People are Starting to Ask What the Hell is Going On - And Why

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People are Starting to ask What the Hell is Going On – And Why

The Wall Street Journal publishes a real estate section every Friday appropriately titled “MANSION.” It features stories and photos of mansions for sale that only the hoi poli can afford: homes with round-the-clock security that feature tennis courts, swimming pools, wine cellars, theaters, exercise rooms, gardens, expansive lawns, and private quarters for maids, butlers and chefs.

On Friday, January 17, seven pages of the 16-page section were devoted to the horrific damage the Palisades and Eaton fires had caused in Pacific Palisades, Altadena, Pasadena and Malibu. Many were homes like those you would expect MANSION to feature. One was about a year ago.

Google reports that CoreLogic, an analytics and data provider that serves the financial and real estate industries, estimates that the losses will be in the $35 to $45 billion dollar range.

Multiply that estimate by two. Damage costs for Category 4 Hurricane Helena and Category 5 Hurricane Milton topped $50 billion in Florida and North Carolina, alone. They struck the two states within 11 days of one another last Fall.

I doubt that most people feel sorry for the losses suffered by the Hollywood crowd. They can afford to rebuild with or without insurance settlements. But many living in the rubble lost everything - including their jobs - and are counting on their insurance companies to bail them out of their losses.

The LA fires aren’t forest fires – or even brush fires in the conventional sense of the word. Firefighters from across the West are engaged in something more akin to house-to-house warfare. So far, none have died, but 28 residents have been killed. Cadaver dogs are combing smoking ruins in search of bodies. I suspect the dogs will find some.

The chaos prompted Los Angeles Battalion Chiefs, Assistant Chiefs and Deputy Chiefs to send a blistering five-page letter to their boss, Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley, in which they suggested she was in “CYA mode.”

CYA as in “cover your ass.” She still is. So is LA Mayor, Karen Bass, who was in Ghana for the inauguration of the country’s new president when the Palisades fire broke out. As a former member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mayor Bass made frequent trips to the African sub-continent to work on diplomatic relationships between Africa and the U.S.

When she decided to run for Mayor in 2021, a Times reporter asked her if she intended to curb her international travel during her term in office. She said she would. But she was in Ghana when all hell broke loose in Pacific Palisades.

The normally left-leaning Los Angeles Times has pulled no punches in its reporting on the ass-covering. But the current political dustup is less about where Mayor Bass was on January 7 and more about Fire Chief Crowley's role in reducing her department’s 2025 budget by two percent, nearly $18 million. That doesn’t seem like much in a $900 million annual budget, but the letter from her Chiefs speaks to the political nastiness that is so pervasive in big city governments.

Here is the letter to Chief Crowley

I was among 21 signers on a more polite but to-the-point 2021 letter to Forest Service Chief, Randy Moore. Also among the signers: The late Bruce Courtright, founder of the National Wildfire Institute, on whose masthead the letter appears. Bruce was widely admired by Forest Service colleagues.

Forest Service retiree Michael Rains, who held numerous posts in the Washington Office during his 50 years with the agency, also signed the letter. His exceptionally well-documented blog posts, which he titled A Call to Action, first appeared in my email box sometime in 2020, not long after he wrote the foreword to my book, First, Put Out the Fire.

Among the other signers: Evergreen board members Ted Stubblefield and Phil Aune. We interviewed them in Parts 1 and 2 of our Rebuilding the Forest Service series. You can read both interviews on this website.

Unlike the five-page letter to Chief Crowley, our 2021 letter to Chief Moore ran 44 pages because it included Michael's July 23, 2021 Call to Action. Michael has since updated his report 19 times.

The Call is an impressive body of work that draws from hundreds of scientific studies that focus on wildfire, its multiple causes and numerous time-tested and proven strategies for reducing wildfire risk. To understand how sophisticated it became - and how much worse the West's wildfire pandemic became - here is Michael's last Call, written November 17, 2024.

The anti-forestry mob has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in strategies designed to draw the public’s attention away from the West’s wildfire pandemic. It's worked well for at least 30 years. Now suddenly, in the wake of house-to-house carnage in southern California’s wealthiest enclaves, news media talking heads are starting to ask what the hell is happening – and why.

The Wall Street Journal has done some impressive on-scene reporting. On the broadcast side, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC] approach skips most of the climate change hysteria that pervades U.S. networks. Canada’s journalists are more even-handed and often more supportive of their natural resource-based industries than U.S. journalists.

Mike Archer also does a great job with his Wildfire News of the Day and Nick Smith’s HFHC News Roundup delivers a solid Monday thru Friday summary of forestry-related events coast-to-coast. Google them. Both reports are free, though donations are happily accepted. Same here.

President Trump toured the Los Angeles carnage on January 24. Paraphrazing Bette Davis, "Hang on to your hats. It's going to be a bumpy ride. Especially if your last name is Newsom."