureau. Watch her in the video that appears in this New York Post story, and be prepared to laugh as she sarcasticly refers to men who might need to be saved from a fire.

It is beyond embarrassing that the city would give such a high salary to such a person and put her in such a position. The LAFD’s efforts to indoctrinate its employees in DEI nonsense are one less money that should be spent on the department’s goal of preventing fires and putting them out quickly when they do occur.

Some politicians will be held accountable for the failures these inquiries expose, and there will be inquiries into how the fire started and how it was fought. The Pacific Palisades may once again prosper, but only in an encouraging political climate. That atmosphere is not present at this time. Who will emerge to make it happen?

Source credit