Democratic lawmakers are claiming the severity of the Los Angeles wildfires was a result of climate change, despite reports that the city’s fire hydrants ran out of water and the fire department’s budget was slashed just weeks before the Palisades fire destroyed thousands of homes and burned more than 15,000 acres.
Several fires broke out across the Southern California mountains in early January, quickly spreading to coastal residential areas and destroying more than 10,000 homes and structures.
As the fires gained national attention, Democratic lawmakers across the country began to claim it was climate change rather than state policies that caused the disastrous fire damage.
“And what has happened is that climate change has dried out our foliage, our flora. And coupled with these massive winds, these 50 to 100 miles an hour winds that happen every year around this time, a little ember can turn into a massive fire,” Rep. Dave Min, D-Calif., who represents a district not far from the raging fires, told NewsNation’s “The Hill Sunday.”
“Climate change has wreaked havoc on us,” Min said.
After the fires engulfed the Los Angeles mountains, it was reported that local fire hydrants were not producing water and that the firefighter funding had recently been cut by millions.
Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged these reports, and demanded an independent investigation be conducted into the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) regarding the lack of water in the middle of the crisis, but Democratic lawmakers shifted the blame away from state leaders.
“The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax.’ Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said in a social media post on Wednesday morning.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, said that the state leaders who don’t acknowledge climate change as a crisis, who are commonly Republican, are at fault.
“I’m so heartbroken at the devastation that’s continuously inflicted upon our country & the world & elected ‘leaders’ are ignorant, impotent, or just incompetent to doing the smart thing, which is to acknowledge that climate change is real & start to solve it,” Crockett wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Jan. 8.
Another Democratic lawmaker, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, said in January that he was “glad to be working with Gov. Newsom and helping CA, ravaged repeatedly by the effects of climate change.”
Months before the fires broke out, Los Angeles city officials cut the fire department budget by $17.6 million, while hundreds of thousands of dollars were being allocated to fund diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the state.
Celebrities immediately began pointing fingers at city leadership for investing in programs such as a “syringe exchange” program that gives sterile syringes to homeless drug addicts, instead of more funding for fire prevention efforts.
“We pay the highest taxes in California. Our fire hydrants were empty. Our vegetation was overgrown, brush not cleared. Our reservoirs were emptied by our governor because tribal leaders wanted to save fish. Our fire department budget was cut by our mayor. But thank god drug addicts are getting their drug kits,” actress Sara Foster wrote in a post on X.
On the same platform, Khloé Kardashian called out the city’s Democratic mayor, writing, “Mayor Bass you are a joke!!!!”
Rick Caruso, founder of a real estate company and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate, suggested that forest management could have mitigated the fires.
“We knew the winds were coming. We knew that there was brush that needed to be cleared 20 years ago,” Caruso, founder of a real estate company and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate, told the LA Times. “This fire could have been mitigated — maybe not prevented.”
