As Fires Burn, Private Firms and Personal Effort Step In Where California Officials Fail
California’s incompetent governance has been on full display as wildfires rage around Los Angeles—and also long before, if we’re being honest. Bizarre priorities, policy failures, unforgivable neglect, and officials who are out to lunch (or at overseas shindigs) have all played a role in throwing Californians on their own efforts to substitute for government institutions that just aren’t up to the job. Faced with no other choice, people ingeniously devised means of keeping themselves and their property safe. They’d be better off if they hadn’t first been fed false promises and charged, heavily, for substandard services.
Private Firefighting
This week, The Wall Street Journal ran a fascinating piece by Kelly Crow on the J. Paul Getty Museum’s efforts to protect its two campuses from fire.
“Fire extinguishers in hand, the museum said, the Getty’s staff scours the sparse ground beneath their boots as well as the canopies of oak trees overhead,” Crow wrote. “They look for embers.”
Anticipating problems in a region prone to blazes, for years the museum prepared its grounds and constructed its buildings to be fire-resistant. It planted trees and shrubs that concentrate water, the irrigation system was designed as much to suppress fire as to maintain the grass, and on-site water tanks keep sprinklers from running dry. Flames made it within within six feet of the Pacific Palisades site but didn’t damage the museum’s buildings or collection.
Of course, such preparations come relatively easy for an institution with the foresight to plan for riding out both fires and earthquakes and a $9.1 billion endowment to fund its efforts. What are regular people with less gobsmacking bank balances to do?
“Wildfire Defense Systems, founded in 2008, works with three dozen insurance carriers to help prevent the costly wildfire damage to homes and businesses that insurance companies will ultimately be responsible for paying,” The Guardian‘s Lois Beckett reports of one private firefighting company. “[The] company was not the only one providing boots on the ground in Los Angeles for major insurance companies.”
As Reason‘s Jack Nicastro noted this week, private firefighting efforts have a long history in the United States. To this day, many of the older buildings in Annapolis, Maryland bear the plaques of the fire companies with which the property owners contracted in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Priv
Article from Reason.com
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