An inferno of incompetence in California

However, Gov. Gavin Newsom did one worse than Bass by telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “The local folks are going to have to figure that out,” after Cooper asked why so many fire hydrants in the city had no water to douse the flames threatening homes.

Newsom shouldn’t have been showboating and should have known that although pressure was maintained on the city’s main trunk line, so much water was used in the Pacific Palisades that there was not enough pressure to get water to the higher elevations that needed it. 

The city eventually sent 20 water tankers to support firefighters at higher elevations, but when those tankers ran dry, they had to drive long distances to refill before returning to the fires.

“This is a window into a systemic problem of the city,” Rick Caruso, Pacific Palisades property owner and former Los Angeles Department of Water and Power commissioner, told reporters, “not only of mismanagement, but our infrastructure is old.”

Los Angeles City Council member Traci Park, who represents Pacific Palisades, agreed with Caruso, adding:

“Chronic under-investment in the city of Los Angeles in our public infrastructure and our public safety partners was evident and on full display over the last 24 hours.”

The Democratic Party’s failure to spend on water infrastructure goes beyond incompetence and into ideology.

Asked to respond to Caruso’s claim that low water pressure was due to mismanagement, Greg Pierce, University of California professor of urban environmental policy, told reporters that investing in necessary water infrastructure to protect homes in Pacific Palisades was a “subsidy” for wealthy homeowners, adding:

“I think the conversation has to be more about whether these areas are habitable.”

What Pierce and his ideological colleagues in the Democratic Party’s elite forget is that most of Los Angeles is habitable only because of expensive infrastructure and policy choices that the current Democratic Party lacks the stomach to make.

The Los Angeles River could support about 300,000 people, but the river basin has four million residents. The only reason these people survive is because of past generations’ hard decision to build suitable water infrastructure.

Half the water used by Los Angeles comes from the Colorado River through 242 miles of aqueducts. Another quarter comes from the State Water Project of 22 dams and reservoirs and 444 miles of aqueduct that carries water from northern California.

Another 15 percent comes from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which draws from the Owens River Valley and the Mono Lake Basin. Just 10 percent comes from the Los Angeles River.

All of these projects were completed before the California Environmental Quality Act and California Coastal Commission were invented, and none could be built today.

The Democratic Party’s willingness to transform the environment to support human flourishing has died in California. The fire burning Los Angeles is a direct result of this political failure.

The Poseidon Resources Corporation recently proposed building a desalination plant in Hunting Beach, a project that could supply water for 250,000 homes a year. The California Coastal Commission blocked the project because studies showed it would kill plankton near the facility.

Democrats running the Coastal Commission chose a microscopic organism over people. That’s why California is dying. It has nothing to do with anything so grand and exaggerated as global warming.