An hour after midnight Jan. 1, as a small brush fire blazed across Topanga State Park, a California State Parks employee texted the Los Angeles Fire Department’s heavy equipment supervisor to find out if they were sending in bulldozers.
“Heck no that area is full of endangered plants,” Capt. Richard Diede replied at 9:52 a.m, five hours after LAFD declared the fire contained.
“I would be a real idiot to ever put a dozer in that area,” he wrote. “I’m so trained.”
The exchange between the state and LAFD employees is part of a batch of newly-released text messages and depositions from California State Parks staffers that offers new details of the state’s actions and interactions with firefighters in the critical days after the Lachman fire ignited and rekindled Jan. 7 into the deadly Palisades blaze.
I’m guessing that there are fewer of the endangered plants now. Is it permissible to use heavy equipment now?
“I’m so trained” … this sounds like someone who’s opted to simply follow ALL the gov’t rules to the nth degree, while acknowledging nothing will be done to deal with the problem at hand while the rules forbade what’s known as a “thinking man’s solution”.
I’d blame those cushy chaired folks in Sacramento. All the people involved with putting out the fire, the state employees, the local Los Angeles firemen, those imposing fines for following or not following the rules, those scientists who converse about which plants will be impacted by fire, they’re all gov’t employees, the fines they pay, the fines their gov’t organization pays, who they’re paying fines to, are all gov’t departments with overlapping control mechanisms. From one pocket to another, then reverse the entire affair, then tax it so much that it never happens again.
The only one in Southern California I’ve listened to who has any sense remaining in him seems to be Adam Carrolla and I don’t know how much longer he can take it.
I saw those 3 words and thought it was from a Babylon Bee article.
As always, truth is stranger than fiction.
mhb23re
Why is it that endangered plants are everywhere?
And endangered fish. It’s just another day in the life when fire hydrants are dry because water is scarce to protect the Delta Smelt or Dry Run Chinook Salmon or whatever else.
Dennis Prager once characterized the Left – very generously – as “people who haphazardly destroy things out of good intentions” (paraphrased).
There’s nothing haphazard or random about it. Nor is it accidental. Some can be blamed on stupidity – as a group, no entity is a dumber collective than the Left – but the majority is planned out of malice.
I got many looks years ago when I joked the world needs a modern-day Thanos who could make half the world disappear: just the leftists. I hear others making the same comment, now.
Maybe not disappear permanently (it’s a bit harsh, even tongue-in-cheek), just go someplace where they could live as a group and leave the rest of us in peace. Maybe the righties in Australia would emigrate and donate that continent: what’s a happier thought than michael moore battling poisonous snakes and spiders in the Outback? Africa is a thought, too: get the white SA farmers out of the country before they’re slaughtered and let Rosie and Ruffalo move in.
I can dream.
mhb23re
Burn it all to the ground and RULE over the ashes.
How much longer are my dimwit neighbors in CA going to allow this?!
Oh … BTW … here in my N.CA town … every oak is sacred. It is ILLEGAL … seriously. ILLEGAL to harm a single branch or a single seedling. This is the eco-CA articles of faith.
https://youtu.be/fUspLVStPbk?si=o4Sg0cuRiW6UJ8cc
Your next ice storm should be fun. Hope your generator is tuned up, you’ll be needing it.
Same thing in New York though, honestly. Westchester County, Dutchess County, Long Island, they never trim the trees along the power lines. Never. Because why? Because they GET SUED by some eco-fruitbat every time a linesman reaches for a chainsaw. And the lawsuits cost more than it does to cut the trees. Oh, and also they steal the money for the tree cutting, that happens too.
And so every single f-ing time it snows, the power goes out. Because snow knocks down tree branches that are hanging over powerlines.
Here we trim everything, or the power would go down every week. The power still goes out occasionally, like during a -massive- ice storm when the wires fall by themselves without being hit by a tree, but at least they freaking try.
The Left have disavowed Christianity as a religion and replaced it with environmentalism, and acolytes of the Church of Gaia proselytize, evangelize and throw as much fire and brimstone as any southern Baptist preacher. They are just as hypocritical, too: witness david suzuki, Canada’s “Greatest Canadian” ™ preaching against young canucks having their own homes when that d-bag owns 3 large ones.
They are a scourge on mankind.
mhb23re
“I would be a real idiot…”. Truer words were never spoken.
“Truer words were never spoken.”
Well, yeah. But on the other hand, I bet you #MrIdiot still has that job. And if he had done the right thing and bulldozed to make sure the fire was out, he would -not- have that job anymore.
To me, it is important to realize that public employees do NOT get paid to serve the public. #BulldozerGuy does not get paid to prevent and put out fires. He gets paid to follow instructions. If they tell him to let the city burn to the ground because of the Pierson’s Milk Vetch (that’s a real thing by the way) then he will do it.
My favorite California Stupidity is the Pierson’s Milk Vetch. It grows primarily in the Imperial Sand Dunes and other desert places in SoCal. 25 years ago there was a “SAVE THE MILK VETCH!!!!” campaign, and they closed huge swaths of the Imperial Dunes to sand rails. This despite -knowing- that the Pierson’s Milk Vetch grows just fine where sand cars are common, and in fact it actually grows better. Soil aeration, drainage, etc.
But they closed it anyway, and over the 5 or so years I followed the situation the proof was in the pudding, Pierson’s Milk Vetch doing great where it was getting ran over by sand cars all the time, struggling in the protected areas where nobody was allowed to go. A brief google today shows that #BLM California still bans sand cars on lots of the dunes, and the damn plant still won’t die where the cars race every day.
Come to find out today that yes, one of the reasons they let LA burn down was indeed a milk vetch, the Braunton’s milk-vetch. #BulldozerGuy could have potentially gone to jail for messing with those. He will -not- go to jail for letting the fire burn out 23K acres of Malibu dream homes.
He should, but he won’t.
“My favorite California Stupidity is the Pierson’s Milk Vetch”.
My favorite is the Oregon-California Stupidity of the Smith River Drainage Basin. On the Oregon side you can’t mine, fish, camp, or graze cattle. As soon the river winds into Northern California it is surrounded on both sides by farmland almost all the way to the ocean. But Oregon remains the virgin. Except the private land which is currently being clear-cut logged – and grazed by cattle.