Conspiracies and the LA Wildfires

Of Climate change, aid to Ukraine, Israel's Gaza operation, and DEI, which was a factor in the worst fires in California history?

There are many things that contributed to the devastating California wildfires. Long term policy failures center on mismanaging the state’s water resources. The Governor and state legislature failed to prioritize the building of additional water reservoirs in fire-prone Los Angeles county, and they rejected proposals for water recycling and desalination plants, like those in Israel. It was unnecessary, said the state’s elected leaders, to build such plants with excess capacity so that in the case of a fire like the one now unfolding, those plants would pump fresh water to augment the water in existing reservoirs. Environmental groups have successfully fought to stop controlled burns and programs designed to clear flammable debris in forests and to manage potential fire hazards in new housing development landscaping.

There are also short-term failures. Elected officials failed to pay heed to a National Weather Service warning nearly a week before the first fire. That warning did not stop Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, from leaving for Africa and the inauguration of the new Ghanian president. Since becoming mayor in 2022, Bass has cut the Fire Department budget twice. In the current fiscal year, it was her second largest budget cut at $17.6 million (she had wanted $25 million and had proposed another $49 million to be slashed in the 2024-2025 budget).

While the fire department budget was cut, Bass gave a record amount to deal with rampant homelessness. Instead of getting better, there are more homeless on the streets of Los Angeles county since the start of her administration. That mimics what is happening statewide: despite Governor Newsom spending $24 billion during his tenure on homelessness, it has increased by 40%.

That there are easy to pinpoint shortcomings that set the groundwork for this natural disaster did not stop some wild conspiracy speculation going viral. The lack of rain in Los Angeles, charged some green activists, was from climate change. It made sense to many people raised on a steady diet of Hollywood films about some dystopian future in which climate has caused an apocalypse.

In fact, a chart of Southern California rainfall for the past 144 years proves there is not declining rainfall levels. Some years there is plenty of rain, and some years very little.

Climate change is at least a mainstream alternative explanation, even if it is wrong. Other popular online theories are in the province of tin foil hat enthusiasts on the political extremes. Some on the right blamed the poor firefighter response early on to the LA Fire Department’s sending of surplus equipment to Ukraine in 2022.

Meanwhile leftwing antiwar activists, Code Pink, blamed aid to Israel for the shortfall in revenue and resources. Others blamed the strength and speed of the fires on the extra CO2 equivalent added to the earth by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

One assertion that caused the legacy media to go into meltdown was that an emphasis on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion had taken the Fire Department’s eye off its priority of fighting fires. The DEI charge became a lightning rod after Elon Musk posted this on X.

There is an automatic response by many in the legacy media who feel compelled to immediately take issue with any Musk pronouncement. Most pounced on the idea that the Fire Department might have lost sight of its core mission because of its emphasis on diversity. A quick Google search turns up the broadside dismissing the idea as nonsense.

The problem for the legacy media is that as opposed to the baseless speculation about climate, aid to Ukraine, and Israel’s munitions, there is evidence to at least establish that DEI distracted the Fire Department in the few years leading up to this natural catastrophe.

NPR reported in 2023 that “Firefighting is mostly white and male. A California program aims to change that.”

NPR noted that “Nationwide, more than 90% of firefighters are men and about 85% are white, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.” It noted that departments in Los Angeles and San Francisco had more diversity because of settlements from discrimination litigation, but that they still had a long way to go to.

Political commentator, Scott Jennings, talked about this last week on CNN: “There was some interest in the fire departments and the firefighters in California. And the interest was that there were too many white men who were firefighters. And we need to have a program in California to make sure we don’t have enough white men as firefighters. We have DEI, we have budget cuts, and yet I’m wondering now if your house was burning down, how much do you care what color the firefighters are?”

Beginning in 2019-2020, Los Angeles began collecting racial demographics to judge the diversity in all city departments.

The Fire Department created a DEI Bureau over 2022-2023, announcing it was to correct for “systemic, institutional, and structural racism.” It was led by Deputy Chief, Kristine Larson, a pioneering African American and openly Lesbian firefighter. Her $399,000 annual salary exceeded everyone in the department except the chief. Although the Fire Department’s DEI department was rolled out in 2023, Larson was featured in a DEI promo film from the department in 2019.

As part of the diversity effort, in 2022 the city appointed Kristin Crowley as the chief, the first woman and openly gay firefighter to lead the department.

In interviews, she had a three-year strategic plan to increase diversity.

While the overall Fire Department budget was cut the past two years under the Bass administration, the city budget documents for the 2022-23 fiscal year has $673,810 for “Equity and Inclusion Staffing.” That is for “a new Human Resources Bureau to implement a strategic diversity and inclusion plan, mediate conflict, mitigate complaints, grievances, lawsuites [sic], and facilitate a positive work environment.” A second budget line is for $418,778 for “Diversity in Recruitment,” meaning “the targeted recruitment of women and members of underrepresented groups.”

As for the 2024-2025 fiscal year documents show a $1,777,715 for “Equity and Inclusion Staffing,” allocated to “Continue funding and resolution authority for nine positions consisting of one Fire Deputy Chief, two Fire Battalion Chiefs, one Management Analyst, one Fire Assistant Chief, and four Fire Captain[s] to mediate conflict, implement a strategic diversity and inclusion plan, mitigate complaints, grievances, and lawsuits, and facilitate a positive work environment.”

The cuts in the overall Fire Department budget are in stark contrast to the surge in DEI funding. Appropriations for the General City Purposes saw another $250,000 set aside for "equity and inclusion." A $100,000 grant of county funds went to pay for Juneteenth celebrations while the Civil and Human Rights and Equity Department got $100,000 for a "Midnight Stroll Transgender Cafe" to fund housing for homeless transgender people in Hollywood.

The Los Angeles Fire Department is not the only local or state division that might have gotten sidetracked by focusing on DEI. In April, Mayor Bass nominated a long time Pacific Gas and Electric executive, Janisse Quiñones to be the new general manager of LA’s Department of Water and Power. She got a $775,000 salary, nearly double that of the previous manager. When the wildfires exploded, the Pacific Palisades reservoir was offline for repairs. Quiñones’s department admitted the failure to have that reservoir’s 117 million gallons of water available, likely contributed to reports of dry fire hydrants and low water pressure.

What was Quiñones focused on, however, as her top priority? Diversity.

There is a big blame game in the wake of the disaster. Fire Chief Crowley says this week that her department was short of resources and needed more personnel. No longer anything about diversity.

What about the responses from other city and state leaders? When Mayor Bass returned from Ghana during the middle of the wildfires, a Sky News reporter was on the plane and followed her with questions as she left. That excruciating minute and a half left an impression that the mayor did not know what to say about the catastrophe playing out in real time during her absence.

And what about Governor Newsom? When an irate parent cornered him in the fire zone, he at first said he was on the phone with President Biden. When the parent asked to be part of that call, the Governor admitted he could not get cell reception and then left with a series of promises that seemed hollow at best.

There are no winners in the aftermath of the Los Angeles wildfires. No one has emerged as a prescient public official who took the necessary actions to head off such a disaster. The future might bring some needed reforms, larger firefighting budgets, more aggressive and proactive water management and housing development, streamlined and more accessible insurance, and easier code regulations for improved infrastructure. All of that is, however, years away. For now the finger pointing continues. And conspiracy theories will fester. What is without doubt, however, is that there is plenty of blame to go around.