Arson?

Update: Deb Heine rounds up the arson reports.

It gets worse, reports Nellie Boles.

Los Angeles is currently battling the most destructive wildfire in Los Angeles County history. The Palisades are gone--all those beautiful homes with those beautiful views just up in smoke. Evacuation orders have impacted nearly 180,000 people. Toxic air is engulfing millions more. With first responders tied up, looters are out in force. The fire hydrants have run out of water. Truly, the collapse we're seeing in Los Angeles is every California chicken coming home to every California roost.

Let's start from the top. The Los Angeles County Fire Department sent a load of their "surplus" gear to Ukraine in 2022, because it felt right to do that. From KTLA in 2022: "Boots, hoses, nozzles, body armor and medication were among the items packed and shipped out." Don't need extra of those. You're welcome, Slava Ukraini!

And don't forget: Growing firefighter diversity has been the main priority for the LA department of late, with a whole special equity bureau. And much has been made of the beautiful rainbow leading the department, run by a lesbian. Should I care that a lesbian saves me lesbianly? You might say, you're already a woman married to a woman, you're doing enough. But it's true: Unless the firefighter is singing "Come to My Window," I won't get on the ladder.

And what's an LA story without unchecked crime? With all first responders tied up, into the breach ran those who love chaos and want more homes to loot. Friend of The Free Press Andrew Huberman took this video of a group of men starting a new fire. And of course, there are missing hydrants all over the city because people have been stealing them for years. "Between January 2023 and May 2024, more than 300 fire hydrants were stolen from LA County streets, according to data from the Golden State Water Company, which manages the fire hydrants." Some of the hydrants are sold as scrap metal. Residents are asked to call if they notice a missing hydrant.

When you create a lawless environment and turn the criminals and lunatics out of prisons and asylums en masse, you're going to have vicious and/or insane people setting fires during an arson, as vengeance on the world.

And that's what's happening. I don't know how many of these fires were deliberately set by arsonists, but we know at least some were. More on that later.

Infrastructure that could have provided more water for those fires has been on hold, tied up in red tape. Ten years ago, California voters approved spending $7.5 billion to build water storage and improve state water facilities--but by 2023 not one dam had been finished, per the Los Angeles Times. Not a single one. But a decade into various environmental regulations and reviews, they are moving. ...

And what about controlled burns? Didn't they at least do that? No. "Forest Service Halts Prescribed Burns in California. Is It Worth the Risk?" reported KQED in October. See: If a controlled burn got messy, it would look bad, like, politically, and also, fire can be scary! So the U.S. Forest Service didn't do them.

Here's Michael Wara, energy and climate expert at Stanford University, explaining: "I think the Forest Service is worried about the risk of something bad happening [with a prescribed burn]. And they're willing to trade that risk--which they will be blamed for--for increased risks on wildfires." Which, he says, can then just be blamed on "Mother Nature."

Or "global warming."

The left can't excuse its failures by reciting its catechisms of "global warming, global warming, global warming." They're the ones who have been warning us for fifty years that global warming will cause more environmental disasters. So obviously they believe in an elevated risk of wildfires due to "global warming."

So riddle me this: Why do they take absolutely zero steps to mitigate the risks of the global warming they shriek about?

Do they just want the fires to burn down whole cities so they can say "I told you so" and have fresh fuel for demands we outlaw, well, fuel?

"Global warming" does not excuse their failure to take steps to clear the forest of deadfall. It indicts them further, because, by their own theory, global warming makes the need to practice prudent forest management even more urgent.

Back to the arsonists that the left has cultivated in large numbers.

I believe we talked about this possibility after one of California's other fires that caused billions in damage: Isn't California engineering its forests to be the easiest powderkegs for terrorists to set off?

All it takes is a book of matches and ten minutes of time near some dead leaves in a woods.

John Ekdahl @JohnEkdahl

One thing that has really stuck with me about this Los Angeles fire is how relatively easily this could have been pulled off by a foreign terror operation. We have a porous border with hostile foreign nationals routinely spilling across. It appears this obvious natural and predicable environmental threat was treated somewhere between cavalierly and complete indifference by local and state officials. I'm not suggesting that's what this was here (there's no evidence of that), but it would be incredibly short-sighted to not treat this event as a potential intentional terrorist target going forward, especially since it would be such a low buy-in from a manpower and materials perspective.

posted by Ace at 05:30 PM

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