Governor Newsom announces signing of $15 billion climate change, wildfire funding packages in Sequoia National Park on 9/23/21. (Photo: gov.ca.gov)
California’s Perfect Storm: Historical Devastating Fires and the State’s Insurance Crisis
Gov. Gavin Newsom misled the public in 2021 about his wildfire prevention efforts by 690%
By Katy Grimes, January 8, 2025 8:24 am
As wildfires tear through Southern California burning down entire neighborhoods, homeowners are reporting that insurance companies recently cancelled their fire insurance.
California’s perfect storm is a mishmash of destructive water policy, environmental policy, and a political insurance crisis.
The Southern California wildfires are devastating because of heavy winds, lack of water, and not enough forest management. As California Congressman Tom McClintock has long said, “Excess timber comes out of the forest in only two ways – it is either carried out or it burns out.”
But how did this happen, even after the devastating 2018 fires in Paradise CA, which killed 85 people and destroyed the entire town?
In 2021 the Globe reported:
The June 2021 report which exposed that Gov. Gavin Newsom misled the public about his wildfire prevention efforts by 690%, should have obligated applicable state agencies to act immediately.
The fact remains that California’s forests are still a lethal tinderbox as wildfire prevention efforts have not been ramped up to mitigate the now annual wildfire threat to homes, businesses and entire communities. Instead, 2021 is one of the worse fire seasons ever in state history, with wildfires still burning.
The joint CapRadio and NPR investigation unveiled in June 2021, Governor Newsom was found to have overstated the number of areas treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns by 690%, the Globe reported. Governor Newsom claimed that, due to his executive order, 35 of his priority projects had treated over 90,000 acres with wildfire prevention treatments. However, data from the state only showed 11,399 acres treated.
“The data show Cal Fire treated 64,000 acres in 2019, but only 32,000 acres in 2020 and 24,000 acres through Memorial Day this year,” CapRadio and NPR reported, explaining that the governor even “disinvested in wildfire prevention.”
“At the same time, Newsom slashed roughly $150 million from Cal Fire’s wildfire prevention budget,” CapRadio reported.
Newsom’s executive order on day one as governor in 2019 blamed the state’s wildfires on climate change and paid particular attention to “equity” — focusing on areas with high “poverty levels, residents with disabilities, language barriers, residents over 65 or under five years of age, and households without a car.” (Executive Order below)
Officially, the projects totaled about 90,000 acres. That’s well short of the amount of forestland experts say needs treatment in California, but it would have substantially increased Cal Fire’s prevention output compared to past years.
In early 2020, Newsom declared mission accomplished.
“The projects collectively have treated 90,000 acres,” states a January 2020 press release from the governor’s office. “Work included removal of hazardous dead trees, vegetation clearing, creation of fuel breaks and community defensible spaces, and creation of ingress and egress corridors.”
But the data analyzed by CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom show that Cal Fire treated a small fraction of that amount, 11,399 acres, or about 13% of the amount cited by Newsom.
Big hat, no cattle.
The Insurance Crisis
California’s insurance crisis is pushing Californians whose homeowners insurance has been cancelled to the California FAIR Plan, which is writing the highest-risk policies in California, but it is woefully underfunded, with only a few billion in assets and several hundred billion in liabilities, former state Senator Ted Gaines reported for the Globe.
“California is and has been a lower-cost state for insurance but that did not accurately reflect the risk insurers faced, as the devastating wildfires of 2017 and 2020 proved,” Gaines said. “Those fires wiped out decades of insurer California profits and shed critical light on what rate adequacy really looks like. The low prices were an artifact of Prop. 103, which is acting as a price control, which always leads to shortages. It is proving a barrier to its stated goal of ensuring insurance is available to all Californians.”
The real responsibility for California’s high insurance premiums lies in state politicians’ and the governor’s deluded “progressive” policy decisions and bad laws. Most insurers say because of California’s high cost to rebuild, they can’t keep premiums artificially low any longer.
What are the high costs to rebuild?
- The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA): As Ed Ring reported for the Globe, over 50+ years, “CEQA has acquired layers of legislative updates and precedent setting court rulings, warping it into a beast that denies clarity to developers and derails projects. When projects do make it through the CEQA gauntlet, the price of passage adds punitive costs in time and money.”
- Project labor agreements are one of the biggest obstacles to political collaboration between construction unions and groups representing business interests, Ed Ring explained. A PLA is “a pre-hire collective bargaining agreement with one or more labor organizations that establishes the terms and conditions of employment for a specific construction project.”
- federal, state, regional, and local agencies permitting, overlapping and conflicting regulations, and the agencies all have the power to halt building projects, allow a lawsuit, or rule change, require an entire new set of designs, and force and individual or builder to resubmit plans to every agency and start all over again (Ed Ring, summarized).
