The Los Angeles fires are a human disaster long in the making

As the community of Pacific Palisades in the city of Los Angeles burned to the ground Tuesday night, LA Mayor Karen Bass was in Ghana to attend the inauguration of that country’s new president, while the man she defeated in the 2022 mayor’s race was on the air talking to a local television station about Bass’ “absolute mismanagement of the city.”Real estate developer Rick Caruso also savaged city and county officials for their failure to clear brush in the hills “for probably 30 or 40 years,” increasing the risk of raging wildfires.“What is most concerning to me is, our first responders and our firefighters who are trying to battle this, there’s no water in the Palisades,” Caruso told Fox 11 News.“There’s no water coming out of the fire hydrants.” Caruso slammed Bass for being out of the country while the city was burning.Bass chose to attend a Jan.

7 event in Africa even though the National Weather Service in Los Angeles had warned as early as Jan.2 of the risk of “extreme fire growth” and power outages due to high winds forecast for Jan.

7-9.Before she traveled, the mayor signed off on a news release to announce “preparedness measures” that the city had taken ahead of the dangerous conditions.But shockingly, she failed to order any action to find and clear homeless encampments, a known fire hazard, from fire-prone areas.Instead, Bass reported that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority would continue to conduct “outreach” to individuals living on the streets in “high fire severity zones.”The US Supreme Court ruled last summer that cities may enforce an anti-camping ordinance, but Los Angeles officials have refused to do so.Homeless encampments in Pacific Palisades have long been a concern.

In 2014, a group of community volunteers formed the Pacific Palisades Task Force on Homelessness and began “organizing cleanups of abandoned encampments in our fire-prone hillsides.” The group says it cleaned up 535 last year...