Despite what you’ve been led to believe in recent days, the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles is not the exclusive domain of the rich 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 community in the best sense of the word, where the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy go to the same churches, shop in the same stores, eat in the same restaurants, and line Sunset Boulevard every Fourth of July for the annual parade.
I spent my last years as a bachelor living in Pacific Palisades, which is not just one neighborhood but a network of contiguous ones sharing the 90272 zip 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 destruction. Last Tuesday morning about 1,200 homes stood in the Alphabet Streets neighborhood; perhaps a half dozen of them remain.
The apartment building where I once lived now lies in ashes, as do the church I attended, the stores and restaurants I patronized, and the homes of thousands upon thousands of my former neighbors, including members of my extended family and many friends. Today, even as the fire continues to burn to the north and east and threatens homes in Brentwood, Encino, and Tarzana, people are looking for a scapegoat to blame. If this or that politician had only followed a different course, they say, if only the mayor or governor had opted for choice B rather than choice A, all would be well.
I dismiss such talk. Though I have little regard for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, it was not a failure by either of them that allowed the Palisades to catch fire. Given the high winds, any small fire in the area was sure to grow into a large one. Where they did fail, spectacularly so, was in their preparation for the fire and their response once it began. A disaster may have been unavoidable; the scale of the one that occurred was not.
Fires are a fact of life in Southern California. When the warm, dry Santa Ana winds blow, as they do every fall and winter, when the humidity drops to almost nothing and every piece of paper you hold in your hand feels as though it’s about to crumble to pieces or burst into flames, Southern Californians don’t wonder if a fire will start, only where it will. This is especially so when, as is the case this year, a dry winter follows a wet one.
Given this inevitability, one expects those trusted with the authority to make the necessary preparations so the ill effects can be mitigated when fire breaks out. This is where Mayor Bass, Gov. Newsom, and their various underlings failed their constituents and earned the calls for their removal from office.
Mayor Bass has been widely criticized for her decision to fly to Ghana to attend the inauguration of that country’s president, jetting off even as “red flag” fire conditions were predicted for Southern California. One may debate the use of taxpayer funds for a trip that would bring such negligible benefits to the city, but the Ghana boondoggle is no different than any junket on which public servants go sightseeing in exotic locales at public expense. Had it not been for the fire, Bass’s trip to Africa surely would have gone unnoticed.
But given that Bass had a long flight home on which to consider how to respond to questions about her absence in a crisis, it’s remarkable that when a reporter confronted her on her arrival at LAX, she went completely mute until she could escape with the help of her LAPD bodyguards.
But staying mute is perhaps preferable to Gavin Newsom’s habit of speaking his peculiar brand of slick, pomaded gibberish, as exhibited when he was 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 prevented the fire from starting, but rather how the government apparatus responded when it did.
The Los Angeles Fire Department is excellent, and when red-flag conditions occur as they did last week, the department redeploys resources into areas most vulnerable to wildfires. Pacific Palisades is but one of those areas, with others scattered across a wide expanse of the city in the Hollywood Hills and the fringes of the San Fernando Valley. When the Palisades fire broke out, it took time to muster more engine companies into the area. But even if every fire company in the city had been pre-positioned in the Palisades on Tuesday, they would have been powerless if left without water, as the firefighters were by late Tuesday night.
Three large tanks high in the hills above Pacific Palisades feed the area’s fire hydrants, and such was the demand for water as fires were raging in several neighborhoods simultaneously that the tanks were drained faster than they could be replenished, turning the hundreds of firefighters who had flooded into the area into little more than spectators to the conflagration. They heroically did what they could, exhausting the 500-gallon tanks on their engines and pumping from swimming pools before resorting to shoveling dirt in places they thought might make a difference. 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. To me, it is inconceivable that all this highly paid municipal brainpower never bothered to “war game” a worst-case scenario and ask, “If we have X number of hydrants pumping Y volume of water, how long can we battle a fire before we exhaust the supply?”
Judging from a recent interview, such mundane questions are not foremost on the mind of DWP head Quiñones. 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. Perhaps the residents of Pacific Palisades, as they sift through the ashes of their homes, will be comforted in knowing that the water they lacked was better utilized in some less-prosperous neighborhood across town.
Sadly, it’s not just the DWP that is infected with this mindset. LAFD Deputy Chief Kristine Larson oversees the department’s Equity and Human Resources Bureau, a position to which she rose, if one can judge from her page on the department website, via administrative positions and minimal time spent fighting fires. Watch her in the video featured in this New York Post story and be prepared to cringe as she speaks derisively of men who may find themselves in need of rescue from a fire.
That the city should pay such a lavish salary to such a person and install her in such a position is beyond embarrassing. Every dollar and every minute the LAFD devotes to indoctrinating its employees in DEI nonsense is one less that should be spent on the department’s mission to prevent fires and extinguish them quickly when they occur.
There will be inquiries into how the fire started and how it was fought, and some politicians will rightly pay a price for the failures these inquiries expose. Pacific Palisades may one day thrive again but only in a political atmosphere that encourages it. That atmosphere does not currently exist. Who will emerge to create it?
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