Ask, Tell, Make: The Devastating Results of the American Competency Crisis Are Embodied in the Fires Devastating Los Angeles

If we don't reform our systems and leadership models, America may well go the way of California

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Los Angeles is on fire.

As of this writing, 40,000 acres have burned, 12,000 structures have been destroyed, 150,000 residents are under evacuation orders, and 24 people have died as a result of a series of fires across Los Angeles County.

The damage estimate is already at $150 billion dollars, and that number will surely grow.

Governor Gavin Newsom has characterized the event as a “natural disaster.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, along with some media outlets, are pointing the finger at “climate change.”

There are good reasons to question that.

But what if I told you that whatever climactic forces are at play, the majority of the damage could likely have been prevented, if competent leadership had made appropriate preparations?

While natural causes are undoubtedly a contributing factor, they do not tell the whole story. The failures that led to the tragedy that is still unfolding in LA are multifarious.

Destructive ideologies, breakdowns in leadership, the failure of interconnected systems, and an ethos that prioritizes identity over competence have all played a role in this devastating — and avoidable — tragedy.

Empty Hydrants, Tanks, and Reservoirs

Everyone knows that when a building catches fire, the remedy is water. Lots of water.

The debate over whether any amount of water could sufficiently abate the flames and embers whipped up by 100-mile-per-hour Santa Ana winds will continue indefinitely. When a fire gets out of control enough, water tends to vaporize before it can quench the blaze.

The more important question is whether the fires raging through the City of Angels could have been prevented from ever getting this bad in the first place.

Warnings were issued in advance.

The severity of the winds was forecast.

Negligent forestry practices, environmental mismanagement, moderate drought conditions that could have potentially been mitigated through better irrigation, and the removal of citrus groves that act as natural firebreaks to make room for additional housing all pointed to a disaster in-the-making.

But the lack of water was the thing that really put things over the top.

Empty fire hydrants were reported by multiple firefighting personnel in the initial hours of the blaze. In one darkly amusing clip, a local news anchor, attempting to toe the official city line, looks into the camera and says in response to a call from a former mayoral candidate about empty hydrants, "No firefighters have told us they're running out of water. " The scene then cuts to a reporter on the scene with the LA Fire Department at one of the blazes, who begins her report with the line, "Firefighters have told me they have no water..."

It was not the only such report.

In this clip from MSNBC, a reporter says he asked the Fire Captain at an apartment building fire, after seeing a fire hose fail to fill at a hydrant, “Out of every ten hydrants you attach to today, on average, how many are you getting full water from?”

“Little to none,” the captain replied.

So where the hell was the water?

The Empty Reservoir, The Budget Cuts, and The Endangered Fish

The Santa Ynez Reservoir in Pacific Palisades typically holds 117-million-gallons of water, and feeds three million-gallon storage tanks.

But on the night the Pacific Palisades fire blossomed from a small conflagration into a full-on nightmare, the reservoir was was offline…and completely empty.

And it had been dry for some time.

From Redstate:

When three 1-million-gallon capacity water storage tanks in Pacific Palisades went dry Tuesday night, firefighters were forced to abandon efforts to save thousands of homes. LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP) CEO Janisse Quiñones has repeatedly claimed during press conferences that her utility did everything it could to prepare for the forecasted wind event and support the Los Angeles Fire Department as it responded, but left out one key fact: the Santa Ynez Reservoir in the hills above Pacific Palisades, which holds 117 million gallons of water and normally feeds those tanks, had been drained and taken offline for repairs to its cover even though the state's brush fire season was ongoing.

The LAFD Watchdog Instagram account broke the news on Thursday, January 9th. They also wrote:

This reckless decision to take the reservoir offline left firefighters without sufficient water and severely hindered their efforts. DWP CEO Janisse Quiñones has failed to disclose this critical information and instead blamed "extreme demand" on the system. Her lack of transparency and leadership in this preventable failure demands her immediate resignation."

Martin Adams, the former manager at LADWP whom Quiñones replaced (at $750,000 per year, nearly double Adams’ salary), told the Los Angeles Times that the reservoir still wouldn’t have been enough for the demand:

Had the Santa Ynez Reservoir been in use in that period, Adams estimated, that demand might have been three times as high. Water in the reservoir would have fed the firefighting equipment and helped the pump stations push water to the storage tanks. But the reservoir “wouldn’t have lasted forever and would not have been a fix-all,” Adams said.

