LA’s wildfires disaster: Another indication of an empire’s decline?

THE Los Angeles fires would be the US’ biggest disaster, with its destructive cost estimated at $150 billion, 300,000 residents evacuated,10,000 buildings raised, 16 confirmed killed, with the fire area of 15,702 hectares equivalent to the size of Manila, Caloocan, Taguig and Pasig combined.

While we certainly sympathize with Americans’ tragedy — especially with the multitude of Filipinos living there — we can’t help pointing out that its scale and the controversies surrounding it reminds us of the Great Fire of Rome of 64 A.D. that humbled the Roman Empire. Indeed, as the Los Angeles fires haven’t yet been put out today, the seventh day, more than the six days that Rome had burned.

The disaster will have long-term political repercussions as California and Los Angeles, for several decades, have been run by Democrats and have been solidly anti-Trump in sentiment.

(A sentence here deleted as it appears below) The New York Post yesterday had two screaming headlines: “Catastrophic wildfires left LA in ashes due to California’s failing leadership” and “Outraged LA residents call for immediate relief of Mayor Karen Bass over wildfires — as petition hits over 76k figures.”

Even President-elect Donald Trump on the social-media platform X posted: “Oh look, of course, the LA fire department donated a bunch of their supplies to Ukraine.” (The LA Fire Department in March 2022 donated surplus equipment to support Ukrainian first responders. This included hoses, nozzles, protective gear and other firefighting essentials that had been in storage for several years.)

This early, commentators are saying America will be ruled by the Republican Party for the next eight years, as California Gov. Gavin Newsome, the only Democratic “presidentiable” in the 2028 polls, won’t be able to get rid of the stink of the Los Angeles fires.

A contributed article in the prestigious The Atlantic magazine titled “How well-intentioned policies fueled LA’s fires” by an expert in urban development debunked broadcast media’s portrayal of residents there as rich:

“In 1988, California voters passed Proposition 103, arbitrarily reducing rates by 20 percent and subjecting future rate increases to public oversight. Nobody likes high premiums, of course. But the politicization of risk has been a catastrophe. Artificially low premiums encouraged more Californians to live in the state’s most dangerous areas. And they reduced the incentive for homeowners to protect their houses, such as by installing fire-resistant roofs and siding materials.

Decades of worsening climate risk alongside suppressed premiums have prompted many insurers to drop coverage altogether. Just last summer, State Farm dropped 1,600 home insurance plans in Pacific Palisades. Earlier this week, most of the neighborhood was burning.

Artificially low premiums have also spurred new housing production in fire-prone regions on the edges of cities like Los Angeles. From 1990 to 2020, California built nearly 1.5 million homes in the wildlife-urban interface, putting millions of residents in the path of wildfire.”

How could the world’s richest nation, with the most powerful military, fail in containing swiftly what started as a brushfire in the not-so-dense forests on the outskirts of Los Angeles?

Greece’s GDP is only a percent of California’s $3.9 trillion. Yet, its capital, Athens, has been able to contain the forest fires that perennially threaten it, such as the recent ones that were put out in four days.

Greece comes to mind as I witnessed myself the fires that burned swaths of its suburbs close to the forests when I was the Philippine ambassador there from 2005 to 2010. What I remember vividly were two things. First, the watchtowers around the forests manned by volunteers during the summer, which early on raised the alarms so the fires were put out before they became an uncontrollable conflagration. Second, whenever a wildfire threatened Athens’ mountainous suburbs, they had about half a dozen air tankers, which we watched from some hotel’s view deck, scooped water from the sea with giant baskets and dropped into the fires.

Greece increased in 2022 the number of such air tankers and other firefighting aircraft to 93. The LA Fire Department has 15 fire-fighting helicopters and two Bombardier CL-415 “Super Scoopers,” similar to the planes we saw in action in Grece several years back. One of the two LA Super Scoopers was grounded, though, because of damage when a civilian drone collided with it.

In contrast, the London Daily Mail ran a story titled “Leaked memo reveals LA Mayor Karen Bass demanded her fire department cut an extra $49 million just one week before wildfires broke out.”

The US body politic is now deeply divided among the Reds and Blues, the unconscionable funding running into tens of billions of dollars for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, the near-universal hatred of the US by Muslims, 11 million illegal immigrants since President Biden took power, its losing defense of Ukraine, its warmongering in the South China Sea, the growth of China which has been growing to become America’s executioner — and now uncontrolled wildfires consuming the suburbs of its second largest city, Los Angeles.

I’m certainly not going overboard in seeing here signs of the decline of the America Empire. After all, every single empire in the world had to die sometime.

The big, obvious lesson for us out of these LA fires is for government to throw as many resources as it can to contain natural disasters, which won’t be because of wildfires but rain and typhoons. Yet President Marcos, forgetting the terrible flooding just early this year due to three typhoons, vetoed P16.7 billion worth of flood control projects for the 2025 government budget.

He (and his cousin, Speaker Martin Romualdez) most probably calculated voters would not really know about these projects.

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LA’s wildfires disaster: Another indication of an empire’s decline?
Source: Breaking News PH