LA Locals Urge Leaders to Prioritize Public Safety, Not Climate Agenda
Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell /
As many Democrats seek to use the California wildfires to push their “climate change” agenda, the Los Angeles Fire Department and locals say the city and state should instead prioritize saving as many lives and as much property as possible.
“For us, it doesn’t get very political at all,” Los Angeles County Fire Department Public Information Officer Marco Rodriguez told The Daily Signal.
Wildfires have ravaged Southern California since last Tuesday, forcing more than 150,000 residents to evacuate. As of Monday morning Pacific Time, the death toll from the fires had risen to 25, The Los Angeles Times reported.
Some Democrats have been quick to blame the historically destructive wildfires on climate change. Firefighters, however, say their focus is on containment, public safety, and salvaging property.
“Firefighters, you know, they’re looking at, ‘OK, do we have water? How fast is the wind? I mean, they’re looking at all that stuff like super-micro, rather than the bigger picture,” Rodriguez said.
“Everybody that’s working here is just mainly focused on minimizing the impact of this fire, rather than worrying about stuff like that,” he continued. “We’ll leave that to our leaders, and they can discuss and try to come up with better ways to set us up in the future.”
The L.A. Fire Department is focused on serving its community and getting it back to normal, Rodriguez added.
“We can at least eliminate the threat of more loss, and no more loss of life,” he said.
Former California Assemblyman Matt Gatto, a Democrat, said the politicization of the wildfires “[doesn’t] help a grieving public.”
“This basin has burned since before there were cars,” Gatto told The Daily Signal. “And one of the worst wildfires was in the 1960s, before people talked about the concept of climate change.”
“Is it possible that our weather patterns have changed year to year? And certainly our climate has? Sure,” he continued. “But the question for officials is: ‘What are you going to do about it?’ Climate change is not an excuse. It is not something that absolves our officials from good planning and good execution. So, I get very upset when I see people from either side of the aisle use these fires as a way to score political points.”
“We need help. We need desperate help. The people need help,” Jacqueline Halpin, a mother of six who lost her home of 36 years in the Eaton wildfire, told The Daily Signal. “Make building permits easy to get. This is an unprecedented thing, and we need help. And we need leadership to step up and leave their ideology behind and help us.”
Rebuilding the areas devastated by the fires will take years, Rodriguez said of Malibu and the Palisades. “This whole place will change.”