Anarcho-tyranny in Pacific Palisades Fire: No water in some fire hydrants

 

 From the Los Angeles Times here:

“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” Caruso said. “The firefighters are there [in the neighborhood], and there’s nothing they can do — we’ve got neighborhoods burning, homes burning, and businesses burning. ... It should never happen.”

A spokesman for the Department of Water and Power acknowledged reports of diminished water flow from hydrants but did not have details on the number of hydrants without water or the scale of the issue.

In a statement, the DWP said water crews were working in the neighborhood “to ensure the availability of water supplies.”

“This area is served by water tanks and close coordination is underway to continue supplying the area,” the DWP said in its statement.

 

Providing basic fire fighting resources is a bare minimum function of local government, at which this very wealthy community is obviously failing, mirroring California government's overall statewide failure to reduce wildfires.

State Farm stopped insuring roughly 30,000 homes in California in the summer of 2024, in part due to the danger to its business there from catastrophic fires in communities where multi-million dollar homes are common, and too commonly go up in smoke.

You'd cut your losses, too, if you suspected the locals had become as hopelessly bad as the one party state under Gavin Newsom.

Just found out my neighbors raise funds to provide clean water in drought stricken Zimbabwe

You know the place, where Robert Mugabe spent 37 years turning it into a Maoist hell after white Rhodesians had turned it into a prosperous exporting nation.

We have terrible water problems right here in Michigan, like in Flint but also in many other places affected by PFOS, but my lunatic Christian home-schooling neighbors decided to help the lunatic fringe communists a continent away instead. They're even going there to run a marathon (!) in celebration of the project.

We are doomed.

Clean water flows only from white privilege (and places it subdued in 1945, 1953 and 1973)

Michigan's own Steve Gruber has an important story about contaminated water in the US

New Drinking Water Crisis Dwarfs Flint Tragedy:

[T]he catastrophe brewing across the state and in waterways throughout the country will make the tragedy that took place in Flint seem minor.

Don't blame the Flint River for Flint's water problems

So says the Flint River Watershed Coalition, here:

"It was improper treatment of the water, rather than the health of the river itself, that sparked the suite of issues with Flint’s drinking water."

For more photos see "The Flint River isn't what you think it is, and here's why you should check it out".

clear waters

diverse habitat

thriving wildlife

Water Is Nineteen Times Rarer Than Gold

"Bodies are much more rare and porous than is commonly believed: water is nineteen times lighter, and by consequence nineteen times rarer than gold . . .."

-- Sir Isaac Newton

Stealing Food From the Future Depends on Stealing its Water

After reading this important story from Charles Laurence for the UK Telegraph, you will understand the necessity of industrial scale farming and genetically modified seeds, except that even after all that, the water beneath the High Plains isn't coming back, 20 percent of the world's food supply will disappear, the Colorado River will be the West's last lifeline, and T. Boone Pickens aims to make a mint in the process.

Here's an excerpt:

[I]t was only in the 1940s, after the Dust Bowl (the result of a severe drought and excessive farming in the early 1930s), that the US Geological Survey worked out that the watering holes were clues to the Ogallala [Aquifer], now believed to be the world's largest body of fresh water. They were about to repeat the dreams of man from the days of Ancient Egypt and Judea to turn the desert green, only without the Nile or Jordan. With new technology the wells could reach the deepest water, and from the early 1950s the boom was on. Some of the descendants of Dust Bowl survivors became millionaire landowners.

'Since then,' says David Brauer of the US Agriculture Department agency, the Ogallala Research Service, 'we have drained enough water to half-fill Lake Erie of the Great Lakes.' Billions upon billions of gallons – or, as they prefer to measure it, acre-feet of water, each one equivalent to a football field flooded a foot deep – have been pumped. 'The problem,' he goes on, 'is that in a brief half-century we have drawn the Ogallala level down from an average of 240ft to about 80.'

Brauer's agency was set up in direct response to the Dust Bowl, with the brief of finding ways to make sure that the devastation never happens again. If it does, the impact on the world's food supply will be far greater. The irrigated Plains grow 20 per cent of American grain and corn (maize), and America's 'industrial' agriculture dominates international markets. A collapse of those markets would lead to starvation in Africa and anywhere else where a meal depends on cheap American exports. 'The Ogallala supply is going to run out and the Plains will become uneconomical to farm,' Brauer says. 'That is beyond reasonable argument. Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That's all we can do.'