These reasons as well as incoherent water restrictions, preposterous “clean air” requirements, mandatory electricity requirements, mandatory solar requirements, mandatory interior sprinkler systems and the like. These state mandated regulations in home and commercial building have driven the cost of construction to unimaginable levels.
California’s water crisis
Add to all of this a lack of water in the southern part of the state. Fire fighters reported that there was not enough water pressure in some neighborhoods to fight the fires.
California’s water crisis is created by politicians and state government which allows the unelected, appointed and permanent bureaucrats at the State Water Resources Control Board to fulfill state water policy so politicians’ fingerprints aren’t on it. And, politicians and officials who adhere to radical environmental policies, have been killing off California agriculture lands by denying water, sending 80% of California’s water to the ocean in unimpaired flows for “environmental” purposes, resulting in entire Central Valley towns without water, farms drying up, and threats of rationing to urban water users.
And Gov. Newsom and Democrats have been slow-rolling the already voter approved Sites Reservoir and Temperance Flats Reservoir for water storage – water storage that would greatly help the southern part of the state.
California’s Perfect Storm will not end well. Homeowners will be shattered financially and emotionally.
It’s as if Governor Gavin Newsom and the state’s Democrats are trying to destroy the state – no one could be this incompetent otherwise.
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urban water supply systems typically not designed to fight enormous forest fires, so no surprise there. What still befuddles me is how ineefective water is on these large fires like Malibu. Maybe King Gavin should halt funding on the high speed choo-choo and divert those funds into developing a technology and strategy to actually PUT OUT the fires. Current firefighting strategies of removing fuels ahead of the flames to effectively ‘contain’ the raging beast is outdated ford model T ideology that as we ALL can clearly see (especially on our insurance premiums) is completely ineffective on large forest fires. And maybe let’s revisit building codes in ‘high fire’ areas to make the rebuilt strutures + all others more resistant to ember inturusion/ignition. For pete’s sake how long have sesmic retrofitting standards been around. CA needs to have some true leadership and foresight from Sack-ramento or the fires will only continue to burn……..
When you elect a blue progressive government you have issues like this. We need leadership with common sense.
In 1990 California pased the spotted owl law which stopped all logging in the state. Since then there has been NO forrest management, thus creating massave fuel to cause hugh wildfires. Look at the charts of size and frequency of wildfires before 1990 and after. It is not because of climate change, it is because of l liberals.
What stopped all logging was Federal, not state. Bill Clinton’s ‘Norhtwest Forest Plan’ reduced the volume of timber sold from National Forests in the West by over 90%, which was right around the time wildfires began increasing in size and severity. This was done to “Save the Northern Spotted Owl”, which it turned out was losing numbers not because of habitat loss but because they were being killed by competing Barred Owls. Now FedGuv, in its infinite wisdom, has sanctioned the killing of a half a million Barred Owls in order to save Spotted Owls.
This all makes perfect sense to the Left.
The state did its part in eliminating small sawmills by way of regulations and government fees, especially workman’s compensation. That was the exact reason given by Cecil Wetsel, owner of the Wetsel-Oviattt Lumber Company in Latrobe, El Dorado County. He tried to get the politicians to listen, but they ignored him. He closed his 70 year old business 20 years ago because he could no longer afford the costs of workman’s compensation in California.
And the spotted Owl is still gone because a larger species of owl eat them
Excellent article! You have captured all of the salient points of our self-inflicted government induced problems. I have one more question about how the massive amounts of pollution created by these large fires is quantified and does the amount of pollution created by these wildfires exceed the amount of pollution created by everyday normal activities? The fact that they want to limit normal everyday activities and don’t manage the forest properly tells me that Climate Change and Global Warming is a farce. Our challenge is that this way of radical thought has become normalized.
Katy Grimes and California Globe has effectively documented how a WEF globalist stooge like Governor Gavin “Hair-gel Hitler” Newsom and his criminal Democrat mafia cronies have deliberately tried to destroy the state with their policies. They need to be held accountable.
Yup. The State (Noisome and his WEF masters). Are conducting a War on the people of California. When will people learn that the depopulation agenda is real and in control of the state? I think we shall find that weather manipulation and arson are behind all the catastrophic fires in the last few decades. Is Malibu the next Lahaina? Watch what FEMA and the state does after the fire.
Meanwhile, LA’s Democrat Mayor Karen Bass is in Ghana attending the inauguration of Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama while wildfires ravaged her city. Reports have resurfaced that the Los Angeles Fire Department was hit with significant budget cuts by Mayor Bass’s 2024-2025 fiscal year budget that slashed the department’s budget by $17.6 million.
