It's for sure enough to make you sick. The missed opportunities and coulda/shoulda stories coming out of Los Angeles right now, even while fires are still blazing away, can make you ill thinking about them as you try to take in the scale of the loss.

So much of which, maybe, could have been mitigated with...a little more water? A full reserve reservoir, be damned the inconvenience of having to drain it after fire season.

...It had a ripped cover, so they drained it.

A large reservoir in Pacific Palisades that is part of the Los Angeles water supply system was out of use when a ferocious wildfire destroyed thousands of homes and other structures nearby.

Officials told The Times that the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been closed for repairs to its cover, leaving a 117 million gallon water storage complex empty in the heart of the Palisades.

Perhaps someone could have prioritized the CalFire prevention budget to get brush cleared after two years of record rainfall had exacerbated the already perilous state of the hillsides?

...Even liberal Newsweek, while trying to keep the blow as soft as possible by noting the overall CalFire budget has gone up while specific fire prevention items have taken repeated hits, is calling Newsom out on the numbers.

Gavin Newsom Cut $100M From Fire Prevention Budget Before California Fires

The 2024-25 California state budget, which Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law in June 2024, slashed funding for wildfire and forest resilience by $101 million as part of a series of cutbacks according to an analysis by the state's Legislative Analyst's Office.

The lawsuits against utilities have already started, with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power being a prime target.

The city of Los Angeles’ electric and water utility was hit with a lawsuit faulting it for not supplying enough water to fight the biggest fire still raging in the second-largest U.S. metropolis.

Property owners in the city’s tony Pacific Palisades neighborhood sued the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest municipal utility in the U.S. The complaint appeared late Monday on the Los Angeles Superior Court’s website, but hasn’t yet been fully processed by the court.

The power companies, Southern California Edison (SCE) and Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) are also ripe for the blame plucking. A lawsuit has already been filed against SCE for the smaller Eaton fire even though there's yet to be any determination of cause. I guess it's just better to get your dibs in first.

 A lawsuit filed Monday against Southern California Edison claims the utility’s equipment sparked the deadly Eaton Fire burning just outside Los Angeles and Edison has acknowledged fire agencies are investigating whether its equipment may have started a smaller LA-area fire that broke out the same day.

Authorities still haven’t determined an official cause for any of the fires, which began last Tuesday amid hurricane-force winds and have killed at least 24 people in and around Los Angeles. A team from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is taking the lead on the investigations and whether there is a connection between any of them.

You know who hasn't been sued?

The environmental whackos have prevented much of the work that needed to be done to prevent these naturally occurring wildfires from turning into major catastrophes. The clearing of the underbrush, the controlled burns, the lines restringing, and the pole replacements - none of it was ever done at the rate it needed to be. Only a mere fraction.

Time after time, someone filed an injunction or a complaint, and everything ground to a screeching halt, if it was allowed to begin at all. In some cases, what progress had been made was ordered completely reversed thanks to the enviro-weenies infernal screeching about their priorities of saving the Earth versus public safety.

And it all worked out great...until it didn't.

This devastating, possibly preventable at-scale Palisades fire is a prime example of one more thing being added to the witch's brew of incompetence and smug complacency that turned a brush fire into miles of heartbreak and irrecoverable loss.

As residents learn each new, inexcusable, cascading contributing factor, I hope to God a light goes off in their brains.

The latest one? It's the genesis of my headline - the milkvetch plant.

Apparently, it is a lovely, winsome, and rare little prairie flowering bush that blooms in the hills around the Palisades area. Protecting the milkvetch took precedence over replacing old wooden power poles (that snap in high winds and burn pretty well themselves) and clearing brush to an ardent admirer of the wee endangered shrub.

...In 2019, the LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP) began replacing nearly 100-year-old power line poles cutting through Topanga State Park, when the project was halted within days by conservationists outraged that federally endangered Braunton’s milkvetch plants had been trampled during the process.

The goal of the project was to improve fire safety for the Pacific Palisades area by replacing the wooden poles with steel, widening fire-access lanes in the area, and installing wind- and fire-resistant power lines — all after the area was identified as having an “elevated fire risk,” according to the LA Times.

“This project will help ensure power reliability and safety, while helping reduce wildfire threats,” the LADWP said at the time. “These wooden poles were installed between 1933 and 1955 and are now past their useful service life.”

Yay! Some of those phone poles were almost 90 years old. Change those suckers out, no?

No.

An 'amateur botanist' kvetched to authorities about the 'damage' being done by crews working on the project. It started a tragic comedy of errors that isn't over because the fires aren't out.

...But, after an amateur botanist hiking through the park during the work saw the harm done to some of the park’s Braunton’s milkvetch — a flowering shrub with only a few thousand specimens remaining in the wild — and complained, the project was completely halted, Courthouse News Service reported.

Instead of fire-hardening the park, the city — which the state said had undertaken the work without proper permitting — ended up paying $2 million in fines and was ordered by the California Coastal Commission to reverse the whole project and replant the rare herb.

That work saved about 200 Braunton’s milkvetch plants — almost all of which have now likely been torched in the wildfires that consumed Topanga Canyon, along with nearly 24,000 acres (37 square miles) of some of LA’s most sought-after real estate.

Schweet, huh?

No one is quite sure if those phone poles ever did get replaced, but in an irony of ironies, it turns out that the endangered Braunton's milkvetch is what's known as a 'chaparral' plant. That also means it reproduces best when hit by a good old wildfire.

It's the damnedest thing.

Think if the city had been allowed to finish the pole replacements and prescribe burn - they'd probably be covered up with the suckers now and might have a few more houses left for their tax base.

But no one's talking about hunting down the amateur botanist. 

Or suing the Coastal Commission.

...A report by commission staff found that in all, 183 Braunton’s milkvetch plants along the Temescal Ridge Trail were damaged during the unpermitted project. The commission became involved because the power pole project was partially in an area it regulates.

“The newly graded roads and widened existing road went directly through coastal chaparral and coastal sage scrub communities — both of which are relatively rare and important ecosystems that support and include a wide variety of coastally important plants, insects, mammals, and birds,” the commission report said.

On Wednesday, the commission approved a cease and desist order and a restoration plan that LADWP agreed to follow. The utility will pay $1.9 million for the violation and perform erosion control, reverse any grading it performed, and replant the area. LADWP will also implement long-term monitoring of the damage it caused.

And why?

They don't have deep pockets, the Coastal Commission has big power, and kneeling to the climate cultist tantrums is so ingrained a CA reflex response I don't know that even a catastrophe of this magnitude can shake them free. 

It's a really hip Stockholm syndrome.