Special Report: Los Angeles Wild Fires
Devin Nunes and Jeff Bliss on the crisis in California
John and former United States Representative Devin Nunes discuss the causes of the wildfires tearing through Los Angeles County. Read the full transcript, or listen to an audio version below:
John Batchelor: I welcome Devin Nunes, former member of Congress, now the CEO of Truth Social and a very happy member of the people who live in the San Joaquin Valley, the bread basket to the world, the Central Valley. That's important, because Devin has instructed me for years about the challenge of water in modern California.
Once upon a time, before the great wash of Americans moved to California after the Second War, California had a natural water, fire, mudslide, snow, a natural cycle. It's part of its paradise values. It's got a Mediterranean climate in part of it; another part of it is heavily forested.
But Devin, a very good evening to you. We're looking at the disasters of California, and the reason that's important to me now is because I'm hearing things on the radio or reading things in the European press that are not well-informed. So I want you to help my listeners understand why this is something that was always implicit in the in the natural cycle of California. Water. Water is important everywhere except when it's interrupted by people who have what they think is a superior idea about smelt fish or about salmon or about in the environment. Good evening to you Devin.
Devin Nunes: Great to be with you, John. This was predictable. It's been happening in the San Joaquin Valley and all over California, really, for the better part of the last fifteen years.
There's three main factors that are causing these fires in California that the Left that runs California has refused to admit. And that is, one, the water infrastructure that moves water around the state has largely been curtailed, idled, not used. So it’s created a man-made shortage of water all over the state. So when that happens, bad decisions are made in terms of planning. Green belts aren’t created. The move to desert landscaping. There's not enough water for basic industry, basic people. And then (like they found out) the lack of water. When there’s a lot of fires, you actually can run out of water and not have water pressure.
The second thing that’s happened is the timber industry was annihilated in the late 1990s. So now there is no timber industry, so there is no logging in the state of California, virtually none. So now the same the same thing happens. These trees grow, they fall, and when a fire starts, there’s no way to put it out like there was for the previous history of 100 years in the state of California.
The third issue is grazing and in particular for what’s happening in Los Angeles right now the grazing is very, very critical. So it’s a combination of water, logging, grazing that has led to these fires. Now what really added to—no pun intended—but fuel to the fire is that for the last couple years the rainfall has been very heavy in California. So, it’s typically very cyclical. You’ll get some heavy wet years as you and I have talked about many, many times over the last two decades that I’ve been coming on your show. And then you’ll go off into a two or three year period of below average. So, it kind of just comes in waves. There’s heavy years and dry years. The last couple years were very heavy with a lot of rain. And so it soaks those hillsides and the brush begins to grow.
Now years ago, that was celebrated by farmers and ranchers because that meant that there would be cheap abundant feed for the cattle and sheep and goats and it was utilized. But in Los Angeles County in particular and all over California, farmers and ranchers are a bad word. And over the last three decades they’ve kicked the cattle and sheep and goats off the property. So now when you take two wet years followed by the long hot dry summer—which is normal, it’s a mediterranean climate, it doesn’t rain in California in the summer and fall—and then this year this early winter, typically, you’ll get some rainfalls, but in November and December, it has been it has been fairly dry.
So, now you have two years built up of brush, no cattle, no goats, no sheep, and two years of buildup and now dry, brittle grass. So, what you have surrounding the hillsides all over California, but for sure in Los Angeles County, is you essentially have jet fuel surrounding one of the largest cities in the United States, one of the largest cities in the world. That’s what’s actually happened. So, it’s bad policies on water, grazing, logging, coupled by a couple wet years and now a dry year, and if you don't create large fire breaks, there's only one way for it to go away, and that is to watch it burn. And that’s what’s happened.
John Batchelor: More backstory: because we’re now seeing this move from the Biden administration towards the eminent Trump administration. The President-elect is well informed of these matters. He started talking about them thanks to your advice in 2016. I know in the winter of 2020, Mr. Trump’s last year in the first term, he directed water to be moved towards Los Angeles and not flushed out to sea. That would have anticipated some of the water pressure issues we're now witnessing. The reason it was rejected by the governor and other activist groups is because the salmon and the smelt fish needed the water. Smelt fish, that's you, Devin. Salmon was new to me, that's off of Los Angeles. So, what we have now is a legacy where the President-elect attempted to anticipate a catastrophe we're witnessing now. And it was rejected by the governor and the apparatus and, we can believe, the elected officials of Los Angeles. Can that easily be corrected? I'm not just looking to complain. Can that order now be resurrected with the second Trump administration to get water into the Los Angeles County?
