My hometown during the 2017 fires in which my childhood home was burned and many friends and neighbors lost their homes and animals, and nine lost their lives.
After years of fire and smoke in rural Northern California—evacuations, death and destruction, broken communities, lost homes—watching Los Angeles burn feels surreal but inevitable. This could have been avoided, but we knew it was coming.
For years, we have sounded the alarm to anyone who would listen. San Francisco and Los Angeles ignored us.
Now Los Angeles—one of the great cities on earth, a unique American gem—is in ashes.
For anyone who wants to understand how we got here, this is what happened.
California has not built a new major water reservoir since 1979
The state’s last major reservoir project was completed in 1979, when the population was some 23 million. It’s been 50 years, there are now 39 million residents, and progress on the storied California Water Project has stopped.
In 2014, Californians voted overwhelmingly for Prop 1, funding a US$7.5 billion bond to construct new water reservoirs and dams, with a deadline of January 1, 2022.
It’s now 2025, and no reservoirs have been built. Proposed projects remain mired in the bureaucratic morass of California politics.
There is no reason for California to experience water shortage. The natural climate is cyclical: years of low rainfall punctuated by years of extreme rain. Eleven months ago, at the start of 2024, we were enjoying several extra feet of snowpack in the Sierras and the most rain we’d had in 25 years. The reservoirs were overflowing.
Year after year, massive, swollen rivers in Northern California send water out to the Pacific Ocean, while government agencies scold citizens for watering their lawns.
The state is spending millions to REMOVE existing water infrastructure
If failure to build new water projects for a growing state population weren’t bad enough, Gavin Newsom and his feckless administration is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to destroy existing water infrastructure in fire-prone Northern California.
The Klamath Dam was removed in 2023.
Scott Dam is next: a century-old dam system upon which some 600,000 people rely in agricultural communities stretching from Potter Valley to Bodega Bay.
The government wants to remove this dam, impoverishing the farm communities and rural residents who rely on it, to “improve salmon habitat.”
Photo credit USFS. Lake Pillsbury is a scenic reservoir created by Scott Dam, critical water infrastructure serving rural and ag communities and 600,000 users from Potter Valley to Bodega Bay. Gavin Newsom’s administration is set to remove this dam, which will run Lake Pillsbury dry.
Several lethal fires have hit this region in the past few years, including the Redwood Complex and Sonoma Complex fires in 2017, and the Mendocino Complex Fire in 2018. Removing their water is a cruel blow for a community still reeling from those disasters, leaving them defenseless when the next fire comes.
Water cuts to farmers and citizens over a 3-inch fish led to empty reservoirs
Farms were run dry and pumps shut off to preserve the three-inch “Delta Smelt”
California is the leading agricultural state in the nation. But for years, politicians slashed water allotments and shut off ag pumps to farmers in an effort to save a finger-length, minnow-like fish called the Delta Smelt.
When President Trump took office, he said California should consider updating its water infrastructure so farmers could grow crops and cities didn’t have to burn to the ground over a minnow.
This enraged Democrat activists. Their righteous indignation fueled many think pieces about the Delta Smelt.
For all that spilled ink, the restoration efforts didn’t work. Outside hatcheries, the Delta Smelt are all but gone.
So are scores of farmers, their land run dry by politicians in Sacramento.
This approach is typical of the consistent preference displayed by California politicians for the perceived prosperity of any animal, species, or ecosystem over the welfare and survival of its citizens.
After years of anti-human water and land policy, neglecting critical infrastructure, when the fires started last night in Los Angeles, there was no water in the fire hydrants.
Removing grazing, control burns, and management left California an unnatural tinder box
According to UC Berkeley rangeland science professor Lynn Huntsinger, cattle remove some 12 billion pounds of dry biomass from California’s grasslands and woodlands every year.
“Cattle are the largest fire prevention tool we have in the state,” she told me, “But people are largely unaware of it.”
Environmentalists blame cows for climate change. Beef cattle are responsible for less than 2% of all U.S. carbon emissions. Wildfire is responsible for between 15% and 30% of U.S. emissions—and that number appears to be getting worse.
Prescribed fires and forest management have also gone out of fashion. For centuries, Native tribes practiced control burning to manage the natural fire risk inherent to California’s ecosystem.
