by Edward Ring
Decades of Santa Ana winds fueling fires show California's failure to prioritize land management, instead focusing on politics while residents face predictable disasters.
The first time I’d ever heard of the Santa Ana wind was while reading an essay famed author Joan Didion wrote, “Los Angeles Notebook,” which is included in her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Writing in 1968, Didion describes what had happened just a decade earlier.
The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957,” Didion writes, “and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4. On the first day, 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles per hour. In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale… On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour.
This conflagration, nearly 70 years ago, involved a weather event that was easily a match for what Angelenos are enduring today. That hasn’t stopped the climate crisis industry from pouncing on this tragedy to score political points. From the Sierra Club on January 8, “Time and again, we are witnessing climate change heighten extreme weather, making wildfires increasingly common and increasingly destructive.” From the BBC, “Climate ‘whiplash’ linked to raging LA fires.”
We will hear more of this agenda-driven, politically motivated hectoring, even though according to at least some climate experts, including John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama and originally a California native, over a century of climate data in California refutes the climate crisis narrative.
But what if the climate crisis narrative is valid? So what? If our climate is turning against us, doesn’t that mean we have to be even more prepared to cope with what nature’s going to throw at us, starting with the Santa Ana winds?
Rather than look in the mirror, environmentalists claim these fires are being exploited for political gain by their critics. For example, Steve Lopez, a regular columnist for the Los Angeles Times, accuses president-elect Trump of “using the fires as a political piñata.” But it’s the people running California, the Democrats that Trump and other critics are now holding accountable, who have politicized the management of everything. Not just land use and climate science, but entire industries and every category of infrastructure. Nothing has escaped their reach.
After California’s devastating fires in the summer of 2020, Newsom issued an executive order to ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars starting in 2035. After another round of fires in 2023, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against five major oil companies, accusing them of knowingly misleading the public regarding the harm that fossil fuels would inflict on the climate.
This is pure political theater. What California’s forests need, along with the chaparral currently being immolated in the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains surrounding the Los Angeles Basin, is responsible land management. Before having any discussion, even of firefighting response, much less the “climate crisis,” California’s governor, supported by the state legislature, needs to enact sweeping reforms that, among other things, radically deregulate the activities of timber harvesting, mechanical thinning, grazing, and controlled burns.
As it is, the canyons between the neighborhoods on the hills and ridges surrounding Los Angeles are dangerously overgrown, along with the adjacent state parks and open space. There’s no way to completely stop a wildfire when the Santa Ana winds turn Los Angeles County into a blast furnace. But if the state and county had managed their open space, and private property owners had been not merely permitted but required to clear overgrown brush around their homes, these fires would not have had enough fuel to become the catastrophes we’re witnessing today.
When it comes to politics, exposing DEI-driven incompetence is also touted by defenders of the bureaucracy as another example of how this conflagration is being politicized by its critics. But there is nothing about DEI that is not political, so critics are politicizing something that is already explicitly political. To put this as delicately as possible, thanks to DEI, the chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, the assistant chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, the Los Angeles Fire Department’s first “Equity Bureau Chief,” and the CEO of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power are all political appointees who check two diversity boxes.
Let’s be clear. Nobody wants to discriminate against anyone based on their sexuality or ethnicity. Those days are long gone. In California of all places, those days are ancient history. But were these people selected based on how many boxes they checked relating to their sex, sexuality, or ethnicity, instead of based on their qualifications? The laws of probability suggest that DEI was the prevailing criteria. Up and down the chain of command, from top to bottom, this is happening all the time, everywhere, in every institution that matters. Instead of merit, we are hiring people based on how many diversity boxes they check.
And if these women, the chief in particular, are not the most qualified individuals for the job, what are the consequences of that fact? At a time when leadership was desperately needed, LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley—who, according to Transparent California, made $654,951 in 2023—was scoring points in the liberal press for excluding white men from hiring and promotion opportunities in the name of diversity and irrespective of their qualifications. This sort of discrimination not only deprives fire teams of the most capable potential members, something that I’ve personally been told by current and retired California firefighters. Worse still, and most pertinent to the tragedies citizens are suffering today, Kristin Crowley was not using 100 percent of her leadership capital to demand the reforms to land management and upgrades to firefighting resources that could have prevented this disaster from getting out of control.