Devin Nunes: The question will be, will Los Angeles County and the state of California do a 180 and change the policies as it relates to water, grazing, and logging? If you don’t fix all three of those, you can rebuild and the same thing will happen again. Just remember, we’ve had the fires in our area—horrible fires, we used to never get them. One fire burnt like almost 600,000 acres of of pristine forest. And so if you don't change all three of those, you won't fix any problem.
So, the easiest thing to fix is actually the water, because that is simply just allowing the water infrastructure, the pumps that move the water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta that’s up near by the San Francisco Bay between there and Sacramento that lifts the water, puts it into the aqueduct, takes it all through the San Joaquin Valley where I live—which is the bread basket of the solar system—that water then makes its way over what's called the grape vine so it's pumped up and over into the Los Angeles basin. That’s easy. That can be done quickly.
The harder part, the timber industry, bringing that back is difficult because the the infrastructure and businesses are largely gone. I think there’s only a handful of timber mills left in the state of California. Between the high electricity costs and the inability to actually go out and clean up and harvest trees, there’s no investment. And I think it’d be very difficult to get companies to move back into California without some very strong, supportive California and federal laws that somebody wouldn't go in there and invest, you know, literally hundreds of millions of dollars to revive the tender timber industry to then have the next version of Gavin Newsom or Jerry Brown or Barbara Boxer or Kamala Harris go in and and eliminate your industry. So that's the one I would say that the grazing, the ability for animals to be let back onto those hillsides, that is one that could be done, but at this point what rancher or farmer wants to mess with all of the lunacy of Los Angeles County? And so effectively, you would have to pay cattle and goats and sheep to go in there and clean all that out.
I don’t live in Los Angeles, but I can tell you that if I did, I sure would not be anywhere near—I wouldn’t want to be, you know, I don’t want to be miles inland from any type of of forest or brush unless I saw it being properly maintained.
John Batchelor: Detail in the central valley: you need water now and again. As I remember that drought several years ago, the land was going down, sinking, because the water had been removed at the aquifer underneath you. That gets replenished. However, what you need is a reliable source of water that’s available to you so that it isn’t taken from you or you’re restricted and flushed into San Francisco Bay, is my remembrance for the smelt fish. Can that be stopped? For years, you protested the San Francisco elite claiming that you were going to kill the smelt fish. Can that go away?
Devin Nunes: That is as easy as a flick of a switch. And I don’t mean to be flippant, but it literally is turning the pumps on that lift that water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and then put it into the aqueduct and move the water around the state. That is the easiest thing that that could be done.
Now, that doesn’t solve the problem. You still have to bring the timber industry back. You still have to bring the grazing back. But the sad part about all this is, John, they blame the water infrastructure that had been designed and built over a hundred years on the decline of the delta smelt and the salmon populations. It was a lie, and it continues to be a lie. There is no evidence that the pumps were harming delta smelt or salmon. And that's the sad part about all this is that the farmers were the boogeyman in all of this because of course the farmers have to use the bulk of the water because California is dry and the only way things grow—and I know this sounds, I'm not trying to be, you know, a smartass here, John—but you have to have very simple things for plants to grow. Good soil, sunlight, and water.
So the farms, you know, we’ve idled, I don’t know, close to a million acres of farm ground in the state of California, the most pristine farm ground in the world. And the second casualty of that is that Los Angeles has now gone into its current state of drought. That’s actually just to kind of finish up when President Trump came out in 2016, he had a big golf course in Los Angeles County, or still does, had a house in Beverly Hills, and he was seeing his neighbors put in artificial lawn, put rocks in their yard, take out all the grass in the front and the backyard. The water costs were skyrocketing, and when he toured the Valley on a couple different occasions—and he's told this story on the campaign trail over and over again—he asked me, “Well, why is that field green and that one dry?” And I said, “Well, sir, it's because there’s no water.” He's like, “Well, why does that field have water?” I said, “Well, because that field has different water, they have first rights to the water that comes from the north.” And he says, “Oh, that water comes from the north.” And then we showed him the pumps. We showed him the aqueduct. And he had just never seen it.
