#los angeles fire department

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Payton Armstrong at MMFA:

Right-wing media figures are exploiting the devastating Los Angeles County wildfires to further their crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, suggesting the fires are burning out of control because LAFD's chief is an LGBTQ woman who supports DEI initiatives, declaring “DEI = DIE,” and claiming that “it literally leads to death.”

Uncontained wildfires in Los Angeles County have forced thousands to evacuate

Wildfires in Los Angeles have killed at least five and forced tens of thousands to evacuate their homes, and the fires remain largely uncontained. The Los Angeles Times reported that “more than 1,000 homes, businesses and other buildings have burned and at least two people are dead in wildfires burning across L.A. County, making this one of the most destructive firestorms to hit the region in memory.” [Los Angeles Times, 1/8/25, 1/7/25]

Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley, who is the first woman and first openly LGBTQ person to serve in the role, said that “the fire is being fueled by a combination of strong winds and surrounding topography, which is making it extremely challenging for our personnel that are assigned to this incident.” She also said that the fires are “stretching the capacity of emergency services to their maximum limits.” [ABC7/KABC, 6/5/24; Los Angeles Times, 1/8/25, 1/8/25]

Right-wing media repeatedly used disasters in 2024 to baselessly attack diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. After a series of equipment malfunctions with Boeing passenger jets, right-wing media rushed to blame the failures on DEI policies. Several commentators also linked the Baltimore bridge collapse to DEI programs, declaring that “DEI equals die,” and Fox News' Jeanine Pirro recently responded to the New Orleans terror attack by calling the police chief “a DEI hire.” [Media Matters, 1/12/24, 1/25/24, 3/8/24, 7/15/24, 3/26/24, 3/30/24, 1/3/25]

Right-wing media figures are using the wildfires in the Los Angeles area to exploit anti-DEI and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred all because the LAFD chief Kristin Crowley is a lesbian woman who backs DEI programs.

The faux outrage over DEI is part of the right-wing war on non-cis white male [conservative] Americans in leadership roles.

See Also:

HuffPost: Trump Calls On Newsom To Resign; Republicans Blame DEI For Inability To Contain Wildfires

Daily Kos: Delusional right-wing media blames California fires on DEI

[larryshapiro]

Los Angeles Fire Department engines

[pastrami-ennui]

Amoeba Hollywood, 2025

[randgugotur-6]

[closetofcuriosities]

Advisory Board Crystals - WILDFIRE Shirt - Los Angeles Fire Department Union

[basicpart]

Utility says its equipment may have started a small blaze that erupted during January's LA firestorm

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A California utility said Thursday that its equipment may have sparked a small wildfire in Los Angeles that broke out the same day as two massive blazes in the area that killed at least 29 people and destroyed thousands of homes. Southern California Edison said the Los Angeles Fire Department is investigating the cause of the Hurst Fire and believes the utility’s equipment…

[morganablenewsmedia]

California Fire Updates: Mandatory Evacuation Looms

California Fire Updates: mandatory evacuation Looms as fire hits Hollywood Hills Southern California has been hit with fierce wildfire, since yesterday, as a result of an unprecedented dry and windy condition. Reports have had it that minimum of five people are dead and many more have sustained various degrees of injury as fires erupted across Southern California. A number of thousands of…

[ericpoptone]

Ask Silver Lake — LAFD Station No. 56

The following article was written for the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council‘s “Ask Silver Lake” series — ‘Ask Silver Lake’ is dedicated to exploring the history and insights of our community. If you have questions or ideas you’d like us to consider, please drop a comment or send them to outreach@silverlakenc.org.’ For the sake of full disclosure, this month’s “Ask Silver Lake” resulted not from a…

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Los Angeles Firestorm - II

January 10, 2025

Robert B. Hubbell

My family and I remain safe in Los Angeles, although the apocalyptic feel is growing. New fires continue to erupt in the foothills with alarming regularity. Air quality is unhealthy everywhere. Billowing plumes blot the sun. Though the winds have slowed, the scale and number of the existing fires have stretched emergency services to the breaking point. Schools are closed, so traffic is eerily light. New evacuation orders are issued hourly. Power outages have stretched into their third day.