“Eventually, you would have gotten to the same place,” he added. Adams cautioned that he was basing his assertion on a rough estimate, and that he had not calculated the specific impact.

The word “eventually” seems to be doing most of the work in Adams’ assessment.

Doing some back-of-the-napkin math, 117 million gallons is thirty nine times the capacity of the three 1-million gallon tanks the reservoir fed.

That’s a lot of “eventually.”

It’s impossible to calculate how much better the overall outcome would have been had the reservoir been full, but we can safely speculate that the firefighting efforts would have been roughly 39 times more effective than when those tanks went dry.

How many homes might that have saved?

How many lives?

But if one reservoir was bone dry, others that could have helped simply didn’t exist.

California has long failed to build new infrastructure to capture runoff from snowmelt, which has hit record levels in recent years. Millions of gallons of water that could have been put to use have instead drained into the Pacific.

In a piece last week at her Substack, Unwon, journalist and filmmaker Keely Covello, who lives in Orange County, lays out a compelling case for “Why Los Angeles is Burning.”

At the top of the list? No new reservoirs:

California has not built a new major water reservoir since 1979.

The state’s last major reservoir project was completed in 1979, when the population was some 23 million. It’s been 50 years, there are now 39 million residents, and progress on the storied California Water Project has stopped.

In 2014, Californians voted overwhelmingly for Prop 1, funding a $7.5 billion bond to construct new water reservoirs and dams, with a deadline of January 1, 2022.

It’s now 2025, and no reservoirs have been built. Proposed projects remain mired in the bureaucratic morass of California politics.

There is no reason for California to experience water shortage. The natural climate is cyclical: years of low rainfall punctuated by years of extreme rain. Eleven months ago, at the start of 2024, we were enjoying several extra feet of snowpack in the Sierras and the most rain we’d had in 25 years. The reservoirs were overflowing.

Year after year, massive, swollen rivers in Northern California send water out to the Pacific Ocean, while government agencies scold citizens for watering their lawns.

But that’s not all. Covello says that California is actually spending millions of dollars to tear down existing water infrastructure.

The Klamath Dam was taken down back in 2023.

The Scott Dam, which serves over half a million people in agricultural areas, is slated to go next. According to Covello, the reason is to “improve salmon habitat.”

And then, there are the budget cuts.

Newsweek reports that Gavin Newsom cut $100 million dollars from seven state wildfire and forest resilience budgets in the 2024-2025 budget, while simultaneously having increased the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection budget by nearly $2 billion since 2019.

It’s hard to say how the cuts and increases balance out in the current disaster.

What is much more clear is the problem posed by Mayor Karen Bass’s multimillion-dollar gutting of the LA Fire Department’s budget. A $17.6 million cut, to be precise.

LA fire chief Kristin Crowley — who has been under scrutiny herself as an openly gay woman prioritizing DEI hires in the department — warned the city in May of last year about the significant amount of maintenance personnel on the chopping block due to insufficient resources. The loss of those personnel, Crowley said, meant that a significant amount of essential firefighting equipment would stay out of commission:

Crowley: And I just want to make sure that everybody's aware that we actually have many of our rigs that are sitting at our supply and maintenance because we don't have the resources to fix them.

Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez: So you talked about the sheet metal worker. What's the importance of that?

Crowley: That person is actually essential in the whole line of fixing our apparatus in a timely manner. If there's a minor accident, it'll sit there. We don't have anybody to do the work. It's the same thing with the heavy-duty equipment mechanics where that's actually half of our personnel that is pending to be deleted in regard to our heavy-duty mechanics. So we have a large amount of our emergency resources that we don't have the people to work on.

Crowley: So specifically, the one sheet metal worker, we have six heavy-duty equipment mechanics, two storekeepers, one welder. So there's a deletion potentially of 21 positions that are supply and maintenance. What we're advocating for is to be funded for 11 high, very important critical positions. That would help us with our backlog of our apparatus that we're not able to utilize.

Rodriguez: So how many, so how many apparatus? And, I mean, I know we still have some stations, for example, that still haven't fully recovered in their staffing levels with engines that need to get purchased re-staffed. I know at Fire Station 74, for example. So, how many apparatus do you currently have out of commission?