Kristin Crowley was sworn in 2022 as the first LAFD Fire Chief to be woman and LGBTQ+ whose main focus was to establish a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Bureau in January 2023 with the goal of recruiting more women & gay firefighters. Under her leadership, the LA Fire Department also passed a “racial equity plan” that included a chart to map out the race of every employee to make sure the department was racially diverse enough.
Typical Democrat priorities?
Question 1. Who and what will Gav blame for this debacle?
Question 2. How many lawyers homes were burnt to the ground in Pacific Palisades?
Question 3. Will this motivate the voting public to get out of their EV’s and go to the polls?
There’s more. Democrat Mayor Bass’ budget eliminated many of LA’s Emergency Management Department’s positions which is the department that’s currently in charge of the fires. LA’s Fire Department also sent surplus equipment to Ukraine.
Is it DEI incompetence or planned intentional destruction?
Open the Books reports how much the DIVERSITY,EQUITY, INCLUSION hire gets paid!
Chief Crowley’s 2023 pay was an absurd $439,772 — $412,493 base pay and $27,278 “other” pay.
It gets worse, those who are in charge of the water supply in LA get paid upwards of 700,000 dollars a year. Check out the article in the below link.
https://open.substack.com/pub/openthebooks/p/los-angeles-fires-water-and-power?r=ytkhg&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Hi Katy – please report on the new 2025 mandated FLAMMABLE refrigerant coming to our homes’ HVAC.
https://foxfamilyhvac.com/flammable-refrigerants-used-in-homes/
Modern Fires. What else that is mandated causes fires? Smart Meters. Apparently there is a gag order on this topic.
Katy, yet another cause of modern day fires: MASS TIMBER.
Very good article, Katy. I can’t help but think that if the Highspeed Rail project had been scrapped or never undertaken, responsible governance could have used that time and money wasted on that boondoggle to build/upgrade water recovery systems and clear out the undergrowth in the Pacific Palisades area. It’s clear to me that this tragedy unfolding before our eyes need not have occurred.
The good news….(amidst an avalanche of bad)
Is that California government, including Newsom, Bass, Becerra, Pelosi, Schiff, the Dem. Supermajority and all the rest of the, have been nationally exposed as the incompetents we know them to be. Don’t build water storage, destroy dams, funnel 80% of the snow and rain to the sea, lied about cleaning up the forest, Mayor was in Africa (representing Biden), cut the CalFire budget, cut the LA FF budget, hire only based on DEI, and the friggin’ hydrants ran out of water!
Recall them all.
Speaking of insurance, State Farm had announced in April 2024 that it was cancelling a total of 72,000 policies in California, including 30,000 homes. About 1,600 insured homes in Pacific Palisades lost coverage due to this decision. Many homeowners in Pacific Palisades now find themselves grappling with an unbearable reality watching their homes burn while their insurance policies—once their safety net—were canceled just months ago by State Farm.
State Farm has faced allegations of corruption in the past, particularly in a lawsuit that alleged the company funneled money to the campaign of an Illinois Supreme Court candidate in 2004. The lawsuit claimed that State Farm secretly funded the campaign of Chief Justice Lloyd A. Karmeier through donations to advocacy groups that did not disclose donors. This was alleged to be an effort to secure his win and reverse a $1.06 billion judgment against State Farm for using aftermarket car parts in repairs.
State Farm is the insurance company that ran a series of very successful TV commercials for several years beginning in 2011 featuring a Caucasian character named “Jake from State Farm” who was an actual State Farm employee from Indiana named Jake Stone. The initial ad featured a man in his pajamas talking on the phone in his living room with his insurance agent. His wife came down the stairs demanding to know who he was talking to on the phone at 3 a.m. to which he replied, “It’s Jake from State Farm.” His wife didn’t believe him and she grabbed the phone from him and asked “What are you wearing Jake from State Farm?” Jake looked down at his pants and answered “Ah, kakis?” The wife then told her husband “She sounds hideous.” It was amusing? (Watch: https://youtu.be/47cAxRX3aDg)
However in 2020, State Farm dumped Jake Stone for a professional actor named Kevin Miles (aka Fake Jake) who is Black. Some think the change was part of a State Farm DEI initiative? The saddest thing about it was that transition ad had the real Jake training Fake Jake on the phones.
What a despicable insurance company State Farm is?
But, but, but… now State Farm has Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reed and Taylor Swift’s Pfizer-dartboard ad shill on the payroll, too!!!
Too much marketing, and not enough underwriting and payment processing for my preferences…
Amica makes more sense as a company, and they bolted California years ago when the cost to rebuild with all the costly “green” regulations didn’t pencil out….
California Democrats are the dumbest MF’ers on the planet….
DTOP VOTIMG FOR THEM – THEY ARE LIARS ANF CHEATERS!!!
