Watching the tragedy in California makes us think of the Billy Joel anthem “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
Well, the federal, state, and local officials may not have started the fire, but they’ve done almost everything wrong to contain it, and fulfill their basic duty to protect lives and property.
Rick Caruso, a former commissioner for the city’s Department of Water and Power, says officials failed to properly refill a reservoir, and now “there’s no water in the fire hydrants…the firefighters are there and there’s nothing they can do — we’ve got neighborhoods burning, homes burning, and businesses burning… It should never happen.”
And then there were budget cuts to fire fighting, at a time when Southern California was known to be a tinderbox, as this tweet well documents.
The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development has an excellent report on all the things we can do, without retreating into climate hysteria:
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Donald Trump has long criticized California’s fire management as dominated by environmental extremists. As president, he once threatened to cut off FEMA funds to the state if there were no changes, but then backed off. It is imperative he not only order better management of the 18 federal forests in the state, but renew his efforts to force California officials to reduce the risk of fire. |