A Phil Hall Op-Ed: Los Angeles County has been on fire for nearly a week. We don’t know how the fires started, but we know who doesn’t want to take responsibility for the very obvious lack of preparedness ahead of the blazes.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered an investigation into the Los Angeles Department of Water of Power (LADWP) after media reports detailed the limited water resources in the wildfire zones and how fire hydrants lacked the water needed to put out the fires.
In a public letter to addressed to LADWP CEO and Chief Engineer Janisse Quiñones and Los Angeles County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella, Newsom declared, “From the moment firestorms erupted in Los Angeles County on Tuesday, January 7, it was clear our public infrastructure would be put under tremendous strain … The ongoing reports of loss of water pressure to some local fire hydrants during the fires and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir are deeply troubling to me and to the community. We need answers to how that happened.”
In a rare case of criticizing a prominent Democrat, NBC News took Newsom for not taking responsibility for the state’s lack of preparedness. “Meet the Press” interviewer Jacob Soboroff had this exchange with the governor, who couldn’t stop smiling when answering the not-funny questions.
Soboroff: You say what to people who insist that these independent investigations or calls for them, are you passing the blame onto other people?
Newsom: I’m not – how could it be when we’re doing an independent investigation and we just want the adjudication of the facts? As I say, it’s not about finger pointing. It’s about answering the questions you and everybody wants answered. And I think there’s a propensity to wait to answer those questions, and people want immediacy. They want response and responsiveness. And so that’s the idea.
Soboroff: Ultimately here, does the buck stop with you?
Newsom: Well, I mean, you’re governor of California. You might as well be the mayor of California. We’re all in this together. We’re all better off when we’re all better off, and we’re all better off when we’re working together to take care of people and to make sure people are supported. We’re empathetic. And we’re here not just in the immediacy of the crisis, but we’re here after the crisis, as opposed to creating a crisis in the middle of this by trying to divide people and play political, take cheap political shots.
Huh? Can you make sense of what he said?
In comparison, Los Angeles Mayor was able to produce coherent sentences when refusing to take responsibility for not having her city ready to combat fiery destruction of this magnitude. Indeed, she refused to even allow a conversation on the subject.
“Rest assured that when that is done, when we are safe, when lives have been saved and homes have been saved, we will absolutely do an evaluation to look at what worked, what didn’t work, and to correct or to hold accountable anybody, department, individual, etc.,” Bass said in a curt response to a reporter’s inquiry. “But my focus right now is on the lives and on the homes.”
Translation: Shut up, we’ll talk about this later. Bass’ cold shutdown of the question regarding having this catastrophe occur on her watch – when she was out of the country, no less – has yet to be aggressively challenged by a Los Angeles-area media that is mostly sycophantic to Bass. To her credit, she’s not as dumb as Newsom by putting herself into high-profile, one-on-one media situations where her honesty and integrity are challenged.
So, who’s ultimately responsible for public safety in Los Angeles County? You might as well ask, “Who’s on first?” – you’ll get the same evasive nonsense answers from Newsom and Bass. Neither of these politicians started the fires, but the scope of the tragedy could have easily been avoided if they had the foresight to ensure the region would never face a crisis of this magnitude.
Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected]
Photo by Gage Skidmore / Flickr Creative Commons
