No Need for Conspiracies to Explain Los Angeles Fires Devastation

The news media blares out apocalyptic headlines:

Firefighters continue to battle blazes as L.A. braces for more days of fire weather (LA Times)

Palisades and Eaton fires rage in L.A. County, killing 5 (Washington Post)

Live Updates: New Wildfires Ravage L.A. as Biggest Blazes Burn Unchecked (New York Times)

Celebrities lose homes and flee as Los Angeles fires spread (Reuters)

Photo credit above: Ultra modern house in Mandeville Canyon, Los Angeles, Engulfed in flames (Generated with AI)

Uploaded to Adobe by Brian iStock photo ID: 929456843

As of Thursday, January 9, 2025 over 1,000 building have been destroyed throughout outlying areas of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the USA. These are not some ghetto areas or middle class bungalows, but include some of the most posh mansions of Hollywood elites, in the Hollywood Hills. Many celebrity residents are fleeing their mega mansions as smoke, high winds and fire turn the landscape into scenes from an end-of-the-world film.

Just one blaze destroyed 4,800+ hectares of land in Pacific Palisades, between Santa Monica and Malibu. We are talking about the places where some of the wealthiest people in Southern California live.

Don't Blame Foreign Drones or Space Lasers For This Conflagration

As for theories about how the blaze could've spread so rapidly, the only thing we've yet to see—particularly after the mystery drone swarms over New Jersey just a few weeks ago—is some politician or ex-CIA operative with a podcast attempting to link these raging fires to Russia, or Iran or China. But conspiracy theories are already swirling online, one of our favorites being Directed Energy Weapons, that is, space or high altitude-airplane based lasers. That one was spread via viral videos during the Maui blazes in the state of Hawaii, back in 2023.

Some even more exotic theories may not be far behind, such as the reptilians who've secretly controlled Hollywood for decades burning their elite human hosts out. Hey, we are entering on the Chinese zodiac the Year of the Snake. Maybe the giant troglodyte snake-people villains of the GI Joe cartoons I watched growing up in the 1980s are real.

Alas for those so inclined toward these bizarre views, reality is far more banal, but scary enough. There is no “other” from some foreign power or invading alien host to blame for this devastation, there is only the most fruitful of the late stage Globalist American Empire's cash crops: greed, corruption and incompetence in government and preference for cheaper materials in the post WW2 housing industry.

Cheaper Building Materials = More Combustible Material

Lets begin with some basic historic overviews. American houses are typically built from the cheapest materials, which makes them incredibly combustible. Even by wooden house standards, modern mac-houses, many with whole rooms produced in factories, are nothing if not fire kindling. Many American houses consist of thin-boarded skeletons with plywood boards on the outside and thin ultra-cheap dry wall on the inside.

I remember when a one-storey wing of a neighbor’s house caught fire when we lived in the South, due to a short circuit on the lights of his Christmas tree. In the five minutes it took the fire department to arrive, the roof had collapsed in a column of flames. That actually happened in under three minutes. Over the next two minutes, the rest of the roof of that wing of the house went up in flames.

In most of the rest of the civilized world, houses are built of bricks or foamed cement blocks with poured cement. No, I am not just talking about multifamily multi-story buildings, but individual homes. In many countries the roofs are made of stainless steel or in poorer countries across Latin America and Southeast Asia, there are roofs of tin. Even when houses are made of wood in Scandinavia or Russia, the materials are treated logs, which do not burn so quickly.

Southern California's Drought and Water Shortage

Then there is the ecology of Southern California, a vast overpopulated desert before 'climate change' became a globalist-promoted topic: very dry. Yes there are wetter years, but overall, it’s dry and stays that way.

There are climatological reasons why the indigenous population was relatively small when the first Anglo settlers arrived in then 18th century Spanish ranch land, before Alta California became a part of a newly independent Mexico. Los Angeles started to grow in the early 20th century, after water was piped in via vast waterworks from the Colorado River. Ground water was also tapped and pumped with full abandon over the past 150 years, with little to zero thought for future generations. Droughts are a serious and pressing issue, not just in LA, but across the great desert Southwest through Las Vegas, Phoenix, and on to New Mexico and West Texas. Desalinization--even if nuclear powered--appears to be a prohibitively expensive option. Especially constructing new pipes or viaducts to bring water hundreds of miles through the Inland Empire and Mojave Desert on to southern Nevada. Considering the ludicrous cost of building one failed ‘high speed’ slow train rail line in California, the costs associated with any large scale Gulf states-style desalinization project(s) would likely prove astronomical.

The Santa Ana winds are notorious for rolling down the mountains in great bursts. Any fire that happens to be before them will be driven hard, spreading with incredible speed. To combat this requires high quality, well-functioning infrastructure and a response fast enough that the worst blazes do not get out of hand, burning so hot that water sprayed on the advancing flames is instantly vaporized and only low-altitude drops of flame retardant chemicals by specialized aircraft can slow the conflagration.

