Palisades Fire Allowed to Burn on Behalf of Endangered Plants

Zohran Mamdani’s choice of a lesbian DEI hire to head the NYFD suggests that New York will follow the Los Angeles model of firefighting. To grasp what this means, consider that the disastrous Palisades Fire was allowed to get out of control lest the bulldozers that could have stopped it damage endangered plants.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

An hour after midnight Jan. 1, as a small brush fire blazed across Topanga State Park, a California State Parks employee texted the Los Angeles Fire Department’s heavy equipment supervisor to find out if they were sending in bulldozers.

Using bulldozers to clear flammable brush could have prevented the fire from spreading.

“Heck no that area is full of endangered plants,” Capt. Richard Diede replied at 9:52 a.m, five hours after LAFD declared the fire contained.

“I would be a real idiot to ever put a dozer in that area,” he wrote. “I’m so trained.”

That is, trained by moonbats to prioritize allegedly oppressed plants over people and their property. Evidently fire doesn’t harm endangered plants.

The exchange between the state and LAFD employees is part of a batch of newly-released text messages and depositions from California State Parks staffers that offers new details of the state’s actions and interactions with firefighters in the critical days after the Lachman fire ignited and rekindled Jan. 7 into the deadly Palisades blaze.

We already knew that the ineptitude of the moonbats in charge played a major role:

In October, The Times reported that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to roll up their hoses and leave the burn area Jan. 2, even though crews warned that the ground was still smoldering. The LAFD also decided not to use thermal imaging technology to detect heat underground.

The problem goes beyond Karen Bass to Gavin Newsom. Some Los Angeles moonbattery is passed down from Sacramento:

Palisades residents have also sued the state, which owns Topanga State Park, alleging it failed in the week between the two fires to inspect the burn scar after firefighters left and make sure a “dangerous condition” did not exist on its property. …

Testimony and texts from state environmental scientists show that California State Parks’ initial concern when the fire broke out was whether the fire was on park land and whether firefighting efforts and equipment would harm federally endangered plants and artifacts. …

In 2020, the city of Los Angeles agreed to pay $1.9 million in fines as part of an agreement with the California Coastal Commission after L.A. Department of Water and Power crews bulldozed hundreds of federally endangered plants in Topanga State Park. The city had been working to replace aging wooden power poles to make the power lines more resistant to strong winds and fire.

LA bureaucrats weren’t about to make that mistake again.

Regarding the price of this foolishness, as noted at PJ Media:

Twelve people died in the fires during three weeks of January 2025, with 6,837 structures destroyed (and another thousand or so damaged), more than 23,000 acres burned, and total damages currently estimated at about $25 billion with a B in the Palisades, Topanga, and Malibu areas of Los Angeles County.

But at least the devastation will Democrats to replace nice neighborhoods with government-subsidized slums.

On tips from R F, abcanc, and Franco.

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