The devastating wildfires that have laid waste to entire Los Angeles neighborhoods were fueled in large part by dried-out underbrush piling up in the surrounding hills, which state and local officials ignored warnings about for years and at times even misled the public about efforts to clear it.
Removal of decaying vegetation is a key component of brushfire prevention in arid climates, but LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom repeatedly failed to address the problem, which set the stage for one of the worst disasters in the history of the city.
“It’s beyond negligence in my opinion,” said Rick Caruso, a California billionaire real estate developer who ran against Bass in the 2022 mayoral race.
“Some really tough questions need to be answered about how this happened — the void of leadership. Not just in the last couple of days but in the last couple of years,” he said on CNBC Wednesday, resurrecting a theme he repeatedly against Bass in his unsuccessful bid for mayor.
“The public hillsides there and mountains have not been managed, the amount of brush created fuel that was just unstoppable,” he said of the raging LA wildfires that have so far claimed five lives, destroyed more than 1,000 structures and is set to cost as much as $57 billion in damages.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Bass dismissed Caruso’s concerns about the city and county’s failure to clear the underbrush from Pacific Palisades and adjacent neighborhoods, placing the blame on “eight months of negligible rain and winds that have not been seen in LA in at least 14 years.”
On Thursday, Bass — who took heat for being in Ghana when the blaze ignited — grew combative with reporters who questioned the efficacy of her crisis leadership, shifting blame to factors like the fierce Santa Ana winds that hindered firefighters’ progress, and even the fire hydrants.
Bass conceded that “of course” she was frustrated by the hydrants malfunctioning — many of which ran dry or provided abysmally low water pressure during the fire’s key early moments.
“We also know the hydrants are not designed to deal with this type of massive devastation and that the number one problem, especially on Wednesday, was the fact that we weren’t able to do air support because of the wind,” she said.
It was no secret that the Pacific Palisades were slowly becoming a tinderbox over the years, with Newsom himself pledging on his first day in office in 2019 to overhaul the state’s wildfire prevention apparatus.
“We need to do more and better,” he said at the time, promising the state would “step up our game” when it comes to forest thinning, controlled burns and other mitigation efforts aimed at protecting vulnerable communities — some of which were reduced to cinders this week as the fires devoured the long-uncleared brush.
Despite his tough talk, Newsom slashed and burned the state’s fire prevention budget by around $150 million — during one of its worst years for wildfires on record, according to an NPR report.
Even more galling, the governor shamelessly embellished the number of acres treated under his promised plan, claiming 90,000 acres were treated when the true figure was closer to 12,000.
Even President-elect Donald Trump was able to presage the effects of Newsom’s inaction, hitting out at the governor in an X thread from more than five years ago.
“The Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must ‘clean’ his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him,” Trump wrote back in November 2019.
“Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers every year, as the fire’s rage and California burns, it is the same thing — and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$ help. No more. Get your act together Governor,” he said.
The Los Angeles area has experienced wetter-than-usual winters for the last two years, which helped foster the growth of grass and brush on hillsides throughout the region — which is dotted with multimillion-dollar homes and where scores of celebrities reside.
Back-to-back soggy winters, followed by record-breaking drought conditions which dried out the fresh vegetation, created the perfect conditions for a deadly and fast-moving wildfire.
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“The abnormally high fuel loads from two wet years are very likely playing an important role here,” Park Williams, bioclimatologist and professor at UCLA, told The Post Thursday.
“Then there’s the fact that the rainy season hasn’t yet begun, now 2-3 months late in arriving, and then the exceptional Santa Ana winds this week. Flip one of those 3 switches off and you don’t get the extraordinary fire activity this week,” he said.
Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist, called the phenomenon “hydroclimate whiplash” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
“This whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold: first, by greatly increasing the growth of flammable grass and brush in the months leading up to fire season, and then by drying it out to exceptionally high levels,” Swain told the outlet.
The Los Angeles Fire Department warned the increased risk of brushfires was quickly becoming a year-round phenomenon back in 2021, as an earlier blaze also dubbed the Palisades Fire torched more than 1,300 acres.
“We no longer have a brush fire season,” Margaret Stewart, spokeswoman for the LAFD told the LA Times.
“The extended duration of the drought and the dryness of the vegetation across the region means that we have these brush fires throughout the year.”