Crowley: So I can give you those numbers right here.

Rodriguez: Perfect.

Crowley: Out-of-service apparatus. We have 40 engines. We have 36 rescue ambulances and ten of our trucks that are out of service. And, you look at, “Well, how many actually do we have?” It's close to 15 to 20% of our fleet that's out of service.

Again, in November of last year, then in December as well, Crowley warned the city that they were understaffed and unprepared for an event like this. Rather than heed her warnings, the city made one of them disappear from their website after the fires started.

From the Washington Free Beacon:

Los Angeles fire chief Kristin Crowley warned city officials in November that her department had about half as many firefighters as it needed. When deadly wildfires struck the city two months later, Mayor Karen Bass's administration pulled Crowley's memo from its website. [emphasis added]

Crowley wrote to the city's fire commissioners—a five-person board appointed by Bass—on Nov. 18 and asked them to transmit the message to Bass and the city council. The fire department's size, she said, hadn't increased in decades despite significant population growth.

"In many ways, the current staffing, deployment model, and size of the LAFD have not changed since the 1960s," wrote Crowley, who also complained that a spike in emergency calls and a shortage of fire stations had led to longer response times. In 2022, Crowley said, 61 percent of the department's firefighters failed to meet the 4-minute first response time, a national firefighting standard. The National Fire Protection Association, meanwhile, recommends that cities like Los Angeles employ some 1.51 to 1.81 firefighters per 1,000 residents. But Los Angeles, Crowley wrote, only staffs 0.91 firefighters per 1,000 people.

Two months later, historic wildfires erupted across the Los Angeles area. Since last week, 37,000 acres and more than 12,000 structures have burned, 16 people have died, and more than 150,000 are under evacuation orders. [These numbers have since grown - SS]

As the catastrophe unfolded, Crowley's memo disappeared from a city website. The New York Times referenced the memo in a Thursday piece but did not link to it. The memo was available online at this link as recently as Friday. By Saturday night, however, the memo was replaced with a message stating, "404! We are sorry, but the page you requested was not found." A Google search preview includes Crowley's quote on the inadequate "size of the LAFD."

The memo's newfound error message comes as Bass faces criticism for her fire department budget and her decision to travel to Ghana after meteorologists warned of "critical" fire conditions in the days leading up to the blazes. Still, other memos Crowley wrote criticizing the city remain available online, including a Dec. 4 missive in which Crowley says her department "is facing unprecedented operational challenges due to the elimination of critical civilian positions and a $7 million reduction in Overtime Variable Staffing House (V-Hours)." That memo went viral as the fires broke out; Crowley's Nov. 18 memo did not.

As Bass continues to play a game of personal CYA, her own city’s firefighters are turning against her:

Bass has said she’s confident the budget didn’t hurt the city’s ability to respond to the wildfires. But Freddy Escobar, the president of the local firefighters’ union, said reduced overtime pay meant the department couldn’t fortify its crews early on. He also said the department couldn’t afford as many mechanics to fix broken-down engines and trucks.

"If we had more apparatus and more staffing," he told the New York Times, "it sure would have given us a better chance."

Reports emerged that Crowley had been fired after she criticized Bass. Later, those reports were walked back. It’s impossible to know if the dismissal was rescinded at the urging of a frantic PR person, or if the reporting just got it wrong.

Either way, the city’s response has been a disaster.

And then, there is the issue of the itty-bitty Delta Smelt.

"Delta Smelt" flickr photo by USFWS Pacific Southwest Region https://flickr.com/photos/usfws_pacificsw/5159686356 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

This tiny fish — which only grows to a maximum of about 3 inches — is an endangered species native to the upper Sacramento-San Joaquin Estuary of California. Efforts to preserve its habitat have prevented the release of millions of gallons of water from the northern part of the state to agricultural lands further south, where crops are grown, as well as urban areas that often face drought conditions conducive to wildfires.

During his 2020 campaign, President Donald Trump took action to address some of the region’s water issues:

Speaking at an event in Bakersfield, Trump signed a memorandum that will allow the federal government to redirect millions of gallons of water to the Central Valley and Southern California. Trump said that water, managed by a large network of dams, canals, pumps and tunnels, was being “needlessly flushed” into the Pacific Ocean.

