Illustration: Liu Rui/GT
It has been a week since massive wildfires broke out in California and ripped through the Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, Pasadena and Altadena neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The blazes have claimed at least 24 lives and ravaged 40,000 acres in the Greater Los Angeles area, reducing entire neighborhoods to ashes and destroying over 12,300 structures. On Monday night, another wildfire broke out in Ventura County, intensifying the crisis.
The scope of the disaster in Southern California is staggering. All these unfavorable factors would be a challenge in the most normal of times, but with much of Los Angeles firefighting hamstrung by government ineptitude, they have been downright apocalyptic.
Just last month, the Los Angeles Fire Department complained that their budget had been cut by more than $17 million, which "severely limited" their capability to respond to major emergencies. Moreover, some of the Los Angeles County Fire Department's equipment has been donated to Ukraine as part of the ongoing US effort to prop up that country's war against Russia. With an empty water reservoir that could have played a great role in putting out the fire and forest floors littered with underbrush that acts as kindling, literally anyone could have predicted what happened next - anyone, that is, except for the out-of-touch politicians in charge in California.
Whether these wildfires were man-made or natural in origin, the response to them has been so incompetent as to border on malice. California Governor Gavin Newsom was busy blaming "mis- and disinformation." Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who was out of the country when the fires started to burn the city, has been slammed for poorly handling the disaster.
US President Joe Biden, marking his last days in the White House, promised that the federal government will cover all of California's disaster expenses for six months. Not surprisingly, the damage estimates suddenly came in at north of $150 billion.
As the fires rage on, the long-term challenges loom large. Beyond containment, communities face years of recovery amid a climate of increasingly extreme weather events. Exhausted and emotionally strained, Californians are bracing for further red flag warnings and the unrelenting threat of drought-driven wildfires. Even when the flames are extinguished, the scars left by the devastation will persist, serving as a grim reminder of the state's growing vulnerability.
Natural disasters happen from time to time, but it seems that the leadership in the US - from the local, state to federal levels - can always find a way to disappoint the people.
As the Los Angeles fires hit the headlines, the people of North Carolina, affected by a catastrophic hurricane last autumn, are now getting kicked out of hotels because the government has not allowed them to rebuild their homes and their aid vouchers have run out. American media don't mention them at all anymore, even though the number of dead people and destroyed homes in North Carolina was much greater than the most recent tally in Los Angeles.
Even as people in Los Angeles and North Carolina struggle, the Biden administration announced yet another "surge" of funding for Kiev, valued at around $500 million. So far, Washington has funneled something like $175 billion into that proxy war against Russia. A fraction of that could have prevented the Los Angeles fires or helped mitigate North Carolina flooding. It certainly makes people wonder: Does the current US establishment really care about Americans at all?
The "elite" running the US want the new US administration to continue the proxy war in Ukraine and get aggressive toward China, arguing that American "prestige" and "credibility" are at stake. These are the same people who turned California from a dream factory to nightmare fuel, who can't govern their way out of a paper bag.
The author is a Serbian-American journalist. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn