L.A. residents ask, “Where do you start when you lose everything?”
Californians are not strangers to natural disasters.
The state has suffered from several major earthquakes, and for decades, and increasingly in recent years, wildfires have laid waste to hundreds of miles of land and property and have taken lives. But while previous fires have been contained to rural areas, last week things escalated drastically with a series of out-of-control blazes that wreaked destruction in suburban sections of Los Angeles, leaving some neighborhoods in charred ruins.
As of this writing, many of the fires are still burning, preventing evacuees from returning to their homes, or in many cases, what little is left of them.
Adding fuel to the embers is a politically charged blame game, with varying degrees of truth and distortion being played on all sides. California took a hard left turn under Governor Gavin Newsom, often diverting attention and funding toward progressive causes célèbres and away from what many see as core governance responsibilities. At the same time, increasingly hot and dry summers have made the fire-prone state ever more dangerous, and many doubt the confluence of factors that resulted in the present inferno could have been stopped from the state house.
The fires burning in corners of northern Los Angeles began to wreak havoc on Tuesday afternoon, January 7. Californians, used to wildfire threats, kept an eye on developments, but few understood the severity of the danger until blazes had advanced close to their homes. By midday, entire neighborhoods were in flames spread by unusually strong winds.
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