“As a candidate for president, I promised to help solve the water crisis that was crippling our farmers due to the chronic mismanagement and misguided policies,” Trump said.

California Governor Gavin Newsom immediately responded with threats of litigation.

“We will file legal action in the coming days to challenge the federal biological opinions to protect highly imperiled fish species close to extinction,” Newsom said in a statement Wednesday.

Critics argue that diverting more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast, will deplete water needed to help ensure the survival of endangered salmon, steelhead and delta smelt.

Just one day after the article cited above was published, Newsom made good on his threat, with Attorney General Xavier Becerra filing suit against the Trump Administration for “Failing to Protect Endangered Species in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers.”

Three months later, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction, stopping the Trump Administration’s attempt to re-direct the water.

After Biden’s election, the biological opinions in support of Trump’s action were revised by federal agencies, and Newsom prevailed: the Delta Smelt’s habitat was preserved.

The water did not flow to Southern California as promised, and the downstream effects of that are being debated even now. Water from the Delta region accounts for roughly 30% of Southern California’s water supply.

And now, with Trump furious over the failure, Newsom’s office is pretending they don’t know what he’s talking about:

This, despite the fact that the document in question is clear to Newsom and his attorney general:

From the lawsuit itself:

But Wait, There’s More - Failed Forest Management and Arson

Controlled burns are a critical tool in wildfire management. They work to reduce dead trees and excess brush and vegetation which acts as kindling, causing flames to spread quickly.

When areas are cleared of this flammable vegetation, it creates fire breaks that help to slow or stop the spread of fires, making them easier to get under control.

These burns mimic natural fire cycles are interrupted in areas where forest services and other personnel work to actively suppress fires. (The Smokey the Bear campaign is actually counterproductive in preventing severe wildfires.)

But Gavin Newsom has been completely negligent in ensuring that these burns take place, despite his promises to the contrary.

In a 2021 article at Capitol Public Radio entitled “Newsom Misled The Public About Wildfire Prevention Efforts Ahead Of Worst Fire Season On Record,” it was revealed that Newsom had not made the efforts he pledged when he took office:

On Gavin Newsom’s first full day in office, Jan. 8, 2019, the newly elected governor stood before the cameras, clad in jeans and sneakers and surrounded by emergency responders, and declared war on wildfires.

“Everybody has had enough,” the governor said, announcing he’d signed a sweeping executive order overhauling the state’s approach to wildfire prevention. Climate change was sparking fires more frequent, ferocious, and far-reaching than ever before, Newsom said, and confronting them would have to become a year-round effort.

The state’s response, Newsom added, “fundamentally has to change.”

But two-and-a-half years later, as California approaches what could be the worst wildfire season on record, it does so with little evidence of the year-round attention Newsom promised.

An investigation from CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom found the governor has misrepresented his accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention. The investigation found Newsom overstated, by an astounding 690%, the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities. Newsom has claimed that 35 “priority projects” carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres. But the state’s own data show the actual number is 11,399.

In 2020, Newsom made a new promise to increase controlled burns, targeting 1 million acres per year, but by the end of 2022 — the last year on record, according to the Washington Times — his administration had delivered on only 10% of that goal.

The more arrid regions of the state are essentially a tinderbox.

Meanwhile, the LA Fire Department estimated in 2023 that as many as 80% of fires in downtown Los Angeles and 54% of fires citywide were started by homeless people.

The homelessness crisis in California is, of course, completely out of control, and everyone knows it. Federal data indicates that The Golden State accounts for “44% of all individuals who experienced chronic patterns of homelessness in the country.” A quarter of all American homeless people live in California.

In this month’s fires, homeless individuals are suspected of starting the Kenneth Fire and the Azusa incident, but reports of individuals, some of them clearly homeless, openly committing arson in various locations around the city have been coming in steadily across social media.

A video posted on TikTok showing satellite imagery appears to prove that “all three major fires in Los Angeles” started at the same time - suggesting they may not have been created by natural causes:

The Competency Crisis in California is Coming For The Rest of Us

It’s very clear, when considering all this evidence — and it’s entirely possible that even more will come to light — that California is suffering not just from a natural disaster, but a competency crisis.