You know, if you’re not from California, California is a big state. You don’t realize that the most sophisticated water infrastructure ever built in the history of civilization exists in California. And it was designed by brilliant people starting in the late 1800s all the way up until the mid 1960s that built this extravagant water system that allowed California to grow. If you don't move the water around, you cannot grow. And that's what they're paying the price for today is that they ration the water. And therefore, you ration the farmers, you ration, you get rid of the timber industry, and then you create. You might as well just surround your house with jet fuel, because that's effectively what has happened in Los Angeles County.
John Batchelor: Speaking with Devin Nunes, CEO of Truth Social, former member of Congress. It’s important to watch Truth Social, because the President-elect is very well-informed of these matters thanks to Devin helping him and guiding him over these years, as Devin just said. So the information coming from the Trump administration is up to date about not only how we got here, but how to get out of it.
John speaks to Jeff Bliss about the Los Angeles fire’s unpredictable, fast-moving nature, the mass evacuations, and the terrifying situation for LA residents, as well as specific challenges faced by the firefighters. Read the full transcript, or listen to an audio version below:
John Batchelor: I’m John Bachelor with Jeff Bliss, Pacific Watch, who is watching the fires very carefully for the last several days as they move across the landscape of Los Angeles. I know enough about LA to know this headline is terrifying. Los Angeles Times in these last hours: “LA shaken by mass evacuations in Brentwood Encino”—two different places—“Brentwood and Encino flames visible for miles as fire siege enters day five.”
We have a new word, Jeff—siege.
Brentwood and Encino, those neighborhoods are closely put together for very expensive homes, very beautiful homes right now. What is the status of Brentwood? Are they evacuating everyone or just parts of it? It’s very large. Good evening to you.
Jeff Bliss: Good evening, John. They have evacuated parts of Brentwood as well as Encino, the Mandeville Canyon area—they’re all somewhat contiguous running from West LA through the hillsides over into the San Fernando Valley.
If people don’t know Los Angeles, you have the Los Angeles basin and then you know around it are hills and to the east are mountains. When you get to the north and the west part of LA proper, West LA, you have Brentwood and then other communities that are well known, Santa Monica on the west side and then going over the hill through the Sepulveda Pass, which is a major transit route, you have Encino, which is really kind of the start of the San Fernando Valley on that side of the valley.
Encino, Brentwood, as you pointed out, are well-known, wealthy enclaves, a lot of very moneyed people live there. Brentwood for years has been a place where a lot of celebrities live, a lot of finance people live there as well, not unlike Pacific Palisades. And there’s no ocean view there. So what it is, is a lot of wooded areas, a lot of brushy hills. It’s a place that’s had major fires before, catastrophic fires, and these things are kind of cyclical. It’s hard to explain where this is in a cycle in terms of this major fire that we've been experiencing in the Palisades fire, but it’s burning up that ridge line through the Santa Monica Mountains. And as I feared, it crested the hill last night, crested the ridges, and it started to move down toward Encino. So when it moves down towards Enino, you’re moving into the San Frernando Valley area. And the problem is, not only is it densely populated—we're talking about a million people—but there’s a lot of vegetation there in the urban areas. A lot of resources are being put on this fire. Right now, you’re seeing a lot of air assets come in. You’re seeing a lot of hand crews being sent in to try to knock down the flames. We've had a little shift in the winds. It's been favorable to the firefighters, but this thing is so massive and it's all over the place that it's going to be such a tough fight.
John Batchelor: A quote from the LA Times story by Sarah Cohen, 29 years old. She’s with her parents in Braemar Country Club Estates, which is a gated community off Reseda Boulevard: “We’re a nervous wreck,” she says. “Every time they drop water, it gets better, but then it gets worse.” And then there’s a photograph of two firemen standing on a patio in Encino. And there’s what looks like the gates of Hades opening above them, flames thirty or forty feet high on the other side of this ridge. What are they waiting for? Get out of there, guys.