Every press conference and interview Kristin Crowley gave on “diversity”—for example, last winter—was time she should have spent publicly demanding the state, county, and cities immediately send crews into the canyons and finally engage in fuel reduction projects. Everyone knew this was a disaster waiting to happen. And more recently, once she knew the Santa Ana winds were forecast, she could have already been prepositioning tankers and engines and if the resources weren’t there, she could have already been urgently requesting help in advance from other jurisdictions. And why, in a city as big as Los Angeles, in a state as innovative and wealthy as California, wasn’t LAFD exploring and deploying new technologies, such as nontoxic fire retardants or, heck, machine learning chaparral robots to cut, clear and chip overgrown grass, brush, and fallen limbs? Why didn’t Crowley demand the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power trim the trees around power lines, or better yet, move them underground in fire-prone neighborhoods, and demand the state find the funds to help pay for it? And why, if we are to get to what everyone knows is the root of these policy failures, didn’t Crowley publicly expose the environmentalist extremists, the NGOs, and agency activists who have litigated and regulated practical land management to a standstill?
Why didn’t Kristin Crowley hold press conferences, over and over, to demand all of these steps immediately to avoid catastrophe, instead of grandstanding about diversity?
That would take a leader, not a placeholder.
There is so much that could have been done if there had been courageous leadership at the top of the LAFD hierarchy, focused on the department’s primary mission. And why, for that matter, aren’t the California Professional Firefighters, one of the most powerful unions in the state, joining with Crowley to demand all of the above? Why not? If anyone has the political clout to move Newsom and the state legislature to take preventive action that is more than symbolic blather about the “climate crisis,” it’s them.
Once the fires are out, the suffering will go on, because the aftermath of these fires will reveal still more of California’s dysfunction. Families burned out of their homes will face a hostile bureaucracy, populated with environmentalist fanatics who have been trained since kindergarten to resent the privilege and deplore the unsustainability of homes that not only commit the green crime of being detached single-family dwellings but are situated in what is charmingly referred to these days as the “wildland-urban interface.” According to these folks, when “wildland” and “urban” face off in California, “wildland” wins. Give the land back to the mountain lions. It’s their land. Go away.
And even if that bias weren’t present, even if their homes were down in the heart of Los Angeles in fully urbanized settings, they’d face an insurance nightmare. California’s FAIR plan, set up after insurance companies started pulling out of California one after another in response to financially ignorant regulators preventing them from charging rates sufficient to pay claims without going bankrupt, is itself on the brink of bankruptcy. According to a January 10 report in the San Francisco Chronicle, FAIR’s reserves are reportedly around $385 million. Estimated damages so far to residential and commercial property within the ZIP codes in and around the fire perimeters is already $24 billion. FAIR’s share of those claims is easily going to exceed their reserves. Federal bailout, here we come.
And let’s suppose these homeowners finally get the money to rebuild. They’ll have to get building permits. In Texas, that might take three days. In Los Angeles, California, if you’re very, very lucky and very, very diligent, you will have acquired the requisite stack of permits from a bewildering assortment of state, regional, county, city, and various other agencies in around three years. The cost for all these permits and fees will be equal to what construction costs would be in a normal state. Which brings us to California’s abnormal construction costs.
Thanks to absurd building codes baked into state law, new homes have to have solar panels, interior fire sprinklers, and an EV charger circuit. The “building envelope,” the water heater, HVAC, and lighting all have to comply with ridiculously detailed requirements that are set forth in California’s wonderful “Single Family Residential Compliance Manual,” courtesy of the California Energy Commission. And just around the corner, there are the state’s mandatory new building standards to limit water use. Ask anyone still trying to build new homes in California today about the code requirements they have to navigate, or else, and they will launch into a stupefying recitation of just how much BS the idiots in Sacramento are forcing down everyone’s throats. And none of these bureaucrats ever get their fingernails dirty doing real work in the real world. These same Sacramento bureaucrats killed California’s timber industry, which is not only a primary reason for superfires in the overgrown forests, but also the reason lumber costs so much. Victims of this fire may expect construction costs to rebuild—not including permits and fees—to top $500 per square foot.
Such is the disaster that’s befallen some of the wealthiest and most progressive households in America. Such is the nature of the multi-year train wreck they face going forward. Will it change their worldview? Will it change their politics? If it doesn’t, nothing will.
Edward Ring
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/15/the-politicization-of-wind-and-fire/
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