Los Angeles Fire Roundup: Fire Funding, Forest Raking, Missing Reservoirs, and Arson

Following the recent firestorm that swept through and destroyed a large portion of Los Angeles, various accusations have been levied at the mayor of the city, Karen Bass, and the governor, Gavin Newsom, for cutting the budgets of state and city firefighters and fire prevention services.

Bass cut $17 million from the city’s budget and pushed to cut an additional $50 million only a week before the blaze.

Newsom on the other hand disputed accusations that he cut any of the budget for the state’s fire prevention department—the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CalFire. To counter any accusations of budget cutting, Newsom created a special page on his own website stating that CalFire personnel “has nearly doubled since 2019 (from 5,829 to 10,741)” and the budget “has nearly doubled since 2019 ($2 Billion to $3.8 Billion).”

The state budget numbers support Newsom’s statement of a sharp increase in budget and department positions following his election with 4,000 additional headcount, but strangely CalFire shows no sign of a giant swell in its firefighting force.

The CalFire website currently lists 12,000 “permanent and seasonal personnel.” That is about the same number listed in 2019 before Newsom took office: 6,100 permanent, 2,600 seasonal, 3,500 inmates as part of the Conservation Corps, and 600 volunteers in prevention, or 12,800 in total.

That is actually a decline from previous years. In 2014-2015, CalFire listed 16,350 permanent and seasonal employees. According to those CalFire summaries, the budget went up from 2015 to 2018 ($1.4 to $2.3 billion), but the personnel count went down with no other significant change in the department’s inventory outside of the addition of two airtactical planes.

A CalFire “Fire Siege” report notes that Newsom did support various growth in the agency, including thirteen permanently staffed engines, funding for a C-130 large air tanker, and 35 critical fuel reduction projects.

Raking the Forest

Newsom has also trumpeted his approach to forest management or “raking the forest.”

The budget for managing the forest (AKA “raking the forest”) is now TEN TIMES larger than it was when Governor Newsom took office. It was a $200 million annual budget in 2018. The state has now invested $2 billion, in addition to the $200 million annually.

Considering that the CalFire budget is only $3.7 billion, increasing by $1.25 billion since Newsom was elected, it would be hard to fathom that more than half of it was dedicated to forest management.

Graphics on the CalFire site highlight the significance of forest management through “fuel reduction” to prevent forest fires—over 100,000 acres managed a year up from 36,000 acres in 2017. Substantial, but certainly not a ten-fold increase.

Yet with all of the funding and effort put towards preventing fires, CalFire has responded to about 94,000 more incidents each year since Newsom’s election, including the failure to prevent the most recent fire.

The Santa Ynez Reservoir

The response to the fire was severely hampered by a lack of water. Some of that was due to the sheer volume of demand to fight the fire as well as elevation constraints between the location of the fire (Pacific Palisades) and the water sources.

But additionally, one reservoir was not available at the time—the Santa Ynez reservoir right next to Pacific Palisades.

That reservoir was out of commission for almost a year due to a needed repair to its cover—akin to a pool cover for improved water quality.

But oddly, that reservoir doesn’t appear on the California Department of Water Resources’s list of reservoirs and never has been despite being a consistent source of residential drinking water prior to 2021. The reservoir just doesn’t appear on the site for the California Water Department whatsoever.

Large Swings In Arson

The Los Angeles Firestorm wasn’t an isolated incident as the state has long struggled with fire prevention going back decades and in recent years, with major conflagrations like the Camp Fire of 2018.

CalFire’s own statistics site shows a doubling of incident responses per year since 2013. More and more it is the threat of arson as arrests have increased 56 percent since 2019. In 2020, five of California’s largest wildfires occurred—like the August Complex and Lightning Complex fires—with 44,609 acres burned in total.

Federal Bureau of Investigation on arson in Los Angeles shows a particularly odd trend. Incidents increased dramatically starting in 2020—doubling from around 150 a month to over 300—only to have data reporting stop throughout 2021.

When it returned, it dropped precipitously. Since mid-2022, there have been comparatively few reports of arson—less than 50 a month.

A similar but different trend happened in California state-wide: a sudden spike starting in 2020, a sudden collapse in 2021, only to return in 2021 and disappear.