The California Nightmare

Monday, November 24, 2025

I hope you are following the story of the Palisades fire last January in Los Angeles.  We are in this space, but I worry that many of you tune out thinking I am just obsessed with justifying my decision to leave the state.  Nothing could be further from the truth – California is a cautionary tale and it should be carefully studied and understood lest the rest of us follow suit.  There is shocking new information in just the last few days.

The immensely destructive fire of last January in the Los Angeles region was actually a number of fires with two of them being far and away the most devastating – the Palisades fire and the Altadena fire.  Both were massive and both claimed thousands of structures.  But they were differently governed.  The Altadena fire was largely an unincorporated Los Angeles County affair.  The Palisades fire, the truly interesting one, was within the City of Los Angeles, and included some state park land – which is where things get really fascinating.

Background –  The Palisades fire was the reignition of an small brush fire, set about a week earlier by an arsonist.  Not too long ago officials announced the arrest of the arsonist – a fact that has disappeared in the deluge of information that has followed and that increasingly appears to have been a straw man of sorts. It turns out that the arson fire, referred to as the Lachman fire, was never fully extinguished.  Direct accounts of firefighters have been reported in which they were ordered off the fire despite their protests to their commanders that the fire was not fully extinguished.

I last wrote about this developing story on Thursday past when information emerged that California State officials may have been involved in the call to take the fire fighters off the Lachman fire.  The point of my post was one I have made repeatedly – the multiple bureaucracies that pass for governance in California mean that when monstrous mistakes like this are made, each agency owning some responsibility can point a finger at another agency.  No one has to take responsibility and so nothing gets better, ever.  New information makes that case even stronger.

Attorneys, acting on behalf of Palisades fire victims are now probing into allegations that the state officials involved were California State Park officials that arrived on scene and told fire fighters that they could not take some actions on the Lachman fire because of restrictions due to the presence of protected plant species:

Alexander “Trey” Robertson, one of the attorneys who filed the complaint against the state, told The Times that a fire official up on the Lachman burn scar Jan. 1 alleged that a California State Parks representative told them “they couldn’t bring a bulldozer in to cut a line around the fire and they could not do mop-up with their hand tools, dig up around any native plant species.”

Now, of course this is all second or third hand allegations made to the press by attorneys seeking to keep their efforts in the headlines.�� And of course, the State Parks Department is denying involvement and the governor’s office is refusing comment – but the story is spreading (pardon the pun) like wildfire because it has an air of authenticity to it.

As someone that spent a career dealing with California agencies, I can state unequivocally that I have first hand experience of being caught between agencies with competing objectives, each making idiotic calls while they flex their jurisdictional muscle.  Situations like this are all too common.  Hillside homeowners are told to clear brush to protect their homes from brushfire, while environmental agencies tell them they are destroying native habitat.  If you are the homeowner what are you supposed to do? Believe it or not, the question of whether a tank in a basement is an aboveground tank or a below ground tank was a massive controversy in the state for several years.  The two kinds of tanks suffered from a very different set of regulations managed by different agencies.  The compromise that, eventually, emerged succeeded mostly in costing tank owners thousands more than reasonableness would dictate.

When I visited the Soviet Union people there complained, constantly, that they existed under such a burden of regulation that compliance was a practical impossibility.  The bureaucratic maze that was the Soviet government left them in a state of constant non-compliance and therefore constantly at the mercy of officials that could simply decide when and when not to pursue them for violation.  As a practical matter, too much law became lawlessness.

California is in practically the same place.  Until covid the pressure was limited to business, but with covid the state of affairs in California has become increasingly apparent to the average citizen.  That this state of affairs is alleged to not only have become apparent but to be massively destructive is not surprising – and rings very true.

The Biden administration was often lawless in its approach to things – using similar tactics.  That’s why it is important to pay close attention to this story.  The cautionary take here is necessary – very necessary.