Jeff, I want you to translate this. As of Saturday morning, right now, the Eden fire was 15% contained. The Palisades fire was 11% contained. On Friday, in contrast, the Palisades fire was 8% contained, and the Eden fire was 3%. Is that sharp improvement or is that too slow? What does that mean, Jeff?
Jeff Bliss: It’s improvement to be sure, just the numbers alone. I’m sure firefighters and residents will tell you that it can never be fast enough. They are working against conditions that are really beyond what a lot of people have seen before, what they’ve even imagined could happen with these winds. And so the way it’s so rapidly moved the fire lines along, the way it’s distributed things like embers and other burning materials throughout the fire zones, it’s just so hard to keep up with this. It’s so hard to get resources one place because in the blink of an eye that fire line could be a couple miles away in another direction, or it could be coming at you at such a rapid speed that all you can do is turn and run. The winds have been erratic. It’s not easy. Sometimes when you have a fire you can say, okay, the winds are going to push it eastward, and we know it’ll make this kind of progress because of the temperature, the humidity, the wind speed and such. But in this case, it’s not that easy to define or to guess or estimate where things are going to be because, you know, one minute the fire's here, the next minute it’s three miles over there. And I do mean the next minute. I mean, the fire at times has moved so rapidly that the fire authorities can’t keep up with it.
John Batchelor: I’m looking at a map provided by the LA Times. Ventura Boulevard, I guess, is at the north—they don’t give me the orientation. And over here, we have the Brentwood Country Club, which is where Ms. Cohen was speaking from. We have the Encino reservoir. I’m hoping that it’s filled for the water they need, unlike the Pacific Palisades reservoir. And then we have the fire approaching, and it’s got to move through these hills. But you tell me the hills speed up the fire because that's where the brush is, the fuel. Is that right, Jeff? When it gets into the hills, it goes faster?
Jeff Bliss: That’s right. You have what we call a fuel bed that's very rich in content. So you have a lot of old or dying vegetation, dried out vegetation, and it piles up in these canyons so they become like chimneys or even like Roman candles in a way. Yo get fire burning in there, and it just takes off. I've seen fire move up canyons or even down through canyons with the right winds at such a speed that you'd think, wow, it wasn't like there was even anything there to stop it, there wasn't any natural resistance against it. It just shot through it like water going through a hose.
John Batchelor: So as the fire moves through the hills, it’s towering over the housing, which is down around the edges of the hills, and people down there have been evacuated or are going to, they can see the fire coming closer, is that right? The perspective here?
Jeff Bliss: Oh, absolutely. It actually at times takes on a look of like a rolling wave coming down the hill at you. I've experienced that before. It’s terrifying. It’s mesmerizing. It’s awesome in a way that, to see the natural forces at work like that. You just can’t even imagine it until you see something like that. And you hear the sounds and you can smell of course the smoke and there’s actually, at times, there can be kind of a rumble as the air pressure changes and pushes things around, and you feel it. It’s just otherworldly. And for these people, many of whom probably have never experienced this before, I’m sure it's very, very scary. I'm sure they’re thinking, “Where do I go? What do I do?” They're just kind of stuck in their tracks watching this happen to their homes and their communities.
John Batchelor: “All night,” writes the LA Times, “helicopter crews could be seen dropping water along the ridge line, which glowed orange. Flames occasionally flared up on the dark hillsides, leaving locals on edge and questioning whether they would need to evacuate.”
I mention this, Jeff, what I've learned from Australia, which is a profoundly different landscape. There are not as many people; they're not put together by hills. However, the decision about leaving or not leaving—the recommendation from Australia is, when the fire is approaching, come together as a family and make the decision now. Go, or stay. Don't get caught in between.
Are people told that in Los Angeles, or is it different for you when you’re living in a crowded neighborhood as opposed to ranch houses?
