Stunner: California Saved a Shrub Instead of Protecting Humans From the L.A. Firestorm

They really do hate humans, don't they? Just when you thought things couldn't get any dumber than dry fire hydrants, unusable reservoirs, and taking out dams, now comes word that Pacific Palisades went up in smoke in the name of preserving a shrub.

Environmentalists really do hate humans, don't they? If you said yes, you've been paying attention to the anti-human, zero population growth people who have led the environmental movement in ~~this country~~ the world for the past few decades. It's a different take on the PETA Ingrid Newkirk's “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” What's the environmentalist analog? A plant is a shrub is a tree is a human?

Thousands of homes were incinerated, at least two dozen have perished, schools have been wiped out, stores have been destroyed, and for what? When all the coins are counted, the L.A. fires will be the costliest disaster in California history.

What's the ROI on this investment in our environment, you crazy activists? How many dead people will it take to even the score?

Take a minute. Breathe. I'll wait.

OK. It's go time.

The L.A. Times reported —and I'm sure it killed them to do it—that enviros stopped the brush mitigation around Topanga Canyon by the L.A. Department of Water and Power in the Pacific Palisades in 2019 because of "community concerns about protected plants in the construction area."

Please stop the head banging. You'll lose consciousness and miss the rest of the story.

The Times reported in 2019 that DWP wanted to replace old wooden electricity poles with steel ones to lessen the fire fuel in Topanga Canyon. They also hoped to widen fire breaks on the slope leading from the Palisades to Pacific Coast Highway.

Sometime in July, DWP crews used bulldozers to clear and widen a graded road as part of a wildfire prevention project stretching from Pacific Palisades to Lake Encino. The California Public Utilities Commission has identified this area — which includes some of Southern California’s most expensive coastal real estate — as having an “elevated fire risk.” By installing steel poles, DWP hopes to make the power lines more resistant to high winds and fire.
“This project will help ensure power reliability and safety, while helping reduce wildfire threats,” DWP said in a statement Thursday. “These wooden poles were installed between 1933 and 1955 and are now past their useful service life.”
But in doing the work, say state authorities, the crews potentially destroyed hundreds of Braunton’s milk vetch plants, an endangered species whose remaining numbers have dwindled to less than 3,000 in the wild. [emphasis added]

This "potential" destruction was reported to the California Coastal Commission by amateur botanist and hiker David Pluenneke, who told the Times, “It’s hard not to think that if there had been blue whales and panda bears up there, they would have bulldozed them, too."

Apparently, everyone was still sizzling over the incident in which the L.A. County public works department accidentally encased in cement some threatened red-legged frogs at the scene of another huge California fire.

After the 2019 contretemps, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the California Department of Parks and Recreation, and the California Coastal Commission were involved. They stopped the Topanga Canyon pole replacement and fire road work to determine if the LADWP had broken the law.

The LADWP (taxpayers) had to pay a $1.9 million fine, replant the endangered plants, perform erosion control and reverse grading, end the project and "implement long-term monitoring of the damage it caused."

Now all of the woody shrubs are destroyed, homes have been incinerated, schools are mere husks, and many are financially wiped out. And the taxpayers are on the hook for all the costs again.

There are no guarantees that Pacific Palisades would have survived had the mitigation work been allowed to remain.

But, hey, they saved that shrub for a little while.

Priorities.