Government Failures Fuel the Flames
More than 40 years ago, President Reagan warned in his inaugural address, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” This rings true today in the deadly and destructive fires ravaging Southern California, which mirror the same failures we face here in the Pacific Northwest every summer.
Fire hydrant testing, scheduled two weeks ago, was cut by Los Angeles to save a few bucks. When the fires began, burning houses and claiming lives, the hydrants failed. Diversity hiring left the fire department understaffed, further complicating the response. And if that’s not bad enough, when LA needed to make cuts from its $13 billion budget, the fire department took the hit.
Right before the fires broke out, Governor Gavin Newsom slashed $100 million from the fire prevention budget. It’s hard to fix that kind of stupidity.
In a truly baffling move, California state bureaucrats required fire rigs and crews from Oregon and Washington to stop and delay in Sacramento for a mandatory inspection before heading to the front lines.
Ten people have died. Thousands of homes have burned. The total damage is in the tens of billions. The whole area is choking on smoke.
If this doesn’t sound like a familiar scenario, you haven’t lived through a typical forest fire summer here in the Northwest.
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