Round Valley rancher Randy Vann lent me a rare book called The Last of the West by Frank Asbill, whose father Pierce was one of the earliest European explorers in Northern California. In it I came across an incredible passage in which Frank details Mendocino County as his father found it in the spring and summer of 1854:
The lower mountains and valleys…were wild oat fields, the oats being as high as the horses’ backs. There was very little underbrush, as the Wylackie Indians kept their country well burned, burning it every three years. Today the enlightened white man prevents fires, with his water shed and other devices, so that there is timber-rot, tangled underbrush, second growth, worthless timber, and a twisted mass of brush, twenty to fifty feet high, all through these same mountains. This underbrush, literally covered with cobwebs, holds the dried pine needles and dry leaves from the trees in a mass of inflammable material, ready for spontaneous combustion.…The lush undergrowth of today is far different from the flower gardens of that earlier time.
In his incredible piece for The California Sunday Magazine, author Mark Arax interviewed Richard Wilson, an elderly Mendocino County rancher who ran the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in the 1990s.
“The Indians gave us the natural forest. Much of it was patchy, and the trees grew to differing heights,” Wilson told him. “This combination of open ground and uneven canopy kept the fires from raging. Now the fires are raging. They’re racing from forest to suburbia, and we’re scratching our heads trying to figure out why.”
Arax writes about the slow abandonment of California’s natural ecosystem in favor of a lush, dense undergrowth favored by European sensibilities.
What was once sparse is now densely packed with pine, fir, cedar, and manzanita. A forest that supported 64 trees an acre in pre-settlement times now boasted 160 trees an acre. The modern eye sees this mountain-to-mountain vegetation as proof of the forest’s good health. Like the border-to-border almond trees in the valley below, vigor would appear to be nature at its most eloquent. But that is not what nature intended. “The landscapes of today may look attractively lush,” Gruell writes, “but the thickening forest threatens us with several problems.”
For decades, ideologues waged an all-out war against forest management. Earth First! terrorists spiked trees, driving metal spikes into trunks designed to kill or maim unwitting loggers. President Joe Biden appointed one of those extremists to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). 7 million acres were named “protected habitat” for spotted owls, turning logging communities in the North into ghost towns and axing tens of thousands of jobs.
All of these efforts resulted in unnatural, out-of-control overgrowth. When the fires raged through, hot and wicked, those “protected” trees and wildlife were decimated, not with the judicious eye of proper sustainable loggers, but with the fury of insulted nature.
In response, Gavin Newsom cut the budget for forest management. And in October of last year, under President Joe Biden, the Forest Service put a stop to prescribed burning in California altogether.
California changed its wildfire approach from expert forest management to militarized fire suppression
In its slow shift away from responsible, historic land management, California also changed the focus of its fire services away from land and forest management to militarized fire suppression and firefighting. Gone were the days of Richard Wilson’s Department of Fire and Forestry Protection. Now we have something new: CAL FIRE.
By its 2006 name change, CAL FIRE had reached final form—a “disaster-industrial complex,” Arax calls it.
Equipped with helicopters, air tankers, bulldozers, all-terrain fire trucks, thousands of employees, and hundreds of millions of dollars, the fleet of union-backed firefighters weren’t taking orders from quiet old cattlemen and khakied forestry workers anymore.
Screenshot from the CAL FIRE website where the agency suggests deadly megafires are the “new normal” thanks to climate change and vegetation buildup.
In place of tree thinning, control burning, forest management, and brush clearing, we had Smokey the Bear. Prevention, suppression. Fire forces bought into the delusion that they could eliminate fire from this ecosystem. Instead of using fire as a tool, they tried to ban it. We allowed unnatural overgrowth to take over, turning into billions of tons of dry fuel. When fires did burn, they destroyed.
In a piece for The Atlantic titled “Trees Are Overrated,” author Julia Rosen suggests the militarized approach of modern fire practices goes against centuries of land knowledge.
Many Indigenous peoples, likely noting the benefits of wildfires for hunting and foraging grounds, intentionally burned the landscape, helping to maintain and possibly expand grasslands and savannas. But in Europe, powerful civilizations took root in forested terrain. And centuries later, when these cultures began exploring and colonizing the rest of the world, they chose trees over grass.
