Los Angeles is on fire and everybody is looking for somebody to blame. Starting Tuesday, strong Santa Ana winds reaching up to 100mph ignited wildfires all around the city, with five different fires having broken out by Thursday. By Friday morning, at least 10 people had died, over 35,000 acres had burned (an area larger than the island of Manhattan), and damages were expected to reach over $50B, making the fires among the costliest natural disasters in United States history.
With countless images and videos of abandoned homes and highways making the rounds, many called out these fires as the latest example of our climate change reality.
But the two species of conflagration are inverse images of each other. Defended in 1993 by the largest army of firefighters in American history, wealthy Malibu homeowners benefited as well from an extraordinary range of insurance, land use, and disaster relief subsidies. Yet, as most experts will readily concede, periodic firestorms of this magnitude are inevitable as long as residential development is tolerated in the fire ecology of the Santa Monicas.
On the other hand, most of the 119 fatalities from tenement fires in the Westlake and Downtown areas might have been prevented had slumlords been held to even minimal standards of building safety. If enormous resources have been allocated, quixotically, to fight irresistible forces of nature on the Malibu coast, then scandalously little attention has been paid to the man-made and remediable fire crisis of the inner city. – The Case for Letting Malibu Burn
As the fires rapidly spread, Angelinos turned to social media to find the latest information on at-risk areas and recommendations from the authorities. Instead, they were met with what these platforms have deteriorated into.
Because this is the internet in 2025, amidst the human tragedy unfolding, everybody online raced to point fingers at the true cause or accelerant of both the physical and financial damage imposed by these fires.
Throughout, incomplete or entirely inaccurate information has spread like, well, wildfire. Fairly and unfairly, Mayor Karen Bass and California’s political leaders more broadly taking most of the heat – again, no pun intended – from both the left and the right.
On both the left and the right, people were quick to call out Mayor Karen Bass’ increase to the LAPD budget at the expense of the fire department.
Even the owner of the LA Times called out the budget cut.
Problem is, it’s not exactly true.
That assertion is wrong. The city was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted, so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund until that deal was finalized in November. In fact, the city’s fire budget increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget cycle, according to Blumenfield’s office, although overall concerns about the department’s staffing level have persisted for a number of years. –Politico
For those who are interested in the details behind this mix-up, click through here for a longer thread:
But with stories of firefighters struggling with empty fire hydrants, many people in and outside of Los Angeles (reasonably!) demanded answers. In a perfect storm situation – extreme winds and high vegetation thanks to two years of very wet winters – where bad luck stops and poor management begins is difficult to parse out.
“Those tanks help with the pressure on the fire hydrants in the hills in the Palisades, and because we were pushing so much water in our trunk line, and so much water was being used. … we were not able to fill the tanks fast enough,” she said. “So the consumption of water was faster than we can provide water in a trunk line.”
In other words, the demand for water at lower elevations was hampering the ability to refill the tanks located at higher elevations. Because of the ongoing fire, DWP crews also faced difficulty accessing its pump stations, which are used to move water up to the tanks. –Los Angeles Times
President-elect Trump weighed in, blaming California Governor Gavin Newsom for blocking water into Southern California to protect the smelt fish, prompting Newsom’s office to issue a response on Twitter.
LADWP said that because of the high water demand, pump stations at lower elevations did not have enough pressure refill tanks at higher elevations, and the ongoing fire hampered the ability of crews to access the pumps. To supplement, they used water tenders to supply water — a common tactic in wildland firefighting.
But broadly speaking, there is no water shortage in Southern California right now, despite Trump’s claims that he would open some imaginary spigot.
“In terms of water reliability and water supply at this moment in Southern California, things are looking pretty solid,” said Mike McNutt of the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which serves 75,000 people in northwest Los Angeles County.”
“Orange County Water District Chief Hydrogeologist Roy Herndon said his agency, which supplies groundwater to the north half of the county, has enough supply to carry its 2.5 million customers through the worst of any potential droughts — multiple years in a row with minimal rainfall. “Three years, no problem. I’d say even five years,” Herndon said.”
“The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — which serves 19 million people mostly with imported water — also has an abundance, “with a record 3.8 million acre-feet of water in storage,” according to Interim General Manager Deven Upadhyay, who issued a statement last week.
That’s enough water to supply 40 million people for a year.”
The nature of the most affected areas, such as the wealthy neighborhood of the Pacific Palisades, both highlighted the libertarian ethos behind disinvestment in public services like firefighting and served as the backdrop for Twitter’s main character on Tuesday.
From his since-deleted account, VC Keith Wasserman sought out private firefighting services for his neighborhood.
At the same time, many working class families also found themselves in the fires’ path. One particularly heartbreaking story involved a couple who just lost their fire insurance months ago.
This story and others like it prompted a debate about the predatory role of insurance companies. But, like any California story, it’s actually a story about our often problematic ballot system.
Last year, State Farm canceled 1,600 policies in Pacific Palisades because the state would not allow them to raise premiums enough to cover their exposure. The affected homeowners would then likely have to rely on the state-run FAIR Plan, an expensive last-resort insurance program. But the FAIR Plan reportedly only had a surplus of $200 million as of April 2024 and was likely to become insolvent if a catastrophic event occurred.
Governor Newsom goes around posturing about politics instead of trying to solve urgent problems. Our state government takes billions of dollars from hard-working Californians and provides barely anything in return. An unconscionable failure.
In the end, there isn’t one obvious villain, or one policy decision that could have prevented this unimaginable emergency. Even climate change is not the sole culprit. Instead, a combination of decades of poor land use and some really, really bad luck were at play here.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, has come under scrutiny for holding up wildfire mitigation practices such as controlled burns in the name of environmental preservation.
Ballot propositions aside, fire-proofing entire cities will require large-scale collective behavioral change.
There are no obvious answers in a complex scenario like this, except where there are. Unless your brain is broken by right-wing internet rabbit holes like Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire’s, it will probably seem obvious to you that woke is not, in fact, the cause of these wildfires.
On the subject of the composition of the firefighting forces, many were quick to point to California’s exploitative use of incarcerated labor.
Indeed, these fires have provided no shortage of slices of modern dystopia.
Modern dystopia, or modern utopia?
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