Jeff Bliss: What they are telling people is, when we give you a warning, that's when you need to get going. Don’t stay, don't try to put out the fires at your house with a simple garden hose that actually doesn't do much good. So what they’re trying to do is, I think, three-fold. One is to get people out of the danger zone. Two, clear the area so they can get emergency crews in there and they can move around more easily. And three, they don’t want to have to be going into homes and businesses to try to rescue people who get stuck there. That not only bogs them down, but it endangers firefighters as well. So they try to get people these days out of those areas with a lot of time ahead of them if they can do it, because what we saw in the Pacific Palisades, you had cars literally stacked up along key roads. And they were so stuck there that they had to bring in fire department bulldozers to clear the way. I mean, they just shoved cars to the side. They didn’t care if it was an expensive Mercedes or an old junker. They just said, “Sorry, we got to get our trucks through.” But in doing that, it takes time and it diverts resources. So, fire authorities and police are saying, “When we tell you to get out, we warn you it’s coming, get out.”
John Batchelor: One more detail. We check on the cultural icons. Mount Wilson and JPL, they’re roughly in the Eden fire area. How are they doing?
Jeff Bliss: They’re doing fine. It was really touch-and-go for both of them. The communications towers on Mount Wilson are key to Southern California for TV, radio, and emergency services. And there was a a big fear that if those were taken down by the fire that we could be looking at a very, very difficult time ahead for the city, the county, and actually the whole Southern California region. And of course, Mount Wilson is home to a very famous observatory that has been there for, you know, decades and it plays a key role in astronomy, and there was a worry about that. Plus, it’s a historical place. So, they work to save that as well. And then down the hill, you have JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is key to NASA’s efforts in terms of satellites especially and rovers on other planets and such. And then Caltech, which is a key research facility and university for the world. And those have all been protected is my understanding.
John Batchelor: And the Getty, any new threat there or is that passed?
Jeff Bliss: It appears that threat has passed. Matter of fact, the people who run the Getty are being lauded as examples of what you should do to prepare your businesses or even homes by making sure that brush is removed away from the main structures, that you have plans to take care of important valuables, to communicate clearly to your employees ahead of time—not just minutes ahead of time, but weeks and months and years ahead of time. Have a plan. So, Getty comes away from this having very, very high ratings, so to speak.
John Batchelor: Jeff Bliss, Pacific Watch. We’ve been focusing on where the fire is, where it’s moving, what the threat is. We’re going to turn to the politics of this. It’s all politics all the time. We’re dealing with an interregnum here between presidents and administrations, and California is a one-party state. And so the confusion is going to dominate the next weeks of press releases. This is the Friends of History Debating society. I’m John Bachelor.
The conversation shifts to the politics of the crisis. John and Jeff discuss the criticisms towards Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass, including allegations of misallocated funds and inadequate preparation. Read the full transcript, or listen to an audio version below:
John Batchelor: Now we turn to the politics. And I start at the top, and by that I mean the President of the United States saying “as long as it takes.”
And Jeff, you noted in your report of 24 hours past that California scratched its head when it heard the president say “as long as it takes,” and then proposed to advance paying for people’s salaries and what-not for the next six months in order to help them either rebuild or relocate, and the people of North Carolina heard that harshly. Why so, Jeff?
Jeff Bliss: Well, here we are six months out from the hurricane damage in the Carolinas and Appalachian areas, southern Appalachia, and some of them are still living in tents, or they’re being told by the federal government that they can’t live in tents anymore. They have to find some other shelter.
There was always that $750 check they got from FEMA that really stuck on the craw of a lot of people. And here you have this very blue set of enclaves in California being told, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you 100%.” And so it leaves the people in the East saying, “Aren’t we Americans, too? Don’t we deserve the same kind of treatment?” And there seems to be a lot of things going back and forth about special treatment for people that are more Democrat than others.
John Batchelor: California is going to need everything that the federal government can provide over these next years or more. So we go immediately to the reigning politician in California, that is Gavin Newsom, and he has survived recall. He’s been elected twice. He’s very popular, at least he has been very popular as a Democratic contender for the presidency in ‘28.
Right now, questions are being raised about how he prepared for this catastrophe. It is something that has never been seen at this scale, but fire, wind, snow, drought, mediterranean climate, and mudslides, that’s natural California cycle. When there were not 40 million people in the state, it followed the same cycle.
