Los Angeles burns in winter

By Jo Nova

Something awful is going down today in California. Pray tonight for the people of the Palisades, LA. Winds are 80 to 100 mph. 30,000 people have been ordered to evacuate, so far, there are two deaths and 1,000 buildings destroyed. It’s winter, but there is no water in the fire hydrants, hardly any firefighting planes, and “it’s like armageddon”.

One video has the sound of “popping” and we wonder about all the EV’s or home batteries that surely line the wealthy streets of the Pacific Palisades and Malibu. They surely aren’t helping. We hope everyone’s EV was fully charged before the evacuation. Imagine being told to leave your home immediately and you only needed an hour to charge…

Then there are videos like this one, or a raging inferno surrounding the house, with a thousand comments below, wondering if they survived, and asking “why are they filming”? The men sounded far too calm, saying “I’ve turned off the gas”. “Oh Shit”. The scene is so surreal I wonder if this is AI generated, but it may be people raised in Californian education, living through a moment they could not parse.

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One comment below by Kelly Jo says “they got them out”. (We hope so.)

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“There’s no water coming out of the fire hydrants.

You don’t see the fire fighters there, because there is nothing they can do — it looks like we’re in a third world country here.

What was your brush mitigation program. The brush up in these hills … probably have been handled, mitigated, pruned, removed for probably thirty years. It was a disaster waiting to happen.” — Rick Caruso, Real Estate Developer.

There’s been no media mention yet, but Australian gum trees arrived in Los Angeles in the 1870s and spread like weeds, with help from “over 100 companies” setting up Blue Gum plantations in a boom around 1900. There are historic pictures of Eucalyptus trees on the hillside of the Pacific Palisades. Did the fire loving trees make the fire worse, or were they just the icing on a gargantuan multilayered cake of incompetence?

Donald Trump says “Newscum” made it dry to save a worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!) but didn’t care about the people…