One member of the Los Angeles City Council has cut through the blame-games and ridiculous talk of “climate change,” and pointed to the gross lack of attention to infrastructure as the true reason behind the deadly California fires. The Washington Post reported that Los Angeles City Council member Traci Park, who represents parts of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood where the fires broke out, blamed the fires on the “chronic underinvestment in the city of Los Angeles in our public infrastructure.”
“The circumstances of the last 48 hours were 100 percent predictable,” Park said in an interview Jan. 8. It was Los Angeles’ failure to invest in water systems, fire stations, and other infrastructure that contributed to a lack of resources to fight the fire, she added. “It’s on us to fix that,” Park said, and stressed that she had tried to address these issues from the time she took office in 2022.
“We have a long way to go to make this right and to bring Los Angeles and its infrastructure into the modern world,” she said.
During the worst moments of the fires, many of the Los Angeles fire hydrants ran dry. According to Mayor Karen Bass, that occurred with 20% of the hydrants. Park said she planned to look into why it had happened.
The LaRouche movement has produced reports and studies for decades on the need for large-scale water infrastructure in the U.S. West, and California in particular. It was a man-made crisis through decades of willful neglect. This week’s fires underscore the failure of the environmentalist dogma of “conservation,” which had insisted that, despite California’s large population increases over the past 60 years, no new major water infrastructure was needed—only more conserving.