However, these days there are some questions raised about, have we adjusted accordingly, not just to climate change, but to the natural cycle of our state? What I understand from you, Jeff, is that the conditions have been very dry in Southern California, and that’s not unheard of. That’s not that unusual.
We went through a drought a couple of years ago where I think it got down to lawn police, the Colorado River plunging, and the reservoirs were empty. I remember boats sitting at the bottom of reservoirs, pleasure boats. So dry conditions are not unusual. The Santa Ana winds exists, maybe not 100 miles per hour, but certainly at this time of year. And at the same time, the preparation for fires have to be at hand. What is the general opinion on TV and radio now? I know there are going to be hearings about this, and there’ll be a lot of investigations. What’s the general opinion? Was Sacramento prepared for what we’re seeing now?
Jeff Bliss: The general opinion seems to be that Sacramento was neither prepared nor willing to prepare for what we’ve experienced this past week. And there are a number of things coming out, number of leaked documents and other pieces of evidence that show that money was diverted away from things like firefighting and fire prevention and turned to pet projects. We see that not just at the state but also at the local level. So that’s what people are really upset about now. They’re saying, why did we put it on this social program when your first responsibility is, as a governmental agency, to protect us, not to enlighten us or to build our culture up? Your responsibility is to protect us first, and then if there’s money left over, we'll use it for other things.
And so you have a lot of the politicians, including the governor and the mayor of LA, scrambling saying, no, we didn’t do that. That you’re reading that wrong. But they have, as they say, the receipts. They have the proof showing that letters went out and documents and memos and explanations to the legislature saying, this is why I’m going to take this much out of the budget, or this is why I won’t consider your request, or this is why I’m diverting money to some other program. And so that’s what’s got a lot of people upset saying, really you took money? There’s even an aspect, for example, in LA where they sent firefighting equipment to Ukraine. So, of course, it has that element to it, too. While the folks in Ukraine could have definitely used this firefighting equipment, people at home are saying we need to take care of our own things first. We need to take care of our safety. And so that’s what has a lot of people scratching their heads or very angry or even saying, you know what? I used to vote one way. I’m voting the other way now.
John Batchelor: I saw a video that I did not understand. It was what appeared to be a Zoom call between Mr. Biden in Washington—I believe, but I’m not sure, he might have been in Delaware—speaking with Governor Newsom, and the topic was misinformation. But I didn’t understand why. What was the theme for them?
Jeff Bliss: The overall theme of the meeting was to try to help the president understand why we needed federal aid and how the government could step in to help California between now and then. But it also turned into a “woe is me” type of session where you had, on one hand, the governor saying they just don’t understand, this is all misinformation. That they had everything ready to go and fully-funded and the president seeming to be off track saying, well, you know, if that water pressure didn’t happen, or there was a problem with water pressure, that’s not your problem.
There’s been a number of press conferences and press opportunities that the governor’shad where it’s turned more from, you know, “we’re going to help these people” and “this is the solution we’re mapping out” to “woe is me, don't pick on me, it’s not my fault.”
There was one interview, in fact, where he was in the Pacific Palisades area and they asked him about about the water problem and about the delivery and the hydrants being dry. He essentially threw up his arms, hey, it’s not my problem. That’s not my job. And the truth is that really isn’t his job, but that’s not what a leader does in a time of crisis. They don’t go, “Hey, that's somebody else’s business. That’s their fault.” So, those are the types of things that are coming back to point at Gavin Newsom and causing a lot of people to be angry with him.
John Batchelor: I’m not easily familiar with Gavin Newsom’s style. Is this recognizable? “It’s not my problem”—I know for years you’ve told me he does a word salad and you can find lots of meanings in it, but “not my problem” doesn’t sound like a word salad. It sounds like blameshifting.
Jeff Bliss: And that’s what it has been. I mean, again, back to that Zoom call he did with President Biden. It was more about blameshifting than it was about, you know, this is horrible and we’ve got to—you’ve got to do everything you can in your powers as the president to help us with this calamity. It has been kind of ongoing situation with the California leaders and the area leaders this past week. They got caught flatfooted, or they made bad decisions, or they’re thinking about their political lives first, and it’s coming back to bite them.
