Obvious Blue Model Failure: "It’s unclear when the reservoir first went offline"

I’ve been writing about the Palisades fire for years. Let me show you what I mean by that.

The Los Angeles Times reports this morning — confirming a conspiracy theory that people have been spreading online as social media disinformation, of course — that the major local reservoir at the heart of Pacific Palisades was dry when the fire started, due to a torn liner (floating cover). The newspaper quotes a city DWP official as saying that the reservoir has been out of service for repairs for “a while.” They’re not sure about an actual date. The story is illustrated with a photograph of the empty reservoir that was taken in 2022, so.

As the fire burned, the water supply in the Palisades came from three storage tanks that hold “1 million gallons each,” while the 117 million gallon reservoir was completely empty. You can read the whole story to dig into the several arguments that the reservoir wouldn’t have been entirely full even if it was working, and that the supply from the reservoir wouldn’t have been immediately and entirely available for firefighting, but nonetheless: the most important water storage facility in the heart of the burning neighborhood was empty because of maintenance problems, with city officials shrugging and mumbling about the details.

The Palisades had three million gallons of water in a local system that can hold up to 120 million gallons, if it’s maintained and operational. Everything else is just noise.

I live in a small and highly woke suburban town that hangs just off the eastern side of the City of Los Angeles, and I’ve been telling you for years that our city council debates Gaza ceasefires and resolutions denouncing Trump and Putin and climate change while the city’s infrastructure crumbles. Here’s one example among many, from 2022, if you want to click on this and see an example of what I’ve been saying for a long time:

Now, continuing the point:

Years ago, the city installed button-operated flashing lights at crosswalks near schools and the library. Then they broke. Then the city did this, illustrated with a picture I took this morning:

They covered the buttons with orange bags so people would know that they were broken. The bag has faded, because it’s been there for a long time. Here’s another one, also from this morning:

When things break, they’re just broken. It went out of service. It’s been a while. Broken things aren’t fixed, but we nailed the resolution denouncing Putin.

South Pasadena has the only bridge in the world that was designed by the architects Charles and Henry Greene, the Oaklawn pedestrian bridge. We’ve designated it as a local historical landmark. Also, it’s closed, because the concrete is cracked and the city has declared that the bridge may be unsafe. They don’t know that the bridge is unsafe, because they haven’t gotten around to doing a structural assessment, but whatever. This is my video, from 2023, and yes, I held the camera vertically like an idiot:

The bridge, this morning, still has signs warning that it’s closed, but the signs fell down in the wind, so.

We replaced our fleet of police cars with Teslas, by the way, consistent with our climate action plan. The image of new patrol Teslas racing across potholed streets past cracked bridges to save the climate is very blue zone.

The warning fire that told us Los Angeles had lost control happened in November of 2023. The I-10 fire near downtown took out the structural supports underneath the freeway, which didn’t collapse but had to be closed until the thing could be shored up.

State, county, and city officials said, after the fire, that they would remove homeless encampments and illegal storage yards under the freeways to prevent a recurrence. Again, I wrote about this repeatedly and said they weren’t actually fixing the problem. Please read this post from 2023, which includes a detailed discussion of, yes, the risk of wildfires in Los Angeles:

And see also:

The events of this week aren’t a surprise. A bunch of people are doing the akshully act this week, warning that it’s terribly unsophisticated to think that fires can be extinguished or that water can be meaningfully supplied for major urban fires.

It’s an act. We saw this coming. See also, for a concise discussion of social justice activism in Los Angeles fire operations and oversight:

About The Los Angeles Fire Department And The Los Angeles Board Of Fire Commissioners

The Blue Model doesn’t work. Watch this exchange between a local reporter and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, as he tells her he spent hours in a burning neighborhood and “did not see a single fire engine.” She replies, predictably, that she doesn’t think this is the right time for that discussion. The people elected to symbol-performance in the blue zones can’t perform their alleged roles, full stop.

On a personal note, the fire closest to my home is burning uncontrolled to the north, west, and east, but I live well to the south. The brief and very modest danger is long gone for me, and the skies are surprisingly blue over my neighborhood this morning, even as we still have some ash raining down. The evacuation warning zones crept down toward us, for a while, but stopped a little more than a mile away, and the fire is now headed elsewhere. We’re just fine, and will be just fine.