Although the winds are abating, the storm of disinformation is growing—fanned by the President-elect and his billionaire handler. For those dealing with the loss of homes, injuries, dislocation, and fear, disinformation adds insult to injury. Sadly, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, and a recent candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, billionaire developer Rick Caruso, have contributed to the wave of disinformation.

Firefighters are having success in knocking down new fires, but three established fires (Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst) remain largely uncontained. Although the winds have moderated, even moderate winds can spread existing fires with surprising speed. Embers can land a mile ahead of an existing fire, creating new emergencies every minute.

President Biden held a cabinet-level meeting on live television to discuss the federal response to the fire. Biden refuted the silly and ignorant claim by the Trump-Musk axis of disinformation that Los Angeles has “run out of water.” False. Although firefighters are experiencing low or no pressure in some hydrants, that situation is caused by power outages that have disabled pumps that help create pressure in pipes (by filling elevated water storage tanks).

It is also false that Los Angeles cut the budget for its fire department last year. That falsehood was given flight by Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer, who recently ran for mayor of Los Angeles. During a Fox News interview, Caruso apparently referred to a preliminary budget that did not include all funds that were anticipated to be allocated to the fire department. That misinformation was repeated by the owner of the Los Angeles Times.

Caruso, who runs pristine and wildly successful shopping developments in the City of Angels, likened his hometown to a “third-world country.” It is fortunate that Los Angelenos did not elect Rick Caruso as their mayor, given his willingness to trash the city at the first opportunity.

The truth is that the final budget increased the LA Fire Department budget by $50 million (to approximately $870 million). See MSN, Widespread Online Claims Proven False as Report Shows LA Fire Department Budget Actually Increased by $50 Million Last Year. Online sources that claim otherwise are ignoring the increase in firefighter salaries granted in a separate union contract—funds that were not included in the proposed “budget” but are included in the actual allocation of funds to the fire department.

Trump, Musk, and their followers continue to claim that efforts to diversify LA’s almost exclusively male fire department are to blame for the catastrophic losses. LAFD met its racial diversity goals two decades ago; the current diversity efforts relate to increasing the number of women on the force.

In 2022, women accounted for only 4% of LAFD’s workforce, and former Mayor Eric Garcetti started an initiative to increase that percentage. So, when Trump and Musk complain about “diversity,” they are describing efforts to include more women in a workforce that is 96% male. See HuffPo, Trump Calls On Newsom To Resign; Republicans Blame DEI For Inability To Contain Wildfires.

Personal anecdotes are rarely helpful in settling disputes over policy, history, or contested facts. But as a native Angeleno, I can say that after 68 years in Los Angeles, the windstorm on January 7 and 8 was the first time in my life that I was worried by the force of the winds. It felt like a hurricane and sounded like an earthquake as the winds thrummed our rooftop. Imagine trying to control a brushfire in the face of such winds. The notion that attempting to expand the number of women employed by the LAFD is responsible for the losses is insulting to women, to firefighters, and to all Angelenos.

For a brief period on Thursday, the historic observatory atop Mount Wilson was threatened by the flames—which advanced to the boundaries of the facility. But the 100-inch Hooker Telescope was spared. That is the telescope used by Edwin Hubble to determine that the universe extends beyond our own Milky Way Galaxy and that the universe is expanding. See photo below of the 100” Hooker Telescope.

Los Angeles has many tough and heartbreaking days ahead. I continue to hear from readers and friends who have lost their homes or have family members who have lost their homes. Many readers have asked for advice about contributing to recovery efforts. I suggest waiting a few days. Los Angeles is still trying to control the fires, and relief efforts have not begun in earnest. Please exercise caution to ensure that any organization you recommend to others is legitimate and will deliver the donations to those who need them.

Stay safe and take care of friends, family, and complete strangers!

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

Below is a picture of the Hooker 100-inch Telescope, used by Edwin Hubble to determine that the universe expands beyond the Milky Way and that the universe is expanding. The Hooker Telescope sits atop Mount Wilson and was briefly threatened by the Eaton Fire on Thursday.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Gertz at MMFA:

The right-wing propaganda machine’s opportunistic and unhinged response to the wildfires sweeping the Los Angeles area provide an instructive but foreboding look at what the next four years could look like.

