Cause and Effect

“Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best. Negligence or indifference are usually reviewed from an unlucky seat. The law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exactitudes. Luck is the residue of design.” Branch Rickey

Branch Rickey is best known in his role as the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers who signed Jackie Robinson, breaking the racial barrier in Major League Baseball. He was also a baseball player himself, and went on to manage various teams, and was the leader in developing MLB’s minor league farm system; that and his role to integrate the league were two of the most important developments for the long term success of the sport.

This is not a post about baseball; it’s about the recent California fires. Unlike Rickey, the leaders of California failed to understand the laws of cause and effect. While like Rickey they had a vision, they lacked intelligence and effort, which led to their inability to prevent or deal with the event. Historically California has been susceptible to brush and forest fires, so more the reason to plan and take action to prepare in the event they occur. The causes and circumstances of some of the more recent fires provided warning signs that should have been addressed.

There was uncleared underbrush in the 1991 Oakland Hills fire, dry hydrants, high winds and insufficient containment. The cause of the 2017 and 2018 fires in various parts of California were reported to be a result of severe draught exacerbated by unsustainable overpopulation, failing electrical infrastructure, uncleared underbrush, high winds and insufficient firefighting manpower and equipment.

There are some consistent elements in these fire events for lessons learned, but instead politicians leaned on the mantra of climate change; the population of California did outpace the development of its infrastructure, but instead of addressing infrastructure for the safety and security of a growing population, you got more environmental regulation that worked against that.

There is a forestry management protocol called controlled burns; this is supposed to be done on a regular basis to clear the underbrush and dead plant debris in wooded areas to prevent the spread of a fire, which may occur especially in dry regions like California.  Unfortunately, when the Forest Service applies to the state of California for permission to do so, they need to wait four to seven years for an environmental review for approval, which is sometimes denied; in the meantime, you are literally adding fuel to the fire.

Then there’s the issue of water management, an essential part of life in western America even before Europeans explored the region; native Americans built dams and reservoirs before the large westward immigration of settlers. Early on through long term planning and construction of dams and reservoirs by the various states in the region, including California, and despite the explosion of populations there was adequate water supply, although there were times of restricted use during droughts. Starting in 2023, California removed scores of dams essential for water retention in reservoirs as they were not considered natural or environmentally beneficial. The end results were predictable.

California, like some other states, has been hostile toward insurers. When the 2017 fires occurred, premium rates understandably went up. Insurance is an actuarial business assessing risk to determine costs of coverage, so if you suppress that legislatively insurers will simply stop insuring in high risk areas, and that happened. California’s response was to create state insurance, called FAIR; predictably it’s nearly insolvent, and it has been sued often for failure of coverage.

When you ignore proper forestry and water management, and economic reality, which has been the sad story of California politics for quite some time now, and combine that with a natural event like high winds, you have the disaster in the Palisades area of Los Angeles, and spreading. It’s not that California and other parts of the Western US are not prone to brush and forest fires, which makes the absence of proper planning that more egregious, but the actual contrarian efforts detrimental to the safety and security of its residents is bewildering.  

The focus on this disaster should not be that the mayor of LA was out of town, or that the governor and president elect are shooting political darts at each other, but that the people of California need to understand that the real environmental threat they face is the toxic political policies of those they have elected. When fire fighters initially reported that they were finding dry hydrants, and Governor Newsome and Mayor Bass called that misinformation, Californians need to realize that the boots on the ground had no reason to lie, whereas incompetent politicians are addicted to denial even when engulfed in flames.

What we should expect to hear from these same politicians that helped fan the flames of this disaster are the usual trite messages of hope, but as the old sayings go, hope is not a plan, and action is more important than words. That action should start with the people of California at the polls electing candidates who understand the problems their predecessors created, and supporting policies to correct them; careful planning is more valuable than lofty ideas.