@
3Dogmatic How can DEI be a pillar of a natural disaster? What foundation? How does DEI take away from public safety? Does fair hiring cause firefighters to work poorly? lol How did feelings and visuals erode safety? Can you be specific? Here are some facts:
https://www.factcheck.org/2025/01/what-we-know-about-what-led-to-the-l-a-wildfires/
An excerpt below:
Was poor vegetation management to blame?
Soon after the L.A. wildfires began wreaking havoc, a common narrative emerged claiming that poor vegetation management was a key reason why these fires have been so bad.
Donald Trump Jr., for example, stated in an Instagram post mocking California Gov. Gavin Newsom that “proper brush mitigation was ignored for years.”
Other posts have highlighted President-elect Donald Trump’s previous comments blaming Newsom and a lack of forest “raking” or “clean[ing]” of forest floors for wildfires. “Still true,” an Instagram post said of a 2019 Trump tweet.
But as we explained then — and as experts told us once again — while proper forest management is an important part of reducing severe fire risk in forests, it’s a different situation in the grass- and shrubbery-dominated landscape where the current fires are burning in Southern California. (In a Jan. 13 interview with Newsmax, Trump repeated this and other false claims.)
Not only is vegetation management of that ecosystem not particularly helpful in reducing wildfire risk, but active management of the chaparral could backfire. “If the government had requested to remove more chaparral, in a way it could have created an even worse situation,” Syphard said.
That’s because when chaparral is removed, invasive grasses — which are more flammable — move in, heightening the fire risk.
Even putting in more fuel breaks, Syphard said, is not always a good idea, because if a person is not there to fight the fire, the break area can also increase fire risk.
“In Southern California, creating a fuel break means cutting down the chaparral and converting it to grass,” she said. “When you convert it to grass, if an ember lands on that fuel break, it might actually start a new spot fire.”
Particularly with the high winds typical of the season, wildfires will easily cross fuel breaks, Syphard added, noting that embers have jumped across 15-lane freeways.
“Landscape-scale reduction of chaparral will not stop wind-driven wildfires from spreading,” she said.
That’s not to say that property owners shouldn’t keep better tabs on their own plants. Removing vegetation around homes or other structures is recommended, Syphard said.
But other than better enforcement of defensible space rules, she said she did not think the government could have done anything more with vegetation management that would have helped with these fires.
“[L]ack of vegetation management is not what went wrong in these fires,” she said.