The vast plains of the American West are an ecosystem designed for fire, not heady overgrown brush. In terms of climate impact, grassland is a more effective and reliable carbon sink than forest. One study even found that grasslands may store more carbon through fire than forests lose.
“Fire for the savanna is like rain for the rain forest,” Joseph Feldman, an ecologist at Texas A&M University, told The Atlantic.
A comparison of the Yosemite valley floor in 1872 versus 2020. Notice the expansion of tree cover. Credit: University of California
The plains of the American West were not meant to resemble the European forests familiar to our pioneer fathers’ ancestral eye; it is more like the African savanna. This place, in its stark, haunting beauty, was shaped by fire.
State politics have become a money laundering scheme for powerful Democrats
One fact that seems to be lost in the coverage of the Los Angeles fires is this: We had warning.
This tweet was posted Monday, the day before the winds started.
I now live in Orange County. Everyone knew high winds were hitting yesterday. This happens; dry, fast Santa Ana winds or “devil winds” blow from the desert over the mountains, funneling through narrow mountain passes and rapidly heating as they descend.
This year, the conditions for fire were obvious and terrifying. We’re coming off two record rain years, but this winter has been dry. With the devil winds near, we were all on watch.
Still, inexplicably, when the fires started, there was no water in the Los Angeles fire hydrants.
The media will still blame climate change. This allows powerful Democrat politicians and bureaucrats to continue their money laundering scheme in California without accountability.
It’s tough to skim money from workers clearing brush or operating water infrastructure. It’s much easier to skim that money from a DEI program or an anti-fatphobia task force. There are no deliverables expected from these endeavors. They are empty talking points that do not require expertise, sweat, or calluses. No one has to get up on a podium and stand before a microphone and explain where the money went. It’s the perfect system for quietly bleeding citizens dry.
There were 13,909 “homeless fires” in Los Angeles in 2023
A few months ago, LA Mayor Karen Bass slashed the city’s fire budget by $17.6 million. She cut the budget for other government functions such as sanitation and street service. These are the items that Californians pay taxes for; one might say they are the only reason to pay taxes.
Her 2025 budget proposal includes $950 million for “addressing homelessness.”
In California, the homeless are treated like a protected political class. Any suggestion to clean up homeless encampments or get the mentally ill and drug addicted off the streets is met with disdain, as though leaving unwell human beings in squalor, a danger to themselves and others, is the compassionate choice.
It turns out mentally ill people camping in public spaces often start fires. In 2023, 13,909 “homeless fires” were started in Los Angeles alone, almost double the number in 2020. Some are caused by cooking fires, or by tapping into city electrical wires under the pavement.
Between 2019 and 2024, California spent $24 billion to “combat homelessness.” During those five years, the homeless population grew by 30,000 to 181,000. Despite spending the equivalent of $160,000 on each homeless person, the state had nothing to show for it. A 2024 report said the state lost track of those billions of taxpayer dollars, failing to “adequately monitor” its spending.
The homeless issue has become nothing less than a money laundering scheme for greedy, unscrupulous politicians and administrators, lining the pockets of the bureaucrats paid to “address homelessness” as year after year, the problem worsens, with no accountability.
ESG/climate policies and DEI hiring prioritized over effectiveness and competency
In 2021, the L.A. Fire Department issued a racial equity plan to “end systemic, institutional, and structural racism” in the force. This plan includes a chart to map out the racial makeup of employees.
The current LA fire chief appointed in 2022, Kristin Crowley, is female and gay. Her stated focus is improving diversity in the force.
Over at the Mayor’s office, when last night’s fires broke out, Mayor Bass was in Africa, attending the inauguration of the Ghanese president on the taxpayer dime.
Governor Newsom thanked her for providing leadership “in absentia.”
Bass, a black woman, won her race for mayor against Rick Caruso, a successful Los Angeles businessman who changed his political affiliation from Republican to Democrat in a failed bid to soften his appeal to L.A. voters. Caruso was on the ground last night to discuss the fires with local news crews, and the first person I saw to break the news that the hydrants were not working.
