Samuel Hammond, writing in the City Journal, complains about the L.A. Water Department deciding:

To take the Santa Ynez Reservoir in Pacific Palisades, with its 117-million-gallon capacity, offline, due to previously scheduled maintenance. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which made this call, effectively ensured that the basin was empty in the middle of wildfire season.

The southern California fire season normally runs from May to November. This means that all maintenance work is done in the winter. January is a good time to take a reservoir off line because it is the start of the southern California rainy season and allows for a couple of months work before the fire season begins again in May. Maintenance work on a reservoir requires some planning. Equipment needs to be in place, materials purchased, water needs to be moved, people notified. It is a complicated process that requires planning and time prior to taking it off line to prepare.

Given these requirements it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Santa Ynez Reservoir was off line in January. If I were planning such an undertaking, January would be the perfect month to do it. I am not sure how officials could have known that the normally wet December would be a continuation of an unusually long dry spell beginning the previous winter. If Hammond was planning to maintain reservoirs and he had to choose a date, what date would he choose?

Hammond, while giving a rather laconic acknowledgement of strong winds and dry conditions, wants to pin incompetence on water officials who put a reservoir off line at the height of the fire season. January is not the height of the fire season. It is the actual low point, at least historically, of the fire season. The problem that Hammond doesn’t acknowledge is that the fire season is increasingly a year round phenomena. The fire season is now year round. Global Warming is cited as a possible reason for this year long season. No, let’s not mention global warming, but DEI yes, bureaucratic incompetence yes. I have yet to see how bureaucratic incompetence and DEI has seriously affected the fire while a year long dry spell and high winds obviously have.

Critics are focusing on side issues, all which maybe could be done better but had very little to do with the resulting disaster, while ignoring the bigger issue here which is a changing environment that makes wild fires more dangerous and more frequent.