Firestorms have swept parts of Los Angeles Country and its environs since Tuesday, as a “perfect storm” of dry conditions (spurred in part by human-caused climate change) and winds gusting over 80 miles per hour sparked apocalyptic conflagrations and severely hampered firefighters’ response.  While the fires are not uniquely large, the fact that they are burning in a densely populated area has resulted in staggering costs — at least ten people are reported dead as of Friday morning, tens of thousands have fled their homes, and more than 9,000 structures are damaged or destroyed, with economic loss estimates in the tens of billions of dollars.  Political leaders would ideally respond to such horrific circumstances by putting aside partisan differences and standing together to help the victims rebuild. But something very different is happening this week in right-wing spaces.

President-elect Donald Trump is lying a lot in order to blame his political opponents for the fire. The president-elect's Truth Social feed this week is alternating between memes highlighting his purported plans to take over Canada and Greenland and falsehood-heavy rants about how “the gross incompetence and mismanagement” of President Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are responsible for the fire.  Trump’s MAGA media allies are aiding his effort by turning the right-wing information ecosystem into an unrelenting wave of bogus attacks related to the fires. When any major story breaks, the top priority for the hosts on Fox News, Trumpist social media influencers, and the rest of the echo chamber is to identify scapegoats for their audiences to rage against. 

[...]

As SoCal burns, the right finds false scapegoats

Responding to natural disasters is a core function of government, and leaders’ response to such tragedies deserves careful scrutiny. But the evidence Trump and his allies are pointing to in order to claim that California’s fires stem from liberal mismanagement don’t hold up. The main avenue the right has seized upon — blaming California Democrats and environmentalists for supposedly limiting the water supply used to fight the fire — is entirely false. Trump alleged on Truth Social that there was “no water for fire hydrants” to fight the fire because “Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water to flow” from northern to southern California because he wanted to protect populations of the delta smelt, a rare fish.  His right-wing propagandists quickly parroted his argument to their audiences. On OAN, Dan Ball claimed that “You liberal Democrats running that city, county, and the state have blood on your hands tonight,” before reading Trump’s post. On Fox, Jesse Watters claimed of Newsom that “there is no water coming out of the fire hydrant because this man mismanages the water there.” And Larry Kudlow said on his Fox Business show that the governor “cut the water flow that never got to Southern California, in defense of this obscure fish.” But none of this is true. 

It’s not a water shortage that is impeding the firefighting effort — Southern California’s reservoirs are full, and LA County officials say they filled “all available water storage facility tanks” before the fires started. Some water hydrants ran dry in the Palisades because the extraordinary high demand on the area’s tanks (“four times the normal demand of water was seen for 15 hours straight in the area of the fires”) depleted them faster and reduced the water pressure needed to replenish them.  The long-running dispute over protecting the smelt has nothing to do with the firefighting effort — beyond the fact that there wasn’t a water shortage, that dispute hinges on whether water resources should be used instead for farm irrigation in the South and Central Valley.

And the “water restoration declaration” doesn’t exist, according to Newsom’s staff.  The right regularly responds to disasters by fixating on efforts to hire a diverse workforce, and this case has proved no different. On social media, right-wing influencers targeted Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley, the first woman and first openly LGBTQ person to serve in the role, claiming her leadership of the department shows that “DEI is quite literally getting people killed,” “DEI = DIE,” and “DEI has deadly consequences.”  Such attacks moved swiftly up the right-wing food chain. “This is the leadership of the LA Fire Department — I sure hope they know what they’re doing,” Fox star Jesse Watters said on Wednesday while shaking his head. He later claimed that “California is committing suicide before our very eyes. DEI is deadly.” 

[...]

The right uses the same playbook after every disaster

The right treats every disaster as an opportunity to attack the left, with talking points bubbling up from the fever swamps or filtering down from Trump, then spreading swiftly through the ecosystem thanks to the all-encompassing nature of its propaganda machine.  We’ve seen the same pattern repeatedly over the last few years, following deadly natural disasters in North Carolina and Puerto Rico and California, among others. 

The right-wing response to the Los Angeles wildfires is what we’ll be seeing during the next four years: Having Donald Trump and right-wing media in sync blaming Trump’s foes for disaster responses.

[larryshapiro]

Los Angeles Fire Department Agusta-Westland AW-139

[randgugotur-6]

Here’s the link. They are all listed and are in leadership positions. lafd.org/about/organiza…