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“Santa Ana winds blowing hot from the North…”
President Trump has arrived in Los Angeles to survey the devastation of the fires that engulfed the Pacific Palisades and the Altadena area closer to the San Gabriel mountains. He has promised Governor Gavin Newsom, who greeted him on the tarmac at LAX, that the federal government will help California recover from the devastation of the fires, much of which was preventable. Yes, the force of the Santa Ana winds were hurricane strength and created conditions that were incredibly difficult to fight the fires but the lack of water in the reservoir above the Pacific Palisades and in hydrants throughout the affected areas was a failure of local and state officials to make sure that Los Angeles had any potential for fighting the fires.
Newsom has been searching for a scapegoat for his disastrous mismanagement of California’s resources that has destroyed, in his term as governor, several hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and wild lands, and residential property in both northern and southern California – and most recently thousands of homes in Los Angeles County.
Newsom and other Democrat politicians in California continue to blame the severe changes in weather on “Climate Change,” previously referred to as anthropogenic global warming. Of course, there is an elasticity to the meaning of Climate Change, as its religious adherents have vehemently argued, that will cause sea levels to rise, polar ice caps to melt, an increase in the number of hurricanes, the extinction of polar bears, severe drought and surprisingly also intense winters that ironically can grow polar ice caps, and cause massive flooding from record snow melt.
The fires in Los Angeles were not caused by Climate Change. The Santa Ana winds have been a natural and constant meteorological occurrence for thousands of years before the invention of the internal combustion engine, before the Los Angeles basin became inhabited and populated, and before Randy Newman referenced them in his song “I Love LA”.
Hillside brush, especially near housing tracts used to be cleared on a routine basis, before anticipated drier weather and the anticipated Santa Anas.
In the winter and into the spring of 2023, California experienced record snowfall in the Sierra. Homes along the extensive mountain range were buried beneath snow for months. Some homes had to be repeatedly dug out. Roofs had to be repeatedly cleared of snow for fear that they would buckle and collapse. What didn’t seep into the ground, cascaded over cliffs, rushed down river gorges and eventually flowed out to the Pacific Ocean. Most of this frozen water that melted was not collected in reservoirs because new reservoirs had not been built by Newsom or the Democrats who have controlled the legislature for decades. The opportunity to prepare for capturing the snow melt had been lost and will continue to be lost until competent leaders emerge to take the reins of power in Sacramento.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has stated that conditions may be put on California in exchange for federal funds to rebuild and restore the fire-devastated neighborhoods along with the civic infrastructure in and around them. It will be interesting to see if California agrees to actually manage its water resources more intelligently as a condition for assistance from the federal government. Whether there is a political sea change in California that ousts incompetent Democrat politicians in favor of Republicans remains to be seen. To date, I can’t point to a single California Republican who has emerged to articulate anything about how to solve California’s natural resource management. One would think that simply bolstering what President Trump has already expressed about water management for southern California would be a start.
Published in General
“Santa Ana winds blowing hot from the North…”
We were born to ride…
Are there any Republicans left in the Peoples Republic of California?
Well, there’s me, @brianwatt, @mattbalzer, @therightnurse, @clavius, @caroljoy, and a few others.
It’s been my experience, through some relatives and some former neighbors in Arizona, that when Democrat policies/politicians fail, their “solution” is to elect DIFFERENT Democrats, and MORE OF THEM.
The problems in California with fire suppression are not unique to California. Oregon has the same problem. The following quote comes from a 2016 article in the Oregonian about the Canyon Creek fire.
“The Canyon Creek Complex fire charred more than 172 square miles, or more than 110,000 acres, destroying 43 homes.”
Endless lawsuits from environmental advocacy groups and legislators who support their ideas when money is set aside for the removal of dead trees and undergrowth is part of the problem.
From the OP:
BREAKING: California resident, American citizen and Fox News contributor, Steve Hilton announced moments ago that he is considering running for governor and has been meeting with several organizations in the state to assess the support necessary to launch a campaign.
Huntington Beach declared itself not a sanctuary city, so there are still a few enclaves. With the sort of censorship that has gone on for the past few years, perhaps they have just not been heard. I hope that if they are there they will be.
Raymond Chandler wrote about the winds in 1938 in his excellent short story Red Wind.
This is something that just leaves me dumbstruck. Do the simple math and physics on this. The minimum ignition temperature of wood that will cause a sustained fire is somewhere between 572-752 degrees Fahrenheit. The amount of Global Warming claimed by even the most radical scientists is about 1 degree Fahrenheit over a period of about 150 years.
https://fireproofdepot.com/what-temperature-does-wood-ignite/
They are trying to tell us that this measly one-degree rise is going to cause forest fires that require at least 572 degrees to ignite?? The logic of this is literally retarded. By this reasoning, the Amazon should have burnt to the ground a million years ago, not to mention Florida, Texas, Arizona, and all the hot places on Earth. Yet these forest fires are happening in much higher latitude places such as California, Oregon, Washington, and even Canada(!) Not to mention that California’s supposedly hottest year was back in 2014 when wildfires covered relatively few acres that year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires
I never hear any pundits pointing out this absurd notion of the one-degree rise causing fires, but I sure would like some journalist to ask one of these Global Warming dopes to explain how that works.
They are mainly attributing it to the very dry start to the rain season this year. But 2024-25 follows two years of over 23″ of rain against an annual average of 14″. This year is just reversion to the mean.
A challenging retort, but even if we could grant that what they said was true, that there was indeed a very dry start to the rainy season, how in the world could a tiny one-degree rise since the 1880’s have caused that? Most of the rainiest places on earth are hot, not cold. This is why you almost never see the Global Warming activists explaining the science or answering the tough questions.
They can’t answer tough questions or explain the science because it is just a scam.
That used to be part of DonG’s “handle,” as I recall.
Watching that video of the burned out city all I can ask is, how do you recover from this? It seems insurmountable.
It took decades to build all that stuff, it won’t go back up quickly even if there were no regulatory obstacles at all.
I’m surprised that so far, I at least haven’t NOTICED anyone claiming “THAT’S why we need all those illegals, for construction jobs!”
As big as the fires were, LA County is huge, about 4100 square miles. LA City is about 500 sq/mi of that. The hillsides that burned had beautiful homes, but very little business. The regional economy won’t be that affected.
9/11 looked insurmountable at the end of 2001.