Woke DEI + Green Nihilism = Dresden in California

California’s DEI “humanism” and Green New Deal environmentalism ensured the cruelest imaginable treatment of thousands of people and unrivaled destruction of the natural ecosystem

By Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution. Excerpts:

"cut over $17.6 million from the LA fire service budget—itself just 65% of the city’s homelessness expenditures."

"there is a 117-million-gallon water reservoir atop Pacific Palisades"

"it was empty and “under repair” for months because of a mere damaged cover. Consider that: a dry autumn, the onset of the usual Santa Ana winds, a recent plague of hilltop wildfires, and Quiñones (Janisse Quiñones, “the new Chief Executive Officer and Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP)) shuts down the linchpin of a prior generation’s plan to save the Palisades."

"fire chief Kristen Crowley? She now blames the mayor for dry hydrants."

"How about her deputy Kristine Lawson, who claimed people in need want to see fire officers arrive who look like they do? And if they don’t?

She is also on record with this: “Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out.”"

"But what could Newsom do or say? His entire tenure is synonymous with too many catastrophic forest fires and too little water.

He did nothing after the catastrophic Aspen and Paradise fires to revive the timber industry to glean and clean the forests. He never allowed much new grazing on fuel-rich hills or sent crews in to cut back the chaparral.

He never reconsidered his policies of diverting precious snowmelt from the Sacramento River tributaries to flow into the sea to help the delta smelt rather than to ensure that farmers could irrigate their crops or that Los Angeles County reservoirs were fully banked.

Despite an approved 2014 $7.5 billion bond to build three huge dams and reservoirs, Newsom ensured that we built none: not the easily constructed Sites reservoir, not Temperance Flat, and not Los Banos Grandes, all tertiary foothill reservoirs that could have given California by now nearly five million additional acre-feet of storage.

Or is it worse than that?

Governor Dam-Buster still brags about how he greenlit blowing up four dams on the Klamath River—the largest dam removal in American history. The dams provided 80,000 homes with clean hydroelectric power, farmers with irrigation water, and the public with recreation and flood control.

Instead of following the voters’ bond to build reservoirs and dams, Newsom preferred to dynamite them. The ensuing muddy deluge wiped out the surrounding riparian ecosystem."

"California’s failure to effectively prevent and put out fires—along with hyper-regulation and failure to combat an epidemic of insurance fraud—has destroyed the state’s insurance industry. Given the prior inability of homeowners to buy credible fire insurance at any cost, there are thousands of now-homeless who had no insurance at all.

How about the region’s large homeless population that camps out on the streets and in the tinderbox chaparral above the suburbs? Did the city investigate arson or detain, arrest, charge, and jail those rounded up with incendiary devices or seen lighting fires? Of course not. They vetoed any notion long ago of an anti-camping ordinance."

"There is not enough water for hydrants, not enough to deliver to Los Angeles, and when it arrives, there is too much incompetence to know how to use it.

There were no real warnings to residents that they had mere minutes to flee for their lives. Or was it worse still? As the fires wore on, continuous false alarms of new fires sparked unnecessary and dangerous mass evacuations citywide, destroying what, if any, trust was left in the fire department."