Los Ashes :'(
The California Wildfires bring a personal feeling of unease ever closer
Like many people, I was pretty glued to my “Existential Crisis Rectangle” (Cellphone) over the New Year’s break, watching the horrific California wildfires unfold.
For me, it felt a little like Climate Change had finally and forcefully arrived on my doorstep - despite the fact that I’m from New Zealand.
You see, Los Angeles is the only other city besides Auckland (New Zealand), where I’ve actually lived rather than just visited. I have a lot of affection for the city of angels.
I had an apartment in West Hollywood and lived there from 2015-2019, and I’ve been visiting LA almost every year at least once or twice a year for the last 20 years.
Driving along the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) to Malibu is a little bit like the USA version of driving from Auckland City to Mission Bay along Tamaki Drive
I was familiar with many of the houses in Malibu, I once had a tinder date at Moonshadows (a local Malibu Institution, now gone), and I remember going to a house party and a horse trek in Pacific Palisades.
Long story short, all of these places that I know being gone feels very personal.
“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” – unknown
Was it more than just climate change?
Of course, while the California wildfire season getting worse with rising global climate temperatures in a region that typically has pretty low rainfall is probably the only explanation we need, there were a bunch of things about the 2025 wildfires that can’t just be explained by climate change alone.
Suspicious starts: The first thing that struck me as strange about the 2025 wildfires, was that four large wildfires seemed to break out around LA all around the same time on the same day (and one in the city). This overwhelmed fire services in a way that’s never happened before, meaning they couldn’t focus on one, and therefore all 4 fires got out of control. Los Angeles police officers made SIX arrests of arsonists setting ancillary fires around the main fires - but what about the ones they didn’t catch? And if people were setting ancillary fires, who’s to say that people didn’t set the main fires burning too? Now, perhaps arson happens around LA all the time, every year, and simply because of a warmer climate, things are worse, but I think it’s also possible that this is some kind of well co-ordinated arson attack, perhaps by a foreign power. Four large fires all starting at exactly the same time on the same day? Something’s up, and at least one of the main fires seems to now have been publicly acknowledged as having been started by arson.
Diversity hires: Did you know that the three most senior positions in the Los Angeles fire department are all currently occupied by Lesbians? Now there’s NOTHING wrong with Lesbians, and there’s NOTHING wrong with equal opportunity, and if a Lesbian genuinely is the best person for a job, I’m all for it!
BUT, 95% of firefighters are men, so the chance that three lesbians somehow rose to the top of the organisation without being helped by outside influence *when they weren’t actually the best people for the job* seems unlikely.
Now, if people are being selected / prioritised for a job NOT on their skills, but based on their sexual orientation and gender, that’s not helping discrimination, that IS discrimination - and when peoples lives are on the line, we should probably care about it!
Of course, just because 3 lesbians are running the LA fire department, it doesn’t men that they did a worse job than their male predecessors (who were selected on skills and not sex), but let’s investigate a little :
Los Angeles Fire Department releases a video saying that if you aren’t able to be rescued from a fire by a woman it’s your own fault - yes really
Los Angeles fire department budget was cut by $17m, and funds were re-allocated to things like a gay mens choir and a trans-gender cafe - yes really
Los Angeles Water use issues: You may have seen that the Palisades 117 million gallon water reservoir was completely empty when the fires broke out, and not just because it was dry from lack of rain, but deliberately for maintenance. Suspicious? incompetence? Bad Luck? incompetence by the fire chiefs above? who knows at this stage, but had this reservoir been full, Palisades may still be here.
Partly as a knock on from the Palisades reservoir being dry, as well as the fact that LA was battling 4-5 fires at once, LA fire hydrants ran dry. So there was no water to save anything with.
California has other water issues that are to do with some upstate farms being allocated huge quantities of water under historical agreements for free, while the rest of California has to suffer and run dry. In fact, LA only gets 10-20% of the water it would naturally get if water wasn’t being diverted upstream.
Conclusion
Frankly I hate talking about Climate change, and I’ve largely refrained from blogging about it until now, and the reason is that for every viewpoint you take, there will be 1,000 people on the internet who say you’re wrong - and who will vocally tell you!
But, in general, if there’s one thing I think we can all agree on, it’s that evidence that the planet is warming is absolute - the thing that people tend to argue about is whether the warming we are seeing is a) man-made or b) part of a natural cycle.
It would be nice to be able to say that this year’s LA wildfires are all just because of Arson, or bad DEI hires, or poor water use, but the real answer is probably more nuanced.
The issues I outlined above no doubt made the LA wildfires much worse than they needed to be.
But the unstoppable freight train of fires is probably being propelled largely by the 1.5 degrees of warming that the planet is now experiencing - 1.5 degrees seems small, but it means just a bit more evaporation, just a bit drier bush, just a little less rainfall, just a little less water, just a bit more stress, and then - when people set fires, they end up much worse.
In the end, it’s just sad.
My thoughts go out to the people of LA / Palisades / Malibu, and my prayers are that this kind of thing doesn’t end up on my doorstep next.