Los Angeles Wildfire Disaster: A Failure of Leadership
00:00:00.000 | I'm not very sympathetic to the, there were a hundred mile an hour winds, not because
00:00:05.640 | it's not true, but there's been enough modeling that we know that these kinds of outlier weather
00:00:13.660 | events are happening in greater and greater frequency.
00:00:18.040 | Remember that crazy apocalyptic video of that exact same part of Southern California in
00:00:24.800 | 2018 burning to the ground.
00:00:28.840 | Can we just look at that all of us collectively, because that was six years ago.
00:00:34.880 | This is not like it was a distant memory from a hundred years ago.
00:00:39.040 | This idea that we were just lollygagging around and got caught off guard by a hundred mile
00:00:44.080 | an hour winds to me is completely not an acceptable answer.
00:00:48.560 | We knew in 2018 that these things could happen.
00:00:51.680 | We knew across the rest of the United States that these outlier weather events were happening
00:00:55.560 | in greater and greater frequency.
00:00:58.180 | If you weren't sure, you saw most of the insurance companies try to dump Southern California
00:01:03.540 | homes fire coverage three months before this event happened.
00:01:08.080 | So all this data was in the realm of the knowable.
00:01:12.800 | And then when you double click and you get into a little bit more of the details, there's
00:01:17.340 | a level of incompetence bordering on criminal negligence here that we need to get to the
00:01:22.760 | bottom of.
00:01:23.760 | So let me just give you a couple of facts in the 1950s, the average amount of timber,
00:01:30.240 | so wood that was harvested in California was around 6 billion board feet per year.
00:01:37.660 | In the intervening 70 years that shrank to about 1.5 billion board feet.
00:01:43.420 | And so you'd say, okay, well, that's a 75% reduction.
00:01:47.840 | We must be making a very explicit stance on conservation.
00:01:51.880 | It turns out that that's not entirely true because what it left behind was nearly 163
00:01:59.120 | million dead trees, dead, like gone.
00:02:03.640 | And so you would say, well, those things should have been removed.
00:02:07.420 | And the problem is that then there's this California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA,
00:02:12.800 | hopefully I'm pronouncing this right.
00:02:15.300 | And a whole bunch of these other regulatory policies that limited the ability of local
00:02:19.680 | governments and fire management to clear these dead trees and vegetation.
00:02:25.340 | And I think that that's a really big deal.
00:02:27.260 | And when you double click on that, here's where you find the real head scratcher, okay?
00:02:34.400 | Multiple bills, AB 2330, AB 1951, AB 2639, all rejected by the Democrat controlled legislator
00:02:44.440 | or worse vetoed by Governor Newsom that would have exempted these wildfire prevention projects
00:02:51.320 | from CEQA and other permitting issues.
00:02:54.600 | Then there were other bills to try to minimize the risk of fires by burying power lines underground.
00:03:00.000 | SB 103, as an example, went nowhere, didn't even get to the governor's desk.
00:03:06.440 | So I'm just a little bit at a loss to explain these two bodies of data.
00:03:12.960 | One is everybody can see that these events are happening.
00:03:17.440 | Southern California lived through this exact type of moment just six years ago.
00:03:24.600 | All the bills that are meant to prevent this are blocked or vetoed.
00:03:29.900 | This is the ultimate expression of negligence and incompetence.
00:03:34.240 | How did these fires start?
00:03:36.620 | How did they grow out of control?
00:03:38.800 | And again, I think that these wins didn't come out of nowhere in the sense that they
00:03:43.400 | caught everybody off guard.
00:03:45.160 | This has happened before.
00:03:47.200 | That area has gone through this exact moment.
00:03:51.100 | There were laws that were proposed.
00:03:53.040 | They were vetoed, okay?
00:03:55.700 | So that even if you could have controlled it, then you see certain developers like Rick
00:04:00.920 | Caruso who were able to protect the buildings that he was responsible for because he took
00:04:07.080 | proactive and protective measures.
00:04:09.880 | Could those proactive and protective measures not be taken more broadly through LA County?
00:04:14.320 | Of course they could have.
00:04:16.480 | Why were they not?
00:04:17.960 | And here, what we're seeing on the screen is Rick Caruso's village.
00:04:21.480 | Let me ask a very specific question.
00:04:23.320 | Pacific Palisades.
00:04:24.320 | How much money, and we know the answer to this, how much money did the government of
00:04:28.440 | California spend poorly, as it turns out, on homelessness, it was about $21 billion,
00:04:36.160 | and illegal immigrants.
00:04:37.160 | I don't know what the final number is there, but I suspect in the tens of billions.
00:04:41.380 | If you reappropriated those dollars to these kinds of protective mechanisms in these areas,
00:04:46.600 | what would the outcome have been?
00:04:47.840 | Maybe there still would have been a fire.
00:04:49.520 | Maybe there would have been damage, but it's hard for me to believe it would have been
00:04:52.880 | as bad as it is right now.