Gavin Newsom is in a full-court-press panic, trying to save his political career. He’s tweeting out his own damage control, and appears visibly uncomfortable in interviews, dancing around in awkward displays of bizarre body language, speaking in political euphemisms, and nervously discouraging the pointing of fingers.

The odds that he survives this with a career in tact diminish by the hour.

But to put things into perspective, we need to understand how we got here.

In a 2023 think piece in Palladium Magazine, institutional investor and asset class head Harold Robertson took an in-depth look at the problems created by competency crises like the one California is suffering across the complex web of interdependent systems that make America function:

At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.

While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

Robertson argues that America’s shift from an emphasis on merit to diversity is what sent us off the rails. In the post-civil-rights era, he writes, “the first domino to fall ….was the quantitative evaluation of competency by employers using straightforward cognitive batteries.”

Enforcement actions stemming from civil rights laws caused employers to change their screening methods for potential hires, before employers shifted the burden to the university system and their applicate selection process.

It only worked for a little while. Robertson writes:

This outsourcing did not stave off the ideological change for long. Within the system of political imperatives now dominant in all major U.S. organizations, diversity must be prioritized even if there is a price in competency. The definition of diversity varies by industry and geography. In elite universities, diversity means black, indigenous, or Hispanic. In California, Indian women are diverse but Indian men are not. When selecting corporate board members, diversity means “anyone who is not a straight white man.” The legally protected and politically enforced nature of this imperative renders an open dialogue nearly impossible.

However diversity itself is defined, most policy on the matter is based on a simple premise: since all groups are identical in talent, any unbiased process must produce the same group proportions as the general population, and therefore, processes that produce disproportionate outcomes must be biased.

Robertson evaluates the effect of a heuristic that began in police training environments but eventually made its way into HR offices:

In police academies around the country, new recruits are taught to apply an escalation of force algorithm with non-compliant subjects: “Ask, Tell, Make.” The idea behind “Ask, Tell, Make” is to apply the least amount of force necessary to achieve the desired level of compliance. This is the means by which police power, which is ultimately backed by significant coercive force, can maintain an appearance of voluntary compliance and soft-handedness. Similarly, the power centers inside U.S. institutions apply a variant of “Ask, Tell, Make” to achieve diversity in their respective organizations.

The “Ask” phase of “Ask, Tell, Make,” is simply to request that members of a given organization seek to end bias.

“At this stage,” Robertson writes, “the policies seem so reasonable and fair that there will rarely be much pushback.”

But things don’t stay simple for long:

Often HR will become involved in the hiring process, specifically asking the hiring manager to defend their choice not to hire a diverse candidate. Because the wrong answer could result in shaming, loss of advancement opportunities, or even termination, the hiring manager can often be persuaded to prioritize diversity over competence.

Within specialized professional services companies, senior-level recruiting will occasionally result in a resume collection where not a single diverse candidate meets the minimum specifications of the job. This is a terrible outcome for the hiring manager as it attracts negative attention from HR. At this point, firms will often retain an executive search agency that focuses on exclusively diverse candidates. When that does not result in sufficient diversity, roles will often have their requirements diluted to increase the pool of diverse candidates.

The next step is “Tell”:

If these “Ask” tactics do not achieve enough diversity, the next step in the escalation is to attach carrots and sticks to directly tell decision-makers to increase the diversity of the organization. This is the point at which the goals of diversity and competence truly begin displaying significant tension between each other. The first step is the implementation of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) linked to diversity for all managers. Diversity KPIs are a tool to embarrass leaders and teams that are not meeting their diversity targets.

Robertson offers scenarios and supporting evidence for each of these phases in some detail, before moving to his explanation of the final phase:

When even carrot and stick incentives and the removal of standards do not achieve enough diversity, the end game is to simply make decision-makers comply. “Make” has two preferred implementations: one is widely discussed and the other is, for obvious reasons, never disclosed publicly. The first method of implementation is the application of quotas. Quotas or set-asides require the reservation of admissions slots, jobs, contracts, board seats, or other scarce goods for women and members of favored minority groups. Government contracts and supplier agreements are explicitly awarded to firms that have acronyms such as SB, WBE, MBE, DBE, SDB, VOSB, SDVOSB, WOSB, HUB, and 8(a).

