What They’re Not Telling You About Wildfires

Some of the most devastating wildfires in California’s history have destroyed huge areas of Los Angeles. More than 200,000 people have been forced to evacuate their homes. Over 10,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Some economists think the massive damage could cost as much as $275 billion. Climate change is already getting the blame for the scale of the fires and the speed they spread. But maybe it isn’t climate change people should be pointing their fingers at, because a lot of things about this disaster just don’t add up.

Wildfires aren’t exactly unknown in California.

There are thousands of them every year, and the damage they cause is steadily increasing – some say because of climate change, others because there’s more property to damage and forests are being poorly managed.

Where Do Money Go

Over the last 25 years, there have been an average of 8,250 wildfires a year in the Golden State, burning an average of about 975,000 acres of land. It’s not hard to predict that California will have a lot of fires. So why did LA’s Democrat mayor Karen Bass slash almost $20 million from the firefighting budget?

The 2024-25 city budget shows that the Los Angeles Fire Department budget was cut by $17.6 million from the 2023-24 figure.

The city still spent over $800 million on firefighters, but that’s a reduction of over 2%.

Did Mayor Bass think there would be fewer fires this year? Actually, it’s hard to say what – if anything – Bass was thinking. Despite warnings about an increased fire risk days before the first blaze broke out, Bass decided to abandon the city and fly to Ghana for the inauguration of the African country’s new president (even though she promised during her election campaign she wouldn’t travel abroad during her term as mayor). When she returned, in a bizarre scene she refused to answer, or even acknowledge, any questions from journalists, just standing there staring blankly as they tried to get some answers.

As well as the cuts to the firefighting budget there are also questions about the state of the city’s fire hydrant network.

When the biggest of the fires broke out near the upmarket Pacific Palisades neighborhood on January 7 all three water tanks in the area were full – but firefighters found many hydrants were delivering little or no water.

Governor Gavin Newsom is now calling for an independent inquiry into why the hydrants weren’t working and why water from the Santa Ynez reservoir was “unavailable” for firefighting. Even if you don’t live in a dangerous zone like California, you should still take all the precautions you can to make sure you always have water just in case. One thing you can do is make water out of thin air, with this device you can build yourself.

One significant thing about the LA fires is that they’ve devastated some of the most expensive real estate in the US. They’re not just burning rural homes and trailer parks; celebrities and the ultra-rich are losing their homes. Socialite Paris Hilton’s beachfront Malibu home has been incinerated; so has actress Jamie Lee Curtis’s mansion in Pacific Palisades. James Woods, Eugene Levy, Yolanda Hadid, and Billy Crystal are other big names whose houses have burned down. It isn’t just the buildings that cost millions of dollars; so did the land they stood on.

Who Actually Gains from This

That land is going to be worth a lot less in the aftermath of the fire. Much of it isn’t upmarket neighborhoods anymore; it’s a blackened wasteland covered in charred rubble.

Not everyone is going to want to rebuild, so there’s going to be a lot of LA real estate on the market at, literally, fire sale prices. Even if your house may seem out of danger, here is how you can turn it into the safest place on Earth.

It probably won’t stay cheap for long though, so whoever buys it in the wake of the fires could make a huge profit.

Who’s likely to buy it? That’s hard to say. Some states are now bringing in laws to prevent China from buying up American land, but California isn’t one of them. The state government could even buy the land itself.

Related: SHTF Risk Based on Your State

The idea that people could profit from a disaster doesn’t sit well with everyone, but there’s an even worse possibility: What if these fires were no accident? In fact, we already know some of them were deliberate – several arsonists have been caught. There’s no evidence any of them were started by people who hoped to profit from them, but it’s possible.

Profit isn’t the only reason some people might be happy to see the fires.

Los Angeles is due to host the 2028 Summer Olympics, but there are local pressure groups who want the games relocated to another city.

Most of them are left-wing activists who think it’s wrong for LA to spend money on the Olympics when there are so many homeless people in the city.

Now fires are still burning close to several Olympic venues – Pasadena’s Rose Bowl, which will host soccer events, is being used as a base by firefighters. None of the venues has been damaged yet, but campaigners say the cost of rebuilding homes means the games need to be relocated.

What’s Next? 

The value of the land that’s been burned is far from the only suspicious thing about these fires. If you look at lists of previous California wildfires you’ll notice that almost all of them happen in a “fire season” between August and November, with occasional outliers in July or December. January? No. In fact, there doesn’t seem to ever have been a major wildfire in January before – but this January there have been 30. That’s going to leave a lot of people wondering what’s really going on.

The California fires are unusual, and the water supply problems that hindered firefighters are worrying.

Some are already pointing to the deadly fires that ravaged Maui, Hawaii, in August 2023, when there were also rumors of water shortages caused by state policies.

In one case the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources refused to release water after the fires had started, only authorizing the release once the fire had spread out of control.

Another possible link is that the Maui fires threatened to drive native Hawaiians out of burned areas because they lived in paid-off homes they’d inherited and couldn’t afford to rebuild to code. That led to a lot of land going on the market – just like it probably will in LA. Maybe the most significant comparison is the fact Hawaii officials had been warned of a rising fire risk, just like LA’s, but ignored the warnings, left firefighters starved of cash, and allowed dead vegetation to build up in vulnerable areas.

Final Thoughts

Since the Maui fires there have been plenty of reports, inquiries, and lawsuits, California is already gearing up to go through the same process. But is anyone going to look at why two wealthy states have now suffered similar disasters – and turned out to be similarly unprepared to deal with them? Politicians work for us. They’re supposed to use the authority we lend them to protect our interests. In both Maui and Los Angeles, it looks like they haven’t done that. Fire is an old enemy, and it shouldn’t have taken anyone by surprise, so why was the response so disorganized in both cases? Do you think something is going on beyond simple incompetence?

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