California Bluefight, and Other Fire News (Updated)

Many surprising developments in the California fires, the biggest of which are still very active and not at all under control. Fire crews are currently working to keep the Palisades fire from cresting the hills and heading north into the San Fernando Valley, as it also approaches the 405 freeway and Bel Air on the east side. Screenshot from local news that hit close to home:

That tower with the platform is part of an old Nike missile control site, now part of the San Vicente Mountain Park. I’ve stood on that tower many times. It’s down “dirt Mulholland,” the fire road that continues as Mulholland Drive ends above Encino. I used to hike that area with other parents every week because my daughter attended a school in the Mulholland Educational Corridor, a string of private schools clustered around Bel Air Presbyterian Church. It’s up the hill from the Encino Reservoir, which helicopters pilots are using for water, and up the hill on the other side from Mandeville Canyon, a very quiet and very expensive neighborhood. This is a bad place for the fire to have reached. If the fire crews can’t hold it on this ridgeline, Saturday will be an extraordinarily ugly day. Here’s a north-facing picture from the San Vicente Mountain Park website:

There’s a lot of densely populated city below that peak, and evacuation warnings have spread to stretches of Ventura Boulevard tonight. Losing big parts of Altadena, big parts of Malibu, big parts of Pacific Palisades, and big parts of Encino would be like watching a fire stretch deep into multiple boroughs in New York City. Throw in parts of Brentwood and Bel Air and this becomes one the worst disasters in American history. We’ll see.

Second, a word about cause. To pick the lowest hanging fruit, here’s how The Atlantic — my go-to source for wrongest takes — explains the fires:

The fruits of climate change, causing excessive dryness, therefore fire. You can find a lot of this argument online:

See, capitalism causes “prolonged droughts.” Here’s one that celebrates the allegedly excellent reporting in The Atlantic:

Ten years of hotness and dryness because of climate change! Too dry!

So here’s how the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, which controls a bunch of this land (and runs the San Vicente Mountain Park, where an MRCA ranger lives on site), warned in October that we were facing an unusually dangerous fire season, and look especially for the part in italics. Click to enlarge, if you need this to be bigger:

“After two years of record rain,” the fuel load is very dangerous. Because plants grew so much. Because of so much rain. From capitalism’s prolonged droughts, which caused ten years of dryness.

Got all that?

Finally, we’re starting to see signs of a blue-on-blue fight that could get interesting in a hurry. This person is the Los Angeles City Controller, and well enough to the left that he sometimes runs for office as a Green Party candidate. He just knifed the city’s far-left idiot mayor:

Rick Caruso, an extremely capable real estate developer who lost the mayoral race to the worthless idiot socialist Karen Bass, is a centrist Democrat who has been saying for years that the city is dangerously underfunding its fire department to fund social justice nonsense. He’s been on the news a lot this week. The re-emergence of centrist Democrats would be magnificent news for Los Angeles.

Similarly, Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley has been brutally clear about blaming Bass and the woke city council. I find myself suspecting that Crowley, much-derided as a DEI fire chief who got the job merely because she’s a lesbian, has been quietly good at the job. Not sure yet, though, and working on it. Could be wrong. I’m asking firefighters what they think, but Los Angeles firefighters are currently kind of busy. Here’s what their union said when she got the job in 2022:

The dedicated men and women of the LAFD are facing enormous challenges with staffing shortages and an increase in emergency calls for service throughout Los Angeles. We need a fire chief who will endure the political storms and support our firefighters as they save lives and property in our city. We feel that Chief Crowley can provide this leadership.

Much more to come. A dark moment, but also an interesting moment. We’ll see where the Palisades fire is in the morning, and please pray for Los Angeles even if the place and its idiotic politics irritate you.

ADDED LATER:

Forgot to mention: On X, shocking footage from the peak of the fire on Lake Avenue in Altadena. Compare the amount of fire to the number of fire department resources on scene. The “elementary school” the dude shouts about at the end is a middle school, Eliot Arts Magnet.