Tag: los-angeles-fires

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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.

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The right wing media is spreading pernicious lies about DEI being a factor in the Los Angeles fires now burning. Forbes magazine, hardly a left wing source, found that there is absolutely no evidence that this is true. Some of this is based on speculation offered by Adam Carolla who when trying to apply to be a fire fighter many years agos was told that he wouldn’t be considered for 7 years because he was white man. Carolla also admits to having a 1.7 GPA which, and I am just speculating on this now, might have something to do with his long wait and the discouraging words he received at the fire house when asking for a job.

Anyway, a quick glance at the graduating class of 2024 proves Carolla wrong. There are a good number of white men in the group. In fact, if you look at the racial breakdown of Los Angeles Fire Department in 2018, Whites are a much larger portion of the fire department than their percentage in Los Angeles population — 49% Whites in Fire Department, 29% whites in Los Angeles and women make up barely 3% of the department with minority women making up less than 1%. So a department made up of 97% men which is important because one of the chief problems conservative critics have is the physical strength needed to fight fire. Men have more than women. There seems to be more than enough men out there working on the fire.

The unspoken subtext here is that somehow non-whites and women aren’t up to the job. Based on what evidence? Is there data that minorities and women are not performing their job? And if so, what are the problems and how do white men doing the same job compare? If someone graduates from the Fire Academy, doesn’t it mean they past the tests required by the LAFD to adequately perform their job? The critics keep returning to the lesbian women who lead the department. Where exactly have these women failed? Somehow the implication is that since DEI has been considered as a part of the hiring process that standards have somehow diminished. It isn’t like the good old days when only white men were running the LAFD.

But, of course, the good old days were not getting the best people available. They were limiting their search to white men and discriminated against people of color and women. How is this better? It is only when discrimination became an issue that women and people of color got a chance to become a fireman. The good old days. You know when Blacks need not apply for jobs they wanted. You didn’t have to consider women at all because they were the weaker sex. You know those good old days when discrimination was OK.

No one wants to hear about past discrimination when DEI is making it impossible for white men to advance now. Right. The thing is if Blacks and Latinos were given a chance 50 or so years ago to join the force DEI wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place. The problem is they were discriminated against and, because of that past discrimination, women and people of color are rightfully suspicious of their ability to be treated fairly. So ultimately DEI is the direct result of bad faith hiring from white men in the first place.

By all means, blame the Los Angeles Fires on DEI putting incompetents on the front line. I am sure it will encourage those brave people fighting the fires to give their all to put them out. Really, it is shitty way, particularly in the absence of evidence, to treat people who are putting their lives on the line.