When diversity still refuses to rise to acceptable levels, the remaining solution is the direct exclusion of non-diverse candidates. While public support for anti-discrimination laws and equal opportunity laws is high, public support for affirmative action and quotas is decidedly mixed. Hardline views such as those expressed in author Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America—namely that “any white man in a position of power perpetuates a system of white male domination”—are still considered extreme, even within U.S. progressive circles.

And this is where things begin to break down, fast.

Competency, Robertson argues, is “declining from the core outwards.”

More:

Think of the American system as a series of concentric rings with the government at the center. Directly surrounding that are the organizations that receive government funds, then the nonprofits that influence and are subject to policy, and finally business at the periphery. Since the era of the Manhattan Project and the Space Race, the state capacity of the federal government has been declining almost monotonically.

While this has occurred for a multitude of reasons, the steel girders supporting the competency of the federal government were the first to be exposed to the saltwater of the Civil Rights Act and related executive orders. Government agencies, which are in charge of overseeing all the other systems, have seen the quality of their human capital decline tremendously since the 1960s.

[…]

While all businesses subject to federal law must prioritize diversity over competency at some level, the problem is worse at publicly-traded corporations for reasons both obvious and subtle.

This system creates a disincentive for high-performers and kills morale. “Those who understand that the new system makes it hard or impossible for them to advance,” says Robertson, “are demoralized, affecting their performance.”

Because of the complex interplay between systems across America, failures produce ripple effects that can prove deadly — and have. Robertson provides historical examples that I will not go into here to save space.

His conclusion, written over a year before the current crisis in California began playing out, describes perfectly what we are seeing before our very eyes:

The answer is clear: catastrophic normal accidents will happen with increasing regularity. While each failure is officially seen as a separate issue to be fixed with small patches, the reality is that the whole system is seeing failures at an accelerating rate, which will lead in turn to the failure of other systems. In the case of the Camp Fire that killed 85 people, PG&E fired its CEO, filed Chapter 11, and restructured. The system’s response has been to turn off the electricity and raise wildfire insurance premiums. This has resulted in very little reflection.

[…]

Patching the specific failure mode is simultaneously too slow and induces unexpected consequences. Cascading failures overwhelm the capabilities of the system to react. 20 years ago, a software bug caused a poorly-managed local outage that led to a blackout that knocked out power to 55 million people and caused 100 deaths. Utilities were able to restore power to all 55 million people in only four days. It is unclear if they could do the same today.

His conclusion is nothing less than devastating:

Americans living today are the inheritors of systems that created the highest standard of living in human history. Rather than protecting the competency that made those systems possible, the modern preference for diversity has attenuated meritocratic evaluation at all levels of American society. Given the damage already done to competence and morale combined with the natural exodus of baby boomers with decades worth of tacit knowledge, the biggest challenge of the coming decades might simply be maintaining the systems we have today.

The path of least resistance will be the devolution of complex systems and the reduction in the quality of life that entails. For the typical resident in a second-tier city in Mexico, Brazil, or South Africa, power outages are not uncommon, tap water is probably not safe to drink, and hospital-associated infections are common and often fatal. Absent a step change in the quality of American governance and a renewed culture of excellence, they prefigure the country’s future.

For the residents of Los Angeles, the question isn’t just when they can rebuild, but whether it’s even worth trying.

They know that their leaders and the systems that have propped them up have failed. It has cost them their homes, their communities, and in some cases, even their lives.

And their ordeal is not over. The National Weather Service is warning of “extremely critical fire weather conditions” that will “continue across coastal Southern California through Tuesday” with wind gusts “upwards of 55 to 75 mph across portions of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.”

These high winds will have the potential to produce damage to trees and power lines which could lead to widespread power outages. The greater concern however will be the strength of the winds when combined with very dry relative humidities and dry fuels. This combination will result in extremely critical fire weather conditions, as forecast by the Storm Prediction Center. Not only will these extreme and dangerous conditions make fighting ongoing fires much more difficult, but these will make new ignitions much more likely. New fires that do develop will have the potential to grow and spread rapidly, adding to the danger of the situation.

The old saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” comes to mind. For Angelinos, it’s too late to elect the kind of leaders who might have heeded such sage advice.

But America still has a chance.

We either fulfil the desire expressed by a majority of voters in the most recent presidential election to truly make this country great again, or we get to watch as our once great-nation crumples into corruption, disaster, and irrelevance.

The time to act is now.