NOTE: Story updated 3:05 EST with new details.
Wildfires driven by extreme winds are burning through the Los Angeles area today, across thousands of acres in dry, steep hilly areas and forcing the evacuations of more than 80,000 residents so far. The first fire broke out in the wealthy Pacific Palisades area Tuesday morning, with winds of up to 80 mph rapidly spreading the flames. Some roads were so clogged with people trying to escape that at one point police urged them to abandon their vehicles and run for their lives; a Fire Department bulldozer had to push aside cars to make a path for arriving fire trucks.
The AP reports also that the fire was so intense that overnight
staff at a senior living center had to push dozens of residents in wheelchairs and hospital beds down the street to a parking lot. The residents — one as old as 102 — waited there in their bedclothes as the night sky glowed red from flames and embers fell around them until ambulances, buses and even construction vans arrived to take them to safety.
Parts of Santa Monica and Malibu are under evacuation orders, with tens of thousands of residents being warned they should be ready to evacuate if necessary. Homes and businesses along Pacific Coast Highway have been destroyed.
Two more fires exploded overnight over to the east, in Pasadena and Altadena, with wind speeds reaching 99 mph at one point last night. The wind gusts grew so strong that fire officials had to suspend flights of air tankers late in the evening. A fourth fire, in the Sepulveda Basin near Van Nuys, broke out just this morning.
In at least some parts of the Palisades, firefighters encountered fire hydrants that had no water pressure, although it’s not yet clear how widespread the problem was or what the cause was. Despite that, former LA mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, the billionaire real estate developer who lost to current Mayor Karen Bass in 2022 — and who owns a shopping center in Pacific Palisades — complained Tuesday that the fire hydrant problems reflected a “systemic problem of the city — not only of mismanagement, but our infrastructure is old,” and yes, that is already being echoed in social media posts blaming Bass for not putting out apocalyptic wildfires across LA County.
BIGASS ALL_CAPS BOLDFACE UPDATE NOTICE: The LA Times has since updated its story on why the hydrants ran dry in Pacific Palisades, and now we all have even more reason to be angry at Rick Caruso.
As it turns out, no, it wasn’t incompetence or mismanagement. It was a case of an unprecedented emergency overwhelming multiple backup systems. Let us summarize. According to LA Department of Water and Power’s chief executive and chief engineer, Janisse Quiñones, who explained that Pacific Palisades LA’s municipal water system has 114 water tanks supplying its municipal water, all of which were full before the fire began Tuesday morning. City fire hydrants are fed by three huge, million-gallon water tanks, which began running dry after hours and hours of continuous use.
The first ran dry at 4:45 p.m. Tuesday; the second at 8:30 p.m.; and the third was dry at 3 a.m. Wednesday.
“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.”
Water pressure was fine at lower elevations, but the extreme demand meant there was insufficient pressure to refill the tanks up in the hills. The LA Times also reports that because of the fire, city water crews weren’t even able to reach some of the pumping stations that would normally move water uphill. Additional water is now being trucked in to supplement firefighters’ supplies.
Caruso instead insisted that all those issues could have been avoided if only he were mayor.
Rightwing Twitter is busy retweeting a recording of a phone call Caruso made to a local TV station blaming the devastation on Bass. Caruso insisted — well before all three water tanks ran dry, but apparently after the first did — that “there’s no water in the fire hydrants” anywhere in the Palisades, and calling it “absolute mismanagement by the city.” He complained that Bass was out of the country, that “there’s no resources to put out fires,” and that “it looks like we’re in a third-world country here.” Online rightwingers obligingly added that Bass was visiting Ghana, which of course proves that she caused the fires simply by being Black. More on that in a minute; we’re sure it will be getting uglier.
The LA fires are being made worse both by the high winds and by drought; as the Los Angeles Times reports, since October 1, the start of the “water year” (also the fiscal year),
downtown Los Angeles has received 0.16 inches of rain — a tiny fraction of the 4.64 inches that downtown gets, on average, by this point in the season.
By contrast, Northern California hasn’t faced such fire weather, with rainfall at above-average levels. Downtown San Francisco has received 10.39 inches of rain since Oct. 1 — above the 9.29 inches of rainfall the city gets on average by this point in the season.
Alex Hall, director of the UCLA Center for Climate Science, told the LA Times that the prior two very rainy years in Southern California were great after an extended drought, but that now there’s “plenty of fuel for potential wildfires.”
This is what climate change looks like, although in his call to local TV, Caruso speculated that drought couldn’t really be the problem, insisting instead, “I would bet that” the city and LA County hadn’t done anything at all to mitigate brush accumulations in the hills and canyons “in 30 or 40 years,” making it a gospel fact. Call us crazy, but we’d prefer some evidence that nobody raked the ravines first.
Fortunately the current US president does not have a personal grudge against California, and the federal government is working closely with Gov. Gavin Newsom to provide firefighting and disaster relief aid. President Biden was actually visiting the Los Angeles area yesterday to designate two new national monuments; that event was cancelled because of the emergency. Biden’s return to Washington was delayed until Wednesday afternoon because of the high winds and because the typical FAA flight restrictions involved whenever Air Force One flies anywhere could have hampered operations for emergency flights.
Also, in what might as well stand as an example of where America is today, while many residents in the area took care to help neighbors escape the fires, a wealthy real estate guy who once bragged that “real estate ballers don’t pay any taxes!” and during the election called on Donald Trump to cut property taxes once in office took to Twitter to ask last night,
“Does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home in Pacific Palisades? Need to act fast here. All neighbors houses burning. Will pay any amount. Thank you.”
He clarified in replies that he and his family had left “hours ago” but that he just needed someone to come and keep his property from burning, and later retweeted an Elon Musk tweet accusing Barack Obama of making sure that the “extremely competent” Caruso lost the 2022 election to Bass. Caruso has to be competent, after all, because he was in the news for being a white guy, but Italian.
And yes, children, the replies to Musk mostly called Bass, who won a majority of the vote as if that matters, a “DEI hire.” Just to be clear here, if it turns out that some routine maintenance problem was the reason for some Pacific Palisades hydrants going dry, that’s terrible, but was not the cause in itself for the vast scale of the inferno.
We’ll have time to ignore lots of similar shit, which will undoubtedly get worse once Trump takes office. In the meantime, we can at least note that not everyone in the area is a rich asshole; during the fire yesterday, actor Steve Guttenberg, who also had to evacuate, was busy helping moving abandoned cars to help fire trucks get through, telling a local TV station that people should leave their keys in their car if they abandon them, so firefighters can at least move them.
“There are people stuck up there. So we’re trying to clear Palisades Drive and I’m walking up there as far as I can moving cars,” he revealed, pointing up to the hill where traffic was slowly making its way down.
“There are families up there, there are pets up there. There are people who really need help,” he said. […]
“Don’t worry about your personal property. Just get out. Get your loved ones and get out.”
We can see why the Ancient Mystic Order of No Homers (neé the Stonecutters) made him a star. They may be part of a nefarious worldwide conspiracy, but he’s a good egg, and public spirited.
[LAT/ AP / LAT / NBC News / CNN]
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You've gotta love the wealthy arm of the Right complaining about taxes being too high until all of a sudden they need public services. You know, the stuff that taxes pay for...
Story just updated with new, infuriating details on what happened with the fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades. Spoiler: It wasn't DEI