Meanwhile, as 100,000 evacuated Californians prayed their homes were still standing, our critically senile outgoing president Joe Biden took the opportunity at this morning’s press conference to announce, “The good news is, I’m now a great-grandfather.” It brought to mind his equally self-involved press conference in Lahaina after the Maui fires, in which he told a roomful of survivors about the time his Corvette almost caught fire.
State politicians take donations from at-fault power companies while fire victims remain unpaid
The history between California politicians and state-regulated power companies like Southern California Edison (SCE) and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is a long and sordid one.
PG&E has a monopoly on natural gas and electricity services across much of the Northern part of the state. The company was responsible for over 1500 fires between 2014 and 2017, including the 2018 Camp Fire that took 85 lives and destroyed nearly 18,900 homes and buildings.
After pleading guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter in the Camp Fire, PG&E was ordered to pay $13.5 billion to victims. The company filed for bankruptcy.
PG&E has made millions of dollars in donations to politicians like Gavin Newsom, Jared Huffman, and Nancy Pelosi.
In the wake of its new status as a bankrupt convicted felon, PG&E continued to make those donations, spending millions of dollars on lawmakers’ campaigns, treating employees to expensive dinners days before planned power shut-offs, and doling out $11 million in performance bonuses to executives, all while fire victims remain unpaid.
The WSJ reports California fire victims are still unpaid after PG&E pled guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter in the Paradise fire and declared bankruptcy.
Newsom also appears to enjoy a financial relationship with PG&E. Prior to serving as governor, PG&E gave Newsom’s winery over $500,000 for “advertising services.” During his gubernatorial race, PG&E was Newsom’s second-highest political contributor with $208,000 in donations.
SCE has its own lengthy history of political scandals and cover-ups. Former attorney general Kamala Harris appeared to look the other way for both power companies.
A report by ABC10 found that, of the 55 lawmakers representing California in Congress, all but nine have taken money from PG&E.
These power companies continue to raise rates on Californians while failing to maintain basic critical infrastructure in fire-prone areas or make their victims whole.
Ashes to ashes
Butte County cattleman Dave Daley went viral among California ranchers when he wrote about what happened to his land in the 2020 Bear Fire:
Someone asked my daughter if I had lost our family home. She told them “No, that would be replaceable. This is not!” I would gladly sleep in my truck for the rest of my life to have our mountains back.
I am enveloped by overwhelming sadness and grief, and then anger. I’m angry at everyone, and no one. Grieving for things lost that will never be the same. I wake myself weeping almost soundlessly. And, it is hard to stop.
I cry for the forest, the trees and streams, and the horrible deaths suffered by the wildlife and our cattle. The suffering was unimaginable. When you find groups of cows and their baby calves tumbled in a ravine trying to escape, burned almost beyond recognition, you try not to wretch. You only pray death was swift. A fawn and small calf side by side as if hoping to protect one another. Worse, in searing memory, cows with their hooves, udder and even legs burned off who had to be euthanized. A doe laying in the ashes with three fawns, not all hers I bet.
Rural California has been suffering. Perhaps our urban neighbors thought it was safe to ignore us. If the cities thought our pain and devastation would stay isolated to the parts of California that don’t matter to Gavin Newsom, they know today it won’t. No place, not even Los Angeles, is so removed from nature.
There is nothing new about California’s dry climate or cyclical rainfall.
There’s nothing new about the devil winds. Joan Didion wrote about them back in the 60s.
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.
What is new are years of mismanagement, sprawling urban centers built in unattended dry brush, and underprepared government agencies focused on DEI and rhetoric over outcomes.
These are just a few reasons for the state of the Golden State, the reason LA is on fire. There are layers of ineptitude to examine. Years of government mismanagement and money laundering and rejection of pragmatism and science in favor of ideological sun god worship and anti-humanism. Not all the headlines are exciting. This is what a Democrat supermajority looks like. This is the banal, boring brutality of bureaucracy. It’s death by a thousand cuts. This is why people ignore it, get numb to it, or finally move away.
This is why Los Angeles is burning.
This article has been republished with permission from UNWON.
Do you think that the Los Angeles conflagration was preventable?
AUTHOR
Keely Covello
Keely Covello is a writer, investigative journalist and, documentary filmmaker based in rural California. Visit and subscribe to her Substack, UNWON.
EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