There’s been no upsides for any of the political leaders. Instead, it’s been people like Rick Caruso, who ran for mayor and was beaten by Karen Bass. He’s a guy that had experience for the LA Fire and Police Commissions. And he had been warning about this type of situation for several years before he even ran for mayor. He’s emerging now as somebody that, as a leader, somebody saying, “We know how to take care of this. We could have taken care of this.” And people believe that he might eventually be somebody considered for governor because he’s so smart and so sharp, and he was so precient about what was happening
John Batchelor: And his mall didn’t burn in the Pacific Palisades, at least not yet, anyways.
Jeff Bliss: That’s right. And just to kind of help people understand who he is, Rick Caruso is a very well-known, respected, and actually beloved developer in Southern California. He has a number of high-end malls and shopping centers throughout Southern California. And they all bring something great to their communities. Everybody loves these places. And he’s very big in philanthropy. He’s done a lot of work with schools and really supports firefighters and police and he’s been pretty supportive of Karen Bass trying to be the good loser since she beat him in that election a while back.
But he really said, I can’t keep this in anymore. This is ridiculous that they let it get to this point. It’s not that they didn’t know that it was going to happen. I told them and other people told them. And he’s done a number of big things since then throughout the week in terms of making statements, but maybe the biggest statement he made made was that his mall, his shopping center in Pacific Palisades did not burn.
Number one, it was built with all the right materials. Number two was, vegetation was cleared back the right amount. And number three, he even brought in his own private firefighting company to save it. So, people are thinking, “Wow, this this guy is kind of smart. I guess we missed out.”
John Batchelor: About the mayor—I understand there are press conferences on record, I’ve not seen them. But the puzzle is, the fire chief (whose name I do not have) made a statement 24 hours ago to the media that this was a failure of leadership, and that many requests have been made to supplement, to augment, to sustain the fire department budget. They’re short of manpower. They’re short of money. They’re short of equipment. A lot of equipment is in repair shops, because they’re not adequate machinists or mechanics. All of that was very well presented in a grim voice by the fire chief.
And then there was information that the fire chief had been fired, which was hard to believe. Then there was information from the mayor’s office that the fire chief had not been fired. And now there’s information that the fire chief appears next to the mayor in a press conference. What the fire chief said sounded very well-informed and accurate. Has the mayor responded to the idea that the fire department was not adequately prepared by the budget of the city?
Jeff Bliss: No, because that points directly back at her. She’s either denied it, or has gone cold on it. Won’t respond to it. So she’s trying to move the discussion along to something else really.
Actually, this morning she’s doing a better job at it. She seems better prepared. She’s more energetic, and she seems to be more engaged. But it’s going to be those images of what happened in the first days of when she was coming back from a junket to Ghana, I think, that are going to stick to her or her reputation. Everybody has really lost confidence. I have to say that I can’t find many people standing up for Karen Bass. There may be people standing up for Gavin elsewhere in the state—it’s a big state—but here in Southern California, they’ve lost all confidence in Bass, and a good number of people have lost confidence in Gavin Newsom as well.
John Batchelor: There’s LA County, and then there’s LA the town. Both have different police forces. The reason I bring that up is because there are anecdotal signs that looting is underway. We talked about it yesterday. One person had been detained from Chile, which seemed very odd, suggesting that there were gangs coming from way outside into the Los Angeles County or Los Angeles city. Are there arrests being made? Yes. But question of looting, the reason I think about it is not the burned down areas. It’s the areas where the evacuation has been ordered. Jeff, are you allowed? Is there talk about people going back to protect their homes from looters? Armed protection because there are not enough police? Have they talked about that on the television?
Jeff Bliss: If people live in a restricted zone and they were moved out because of evacuation orders, they’re not going to get back. It’s a rare case when they do. There have been people breaking through the lines, both people who are residents as well as people who are suspected looters. The sheriff and the new DA and the chief of police or those deputies have all said, “Look, we're going to take this very seriously. We're not going to sight and release you. We are going to book you.” And so they've done that with probably at least a couple dozen suspects so far.