Minor Earthquakes Slowly Erode Underground and Surface Infrastructure

California and earthquakes are as tied together as Siberia and snow, except that much of Siberia is now snow-free between 3 to 6 months per year. But California almost never goes a day without some minor earthquake. Those earthquakes, even the relatively minor ones, put a constant strain on the buried pipes infrastructure as well as structural foundations.

Having listed all this off, despite credible claims that a few of the fires have in fact been set by arsonists, whether anarchists or schizophrenic pyromaniacs, and that organized gangs of looters on scooters are burglarizing the abandoned homes of the rich, we get to the meat of the real conspiracy: forty years of graft, corruption and chronic under-investment. Above all of which stands the California Democratic political class’s incompetence and ignorance. The fact of the matter here is that California is not just broke, but very very broken and this did not just occur but has been building layer upon layer for decades, with little being done.

California's High Taxes Are Misdirected from the Fundamentals

Part was the desire of the people to live for free, sort of. Yes, California has very high taxes, but most of that money is spent on idiotic feel-good policies and programs that benefit Democratic Party apparatchiks, like 'fighting climate change'. Tax increases to fund practical things like fixing water pipes were put off year after year, so as not to enrage the voters. They were postponed when those fixes would have still been relatively inexpensive, however failures cascade, causing more failures in the system and the new failures add to the costs. Which tend to grow exponentially and then the real hard bills come due.

So now, LA in numbers:

Outside of such things as pruning street trees once every 15 years, trees whose branches fall on power lines or cars or people, street lamps are inspected once every ten years and take up to 6 months to fix when they break. Half the street surfaces are substandard and 15% is near impassable. This is the second largest city in America.

Fifty percent of the bridges are under threat of collapse and once in a while one or two do. Constant heavy vehicle traffic and daily minor earthquakes take their toll.

It only gets worse when you look at the fate of LA in less than a decade, as the megalopolis approaches mid-century.

The city has no capital infrastructural plan and only rushes from emergency to emergency. Much of the repair funds are usually paid out in single or class action lawsuits to people injured by broken infrastructure. But it hardly matters, as the budget before lawsuit payouts has been declining for the past decade to the sum of 37%--this as costs skyrocket.

The sewage lines are clogged; requiring a doubling of fees just to keep them running, otherwise large sections of the city will become unlivable. Water runoff and mud slide risks are equally in a bad way. Any heavy downpour that comes in can flood whole neighborhoods, this includes flooding from burst water mains and here we get to the real meat in today’s story of disaster, the lack of water pressure in the fire hydrants of the impacted areas.

The city has water, even in a drought, much of southern California’s agriculture has been deliberately shrunk and water from even a shriveled Colorado River still flows to the city. But it goes into pipes that have almost totally reached the end of their life span. Twenty percent of those pipes are over 90 years old, that includes quite a few of the mains. Everything leaks and in a drought scenario, it leaks to the tune of 84 million gallons lost PER DAY or 8 billion gallons per year. You could fill a new Inland Sea with all that lost water. In 2015, it was estimated that $1.3 billion was needed to fix the most critical waterline infrastructure. Of course this was not done, not even under Obama. Now the bill stands at over $5.7 billion. Did I mention that since 2015 investment in the water pipe infrastructure decreased by 38%?

Why is the water running out for the hydrants? Probably because the massive increase in pressure for the firefighters has caused the already stretched infrastructure to start failing majorly. As more and more systems collapse in the city, they cascade into new failures, dominos falling until the whole of the system goes down. Add to this after 8 months of negligible rain.

This is what late stage civilizational collapse looks like. Even when the system is run by corrupt idiots and nothing is done to improve it, it will roll on for some time from its own inertia. Rome was famously not built in a day, but it took about two centuries of decay and sackings by rebellions and barbarian chieftains to depopulate the Eternal City, from over one million souls in the 4th century, when the imperial court moved east to Constantinople, to its Dark Ages nadir of as few as 25,000 to 30,000 people, in the 6th century. However, as friction builds up, as one failure builds up on the next, it becomes but one in a string of disasters, like yearly fires or medium earthquakes before the Big One, spiraling downward toward collapse.

Even for many affluent liberals who love the 300 plus days of sunshine, things may have finally reached a breaking point. We may be seeing America’s City of Angels approach her near-death experience. This body blow probably won't kill off LA as a whole. But with even the insured rich and major tourist attracting-businesses being driven out by future uninsurable fire losses, the economic and thus final decline of the city may be approaching an accelerated pace. In our opinion, no one will be able to halt the mass out-migration of all classes from SoCal that’s to come.