There are currently five major fires in the Los Angeles area and the destruction has been truly hellish.
According to the Los Angeles Times’ fire tracker, the Lydia fire is the most contained. The Palisades fire has destroyed over 2,000 homes, businesses and buildings and killed at least five people. It is being called “one of the most destructive firestorms to hit the region in memory.”
There is a lot of blame going around for Democratic leaders in the state who cut funding to the Los Angeles Fire Department, rolled back fire management programs, and scaled back logging, which could reduce fire hazards in the state. All of that is valid but authorities have not confirmed the source of any of the fires.
In Paradise, California, when authorities tried to mitigate fire risks with controlled burns, residents complained enough to halt the burns, according to national disaster expert and forest debris expert John Balobeck. He says that before California was so populace, these fires were regular and less consequential and even helpful to the forest fauna. But with the opposition to forestry and controlled burns and current draught conditions, fires like this are more devastating.
So is the blame game really all that easy? It’s not. Democrats don’t seem to have helped but they don’t seem to be the sole cause either.
