The $750,000-a-year LA water czar is responsible for a raft of failures that contributed to the devastating Palisades Fire, fire department insiders told DailyMail.com.
On Mayor Karen Bass’s orders, the city maxed out its budget to ‘attract private-sector talent’, hiring Department of Water and Power (LADWP) CEO Janisse Quiñones on a $750,000 salary in May – almost double that of her predecessor.
Now, Quiñones is being blamed by LA Fire Department (LAFD) insiders for leaving a nearby reservoir disconnected and fire hydrants broken for months, DailyMail.com can reveal, leading to firefighters running out of water as they battled the devastating Palisades Fire this week.
And, Daily Mail.com has learned, Quiñones past employer is also linked to fire scandals. She was previously a top executive at electricity company PG&E, which went bankrupt over liability for several massive wildfires in California.
She served as senior vice president at Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) from 2021 to 2023.
The utility company’s power lines sparked the second-largest wildfire in California history, Dixie, in 2021. Its involvement in the 2018 Camp Fire cost PG&E a $13.5billion legal settlement.
The firm’s liability for allegedly causing fires was estimated at $30billion when it filed for bankruptcy in 2018. It exited bankruptcy in 2020.
But her LinkedIn Profile was perfect: “With a tenure at Los Angeles Department of Water and Power spanning seven months, our team has taken significant strides towards realizing a sustainable energy vision for the city. Harnessing project management skills and engineering acumen, we’ve focused on the integration of clean energy solutions and enhancing infrastructure resilience.”
As it happens, the same story is true with respect to wildfires like the current LA inferno. This has been the third category of natural disaster that the Climate Howlers have glommed onto. But in this case it’s the aforementioned bad forestry management, not man-made global warming, which has turned much of California into a dry wood fuel dump.
And don’t take our word for it. This quotation below comes from the George Soros-funded Pro Publica, which is not exactly a right-wing tin foil hat outfit. It points out that environmentalists have so shackled Federal and state forest management agencies that today’s tiny “controlled burns” are but an infinitesimal fraction of what Mother Nature herself accomplished before the helping hand of today’s purportedly enlightened political authorities arrived on the scene:
Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change.
We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.
In short, if you don’t clear and burn out the deadwood, you build up nature-defying tinderboxes that then require only a lightning strike, a spark from an unrepaired power line, or human carelessness to ignite into a raging inferno. As one 40-year conservationist and expert summarized,
…There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”
The failure to do just such controlled burns is exactly what is behind the LA wildfire today. That is, a dramatically larger human footprint in the fire-prone shrublands and chaparral (dwarf trees) areas along the coasts has increased the risk residents will start fires, accidentally or otherwise. California’s population doubled from 1970 to 2020, from about 20 million people to nearly 40 million people, and nearly all of the gain was in the coastal areas.
Under those conditions, California’s strong, naturally-occurring winds, which crest periodically, as is occurring at the moment, are the main culprit which fuels and spreads the human-set blazes in the shrublands. The Diablo winds in the north of the state and the Santa Ana winds in the south can actually reach hurricane force, as has also been the case this week. As the winds move West over California mountains and down toward the coast, they compress, warm, and intensify.
These winds, in turn, blow flames and carry embers, spreading the fires quickly before they can be contained. And on top of that, the Santa Ana winds also function as Mother Nature’s blow dryer. As they come down the mountains toward the sea, the hot winds dry the surface vegetation and deadwood rapidly and powerfully, paving the way for the blowing embers to fuel the spread of wildfires down the slopes.
Among other proofs that industrialization and fossil fuels aren’t the culprit is the fact that researchers have shown that when California was occupied by indigenous communities, wildfires would burn up some 4.5 million acres a year. That’s nearly 6X the level experienced during the 2010-2019 period, when wildfires burned an average of just 775,000 acres annually in California.
Beyond the untoward clash of all of these natural forces of climate and ecology with misguided government forest and shrubland husbandry policies, there is actually an even more dispositive smoking gun, as it were.
To wit, the Climate Howlers have at least not yet embraced the patent absurdity that the planet’s purportedly rising temperatures have targeted the Blue State of California for special punishment. Yet when we look at the data for forest fires we find, alas, that unlike California and Oregon, the US as a whole experienced the weakest fire years in 2020 since 2010.
That’s right. As of August 24 each year, the 10-year average burn had been 5.114 million acres across the US, but in 2020 it was 28% lower at 3.714 million acres.
Comments
Voices in your head, soft one.
Lots of bad luck is what I’m hearing.
I hate it when Climate Change™️ demands budget cuts for essential services. Right Ern?
That’s how you know it’s largely non sense. When the aliens show up we won’t have any time for rainbow fire hydrants and trans gender cafes.
Fuck, should have thought about doing this. Bio is hilarious.
Voices in my are hearing that the rats are eating each other
Got a spot on your chin Ern
left eating the left
rats as @Sledog and lots of others would say
blame others
Bass seems like a tone deaf dummy
Gavin Gruesome is at least pretending to look into things.
2 years of above average Rainfall created foliage
9 months of Drought turned that foliage into brush tinder
Proper forest management clears the brush and mitigates fire hazards
Maybe spend some of the 24b you wasted on homeless into managing the forests in the hills around your major metropolitan areas.
It’s hard though. I guess nothing could be done. This isn’t anyones fault. Maybe Trump’s.
$750K gets you a hispanic DEI hire at the LA Water Department whose commitment to Green Energy is unmatched and accomplished all her goals for 2024.
https://instapundit.com/
AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING: LA’s $750k-a-year water chief Janisse Quiñones ‘knew about empty reservoir and broken hydrants’ months before fires.
But her LinkedIn Profile was perfect: “With a tenure at Los Angeles Department of Water and Power spanning seven months, our team has taken significant strides towards realizing a sustainable energy vision for the city. Harnessing project management skills and engineering acumen, we’ve focused on the integration of clean energy solutions and enhancing infrastructure resilience.”
Swaye's ancestors figured out how to thin the fuel load. But modern leftard environmentalists can't.
https://instapundit.com/
WILDFIRES AND THE HOARY HOAX OF A BURNING PLANET:
not just clean energy, equitable clean energy
Who’s gonna pay for all this? California? Rich celebs?
24B lost not spent. The spent figure is much higher.
750k a year 🤣🤣🤣🤣
It's standard procedure... but don't let that get in the way of a good conspiracy...
Shout out Seattle FD and responsible home owners 💪