‘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.