Anarchotyranny Runs Out of Water

Astonishingly devastating fires are burning mostly unchecked in Los Angeles, destroying whole neighborhoods, and see if you can spot the problem in this Yahoo News update I found in my inbox this morning:

Thousands of acres of fire burning into (and then straight through) neighborhoods; 1,400 firefighters. In Pacific Palisades alone, where the biggest fire started first, we’re below one firefighter per two acres of fire. I’ve spent most of my life in California, and a quite common experience is to be in way-Northern California, say for example, and watch a line of fire engines go racing past from San Diego and Newport Beach, 500 miles from home. We deal with big fires with prompt statewide mutual aid, a well-practiced system. I live near the Eaton fire, which is burning in the hills above Pasadena, and I listened all night for the cavalry to arrive. The cavalry, bizarrely, does not seem to have arrived. And so I’ve been watching houses burn, on the news, with reporters present but no firefighters. Also (click this link to watch the video):

This is becoming a widespread problem, so serious and obvious that even the Los Angeles Times has noticed.

Where I live, in the western San Gabriel Valley, a large group of suburban fire departments have built an effective system of integrated and automatic mutual aid, the Verdugo system, run from a shared dispatch center in Glendale. I was listening to Verdugo dispatch last night, and the dispatchers gave up on dispatching. They broadcast calls in sets of ten or twelve, without assignments, so firefighters could hear what was happening, in case anyone could get to any of it: homes burning at the following addresses, brush burning at the following addresses, wires down at the following addresses….

The fire departments aren’t the problem, and the firefighters on the ground are very much not the problem. A cluster of headlines this morning at the highly alert news aggregator Rantingly begins to get at the underlying reality:

The mayor of Los Angeles, having cut fire department funding to pay for social justice programs, is on a city-funded outreach trip to Ghana as her city burns. How important.

As a matter of symbolism, the destruction of Pacific Palisades (and, as we’re seeing this morning, big stretches of Malibu) is a gut punch. These are the most comfortable places in Los Angeles, and one of the discussions on social media this morning is about which celebrities have evacuated or lost their homes. (“Oh my God Tom Hanks!”) The places that are burning are the Democratic Party’s ATM machine. One wonders if they’ll notice the meaning of the fires. Meanwhile:

So yes, the ability of leftists to miss the point appears to be infinite. California has enormously expensive and intrusive government that can’t provide firefighters or water when your neighborhood burns down, which proves that Orange Man Bad.

I’m more than a mile from the edge of the nearest evacuation warning, so we’ll be fine. But that’s because of the accident of our location relative to the fire, not because anything here actually works.