And as you pointed out, it seems to point to these organized crime gangs, including international gangs that we’ve had problems with over the past couple years with, you know, retail theft and with home robberies, that come from particularly places like Chile and Guatemala and Venezuela. The Chilean gangs seem to pop up again and again when they talk about this. So, it is a problem. It’s something they’re very worried about. They did call in the California National Guard a couple days ago and they’ve been pretty good at setting up roadblocks. Apparently, those are pretty effective. I’ve heard from some other journalists who have said that even when they are moving through these zones with their credentials and the press badges on their cars, they get stopped repeatedly again by the National Guard and police officials who want to see their ID. So, this is going to be a problem for weeks to come as these fire zones as people go through them and try to rebuild their lives to find out what’s still there.
John Batchelor: And about the power. Various reports of power outages in different parts of California. The question is, who’s without power? Who’s without the internet? Who’s without telephones? Is there a way to characterize that for the LA County?
Jeff Bliss: Power is slowly but surely being restored to key areas, but in the actual fire zones themselves, that’s not happening, because they can’t get crews in there—it’s too dangerous and it’s too congested. But in outlying areas, for example, I mentioned my in-laws who live out in the Inland Empire, which is Riverside County, it took them several days to get their power restored, and they’re not alone in that. This is just the nature of our power grid and the fact that you have high winds blowing. It’s not just the fires that have taken down power and transmission lines, but also the fact that power companies have shut them down so that energized lines aren’t swinging in the wind and perhaps starting other brush fires.
John Batchelor: Are the iPhones still working on the towers?
Jeff Bliss: They are. The towers for the most part are still up. There’s still communication through that way.
John Batchelor: So, what you need is a power source to recharge your iPhone, and such things exist. Were people prepared for this without the 100 mph winds? Were people prepared individually for power outages, for internet being down, for evacuations? Or, do you get the sense, Jeff, that this was not a thought when you moved to California, and when you’ve lived here for decades? This is not going to happen.
Jeff Bliss: I think everybody knows outages are going to happen from time to time, whether it’s winds or fires or earthquakes, but a lot of people just kind of put it off in the back of their minds. They think, “Well, it’s not going to happen to me, or if it does happen, I’ll be okay.”
Yeah. You know, the the simplest power outages, for example, we reported on one that I had in my town a couple weeks ago. We talked about this on the show and everybody was up in arms walking around the neighborhoods. It was like a Twilight Zone episode where they’re wondering, you know, is this the end of the earth? Almost. That’s the feeling you get from them, because they had no idea that their whole life could be cut off in a moment when the power goes out and they don’t have internet. They don’t have TV or anything.
So, yeah, it’s when people move here, I don’t think they think about it. But when people live here, even people who’ve lived there their whole lives, they kind of tend to put in the back of their minds and a lot of them really don’t do a lot of good planning.
John Batchelor: And the weather meteorology for the next days—what’s the prospect, Jeff?
Jeff Bliss: We’re going to be looking at continued warmer temperatures, sunny skies. It’ll be fairly clear. There is a problem with the humidity dropping. That’s always a key problem or element in big fires like this, is when the humidity drops. But the winds, that’s the big problem. And they do think they’re going to have winds over the next 24 to 48 hours that could rekindle some of these fires or further spread the big ones like this one that’s out in the valley out near Encino. Now, if the wind changes and it picks up, wow, we could be off to the races in a very bad way.
John Batchelor: What’s on the other side of Ventura Boulevard? Are there more homes over there?
Jeff Bliss: Homes and businesses there. There are more than a million people that live out in that part of the valley. It’s very congested and I’m not saying that it would tear through that whole area like it did the Palisades were. There's more vegetation, but there’s still plenty of vegetation out there and a lot of structures that can burn. So, that’s why they’re really putting so many resources on that fire line, that part of the Palisades fire, because if it gets to one part, if it gets down the hill much farther, it’ll turn into an Alamo kind of fight. They’ll have to really throw put everything there and make a last stand.
John Batchelor: Jeff Bliss, Pacific Watch. This is the Friends of History Debating Society, I’m John Batchelor.
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I had a long drive with my kiddos heading up north to ski this morning and really enjoyed this segment. Keep up the great work, John!