LOS ANGELES, CA- USA Today and other left-wing “fact-checkers” have deemed false allegations made that Los Angeles firefighters have been unable to access water to fight the deadly wildfires that have besieged the city. They may want to recheck their facts.
The New York Post reports that firefighters in Los Angeles have watched helplessly as entire blocks of the Pacific Palisades erupted in flames. They have been unable to obtain water to put out the flames.
“As Los Angeles firefighters faced down the most destructive blaze in the city’s history, they ran out of water,” The Post wrote.
The Los Angeles Times documented the frustration of firefighters who could not help.
“The hydrants are down,” one city firefighter said over the radio, according to the Times.
“Water supply just dropped,” said another.
The Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles is described as one of the most scenic areas, and many celebrities call it home. However, in only a matter of hours, the area was completely gutted.
“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” Rick Caruso, who owns the Palisades Village mall amid the ruins, told local media, the frustration in his voice impossible to hide. “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.”
The water shortage, The Post wrote, is the “result of several years of mismanagement of LA’s water system.” That included at least one city leader to be indicted while many others resigned. Shortfalls also include “major operational problems that drained reserves too quickly.”
As of Wednesday night, the Palisades fire, intensified by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, claimed over 1,000 homes and businesses. It had spread to 16,000 acres, or 25 square miles–an area bigger than Manhattan, with fire crews unable to contain any of it.
The fire spread and other wildfires in California have been blamed on poor forest management, spurred by environmental concerns over smelt, a fish allegedly endangered. President-elect Trump laid blame on California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), saying Newsom “refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the north, to flow daily into many parts of California.”
According to NBC News, fire experts warned that mismanaging forests could lead to disaster as early as 2020.
“Fires have always been a part of our ecosystem,” said Mike Rogers, a former Angeles National Forest supervisor. “Forest management is a lot like gardening. You have to keep the forest open and thin.”
According to the U.S. Forest Service, California’s policy of stopping controlled burning of underbrush “resulted in a backlog of trees in forests now choked with brush and other dry fuels.” In 1911, for example, records showed only 19 trees per acre in one section of the Stanislaus National Forest in Northern California. Recently, that number stood at 260 trees per acre. Rogers said that is a recipe for bigger fires.
“We have more large trees per acre than we’ve ever had because they have continued to grow, and underneath these large trees are young shrubs that fuel fires in the crown of the trees,” Rogers said at the time. “When a fire starts in there, it’s unstoppable.”
Now, that mismanagement is claiming an iconic part of California. In addition to the Pacific Palisades fire, two other fires are raging in Los Angeles County. As of Wednesday, five people had died from the fires, several others were injured, and at least 70,000 evacuations had been ordered.
Adding injury to insult, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who was forewarned of the impending fire danger over a week ago, was out of the country on a meaningless trip to Ghana when the fire broke out. That came only months after she cut $18 million from the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget. Residents were outraged that Bass was absent as her city burned.
“I’m born and raised in Los Angeles, I spend my life worrying about when the earthquakes come, when the Santa Ana winds come. I plan my trips around this. For someone to be in charge of my town…where are you?” one LA resident told Fox News.
According to Janisse Quinones, head of the LA Department of Water and Power, the city’s water system couldn’t keep up with the demands of the multiple fires. The city has 114 water tanks that store water and are supposed to maintain a consistent flow. All were full when the fire started on Tuesday. She also said three one-million-gallon tanks supply the hydrants in the Pacific Palisades.
In November, the same situation occurred in nearby Ventura County. The LA Times reported that city officials blamed damaged pumps and an overall lack of water despite backup systems and protocols that allowed firefighters to obtain water from other sources.
Caruso, a former head of the utility commission and candidate for LA mayor, told the Times that those systems should have been working and that a water shortage of this scale “should never happen.”
In his three-hour interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, President-elect Trump warned that what is currently happening in Los Angeles would happen and laid the blame on Newsom’s mismanagement of the state’s water supply and his overturning a Trump administration directive order water be redirected from the verdant north of the state to Southern California.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said Newsom was risking the safety of California residents to protect the smelt.
“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt…but didn’t care about the people of California.
In 2019, Trump took to X and slammed Newsom for failing to manage the state’s forests properly.
“I told him from the first day we met that he must ‘clean’ his forest floors, regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers.”
Newsom has lied about his forestry management accomplishments. A 2021 investigation by CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom found that he overstated the number of acres of forest treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns by nearly 700%.
Bass, however, has been the focal point of outrage. When she returned from Ghana, a reporter confronted her and asked her several questions. Bass just stood there in dumb silence, as if in a trance, and refused to answer his questions.
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