Where State Farm is cutting coverage, by Zip Codes –
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24537687-state-farm-zip-codes/
In my 4 Sierra Foothill zip codes alone, they cancelled roughly 30% of their policies, or about 3600 total. And keep in mind that’s on top of the policies he had already previously cancelled.
I think to fix the problem is simple: If a fire takes more than 50 acres or causes more than $2mil in damage, the money to fight the fire comes from the personal assets of the governor, carb bureaucrats, aqmd bureaucrats, the california legislature, puc bureacrats, county boards of supervisors, and city mayors and city councils and so on. And if they complain about it, simply ask “you have insurance, right?” Of course such a thing would never be legislated, but we have the ballot initiative process. Until those who are responsible for the criminal negligence that seemingly encourage these devestating wildfires are personally held accountable, the problem will never be fixed.
Katy, this is such an important article. No longer can we allow the lives of Californians be sacrificed at the alter of buget cutting and environmental insanity. I support State Assembly Bill Essayli call for a special session of the Assembly to immediately deal with these fires. We also need Federal help, this is beyond a disaster!
This is why I am running for Mayor of Oakland, in the special election. I am the first to be certified.
Oakland is a fire waiting to happen, the horrible leadership of our Mayors and City Council, just passed a budget closing 2 fire houses, with more cuts in the wings. I call on everyone to join me NOW, action can not wait for an election.
Mindy Pechenuk, candidate for Oakland Mayor 2025
January 8, 2025
FIRE, FIRE, FIRE!
It is outrageous that the Oakland City Council closed two Oakland fire stations in order to balance the budget. In my book this is putting our citizens in danger and many could die. Do these council members want the death of Oaklanders on their hands?
Right now, fires are raging in Southern California in three locations. Millions of lives are threatened, homes, business and other property destroyed. Yet, our Oakland City Council shuts down our fire stations!
As reported Seth Olyer, Vice President of Fire Fighters IAF Local 55 said about the closures ” Anywhere between thirty seconds and sixty seconds, a fire doubles in size”.
“Be aware that you’ll be waiting a very long time for help regardless of your emergency. You will not have a fire engine at your doorstep in 4 minutes like you would’ve just yesterday. You will not quickly have paramedics to help you or your family and what could’ve been a small blaze or a small fire near your house will become a conflagration, leaving tragedy in its wake,” he also said. https://www.yahoo.com/news/oakland-could-soon-7-fire-144758908.html
I say no more gambling with our fellow Oaklanders lives!
I will not stand by and let this go. I will do whatever it take and all of us must join together, human life comes first. This is why I am running for Mayor, we never cut fire and our police. Oakland has been mismanaged for too long and I will always put Oaklanders first, and get rid of the debt burden on our backs and grow the real productive economy.
Barabara Lee helped to destroy Oakland, look at our streets with trash, homelessness, prostitution.
Do you want more fires, more cuts, more death?
I am the first candidate for Mayor to file my petitions. First to file, first to lead. Oaklanders come first. Time for a change.
Contact: Gerald Pechenuk, cities 12345678@gmail.com
FPPC # 1477156
http://www.electmindy.com
I am a born and raised Californian, a native Californian going 4 generations.
These fires are not natural. The Santa Ana winds never induced such tragic fires in different areas. This is not climate change, this is not overpopulation! It is looking more llike arson! Terrorism comes with different modalities! Is it ecoterrorism, is it exported terrorism? Perhaps drug cartels that are threatened by a new administration that will strengthen our borders.
This is not normal! The winds were expected. If I were a group or an individual with evil intentions, I would take advantage of the situation. There is now a fire in the Hollywood Hills far from the other fires. It is reported that it started out of nowhere and traveled quickly toward the homes. Many of the past fires in California and Oregon were from man made events. Add in the malfeasance of those in charge to PROTECT and you have a perfect firestorm! Those globalists elites will now call for stricter building codes, green energy legislation and yes 15 minute cities. The huge loss of property and loss to them are just the few eggs broken to make the omelet!
The tragedies in Hawaii, North Carolina and now California all point to something that may be more nefarious than people can wrap their heads around!
Right? It’s probably the deep state who is implementing and orchestrating this latest devastation in SoCal similar to what was done in places like North Carolina, Lahaina on Maui, Banff in Alberta and Paradise in Northern CA? No doubt weather modification and directed energy weapons are being used? Michael Jaco who is a former Navy Seal and CIA Officer put out a video about it on his Rumble channel. (watch: https://rumble.com/v678dyd-massive-directed-energy-weapon-attack-in-california-as-the-deep-state-apoca.html?e9s=src_v1_upp)
Alex Jones theorized that the LA fires are part of a land grab to transform LA into a high-tech surveillance state ‘Smart City’ and it’s also part of a larger deep-state globalist plot to wage economic warfare and deindustrialize the U.S. before triggering total collapse. (Watch: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1877066245192794146)