There is no end in sight to the devastation happening in Los Angeles.

As of Friday evening, the Eaton fire is at least 3% contained and has killed six people. The Pacific Palisades fire is 8% contained, has killed five people, and is now moving toward the San Fernando Valley. People are starting to return to their homes to see what is left. Shockingly, sometimes homes are damaged but still standing, as James Woods and Mandy Moore have found. Others have lost everything and want answers. But apparently even Governor Gavin Newsom has no answers to give.

"I'm literally talking to the President right now."

"Let me see. Let me talk to him. Let's talk."

"I don't have cell service." https://t.co/Bf7SmPrMRP

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) January 9, 2025

In a sane world, that should be the end of Newsom’s political career. But avoiding responsibility and passing the buck are part of Gavin Newsom’s gifts. He would now like to know WHY the Santa Ynez Reservoir was empty and undergoing maintenance, instead of being filled and ready, and why the fire hydrants ran dry. Did anyone consider getting the man a mirror?

Another one of our @TheBabylonBee prophecies fulfilled pic.twitter.com/bZgLIgH0eN

— Kyle Mann (@The_Kyle_Mann) January 10, 2025

The person that Newsom is attempting to get answers from is one Janisse Quiñones, who is the Department of Water and Power (LADWP) CEO. Mayor Karen Bass chose her for the job (“recommended” her to be confirmed by the Los Angeles City Council) just this last April, at the salary of $750,000 a year. What did she have to say for herself when confronted about the fire hydrants running dry?

Janisse Quiñones, chief executive and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said at a Wednesday press conference that all three 1-million-gallon water tanks in the area ran dry by 3 a.m., reducing water pressure for fire hydrants at higher elevations.

“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades. We pushed the system to the extreme,” Quiñones said. “Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”

Quiñones said the tanks, which supply pressure for hydrants in the hilly Palisades, couldn’t refill fast enough as firefighting efforts drained water faster than the main trunk line could supply it.

The Los Angeles fire department confirmed that all three tanks were filled in preparation for potential fires – so what happened with the resevoir? The Los Angeles Times reports that the Santa Ynez Reservoir has been shut down for nearly a YEAR, well before Quiñones took over. However, California bureaucracy struck again!

Officials said that the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been closed since about February for repairs to its cover, leaving a 117-million-gallon water storage complex empty in the heart of the Palisades for nearly a year.

Had the reservoir been operable, water pressure in the Palisades would have lasted longer on Tuesday night, said former DWP general manager Martin Adams, an expert on the city’s water system. But only for a time.

“You still would have ended up with serious drops in pressure,” Adams said in an interview Thursday. “Would Santa Ynez [Reservoir] have helped? Yes, to some extent. Would it have saved the day? I don’t think so.”

Emptying of the reservoir began in February after a tear in the floating cover measuring several feet allowed debris, bird droppings and other objects to enter the water supply. DWP drained the site to avoid contamination and comply with water regulations.

DWP sought bids for the repair in April, at a cost of up to $89,000. In November, the utility signed off on a contract with a Lakeside firm for about $130,000, records show.

The status of the repairs is unclear. The DWP’s employee union leader condemned the months-long wait to restore the reservoir.

“It’s completely unacceptable that this reservoir was empty for almost a year for minor repairs,” Gus Corona, business manager of IBEW Local 18, said in an interview with The Times.

“This work should have been done in-house, and they shouldn’t have depended on a contractor to do it,” he said. “I truly believe it’s something that could have been avoided.”

Joseph Ramallo, a chief communications officer for DWP, said the reservoir was scheduled to reopen in February.

So the reservoir was empty and out of commission during an entire fire season (which usually runs from June to October), and now Newsom wants answers in order to cover his own ass. Quiñones may end up as the scapegoat for this one, despite not being the person in charge when the reservoir was initially shut down. It took seven months for the LADWP to pick someone and sign a contract for the work??? And no one knows if it is done yet???

Meanwhile, Mayor Karen Bass may have come close to firing her very intersectional fire chief on Friday evening. During a couple of interviews, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley claimed that her department was “underfunded” after the budget cuts that Bass imposed. She then was called into a meeting with Bass, and the chief assumed that she was going to be fired. However, it seems that Bass backed off after their meeting.

Crowley told staff in her office she was getting fired by Mayor Karen Bass at a meeting 4pm on Friday.

But she emerged from the meeting saying she was still in her job – for now.

‘She was going into the meeting, telling everybody goodbye, because she was told the whole purpose of the meeting was to fire her,’ a source close to Crowley’s office said.

‘When she was summoned into the meeting, it was with the direct purpose to fire her.

‘Whatever happened in that meeting, minds got changed.

‘Either Bass realized it would be suicide to fire her, and came to her senses, or Crowley talked her out of it.

‘She came back in the office briefly, told her staff “I’m not fired yet” and went into a meeting with all her chiefs.

A retired senior LAFD official told DailyMail.com that he was shocked by Crowley’s comments in her TV interview.

‘In my entire career, a fire chief has never thrown a mayor under the bus. It’s unbelievable, for her to go on the offensive like that,’ he said.

He added that amid fury over alleged failures in preparedness and in tackling the fires that leveled neighborhoods in Los Angeles this week, the city leaders are fearing for their positions and are starting to turn on each other.

‘It was a brilliant move on her part. One of them’s going to get taken out. Either they’re going to go after the Mayor or the Fire Chief,’ the ex-LAFD top brass said. ‘Saying ‘She defunded me, I didn’t have the money’ is a brilliant move.’

Karen Bass, unlike Gavin Newsom, may not be able to find a scapegoat. In calling the fire department “underfunded,” Crowley has not one, but TWO cards to play. The first is the already reported $17.6 million that Bass cut from the fire department budget. The second is an additional $49 million of cuts that Bass asked for – on JANUARY 6TH.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass demanded the fire department cut an extra $49 million just 1 WEEK before fires broke out.

This move would have shut down 16 fire stations, according to the Daily Mail. pic.twitter.com/cDvugRkgEw

— Breanna Morello (@BreannaMorello) January 10, 2025

The memo is dated January 6, only a day before the devastating Palisades Fire started.

According to the sources, it was sent from LAFD ‘top brass’ at City Hall to division chiefs and captains – after a fraught meeting the previous Friday between Chief Kristin Crowley and Mayor Bass.

‘The LAFD is still going through a FY [financial year] 2024/2025 $48.8 million budget reduction exercise with the CAO [City Attorney’s Office],’ the document said.

‘The only way to provide a cost savings would be to close as many as 16 fire stations (not resources, fire stations); this equates to at least one fire station per City Council District.

‘The details of this plan have not yet been developed. This is a worst-case scenario and is NOT happening yet.’

And what did Bass want to do with that money? Take a guess.

‘They did not want this out. It’s an internal memo not to be distributed,’ one currently-serving 25-year veteran of the Fire Department told DailyMail.com.

‘It comes from top brass downtown, City Hall.

‘They’re trying to allocate more money for the homeless, and they need to start taking from everybody.

‘But we already exhausted our budget. It’s already tapped. That’s why they cut the fire academy in half, so they could save more money. That’s why we’re not testing if hydrants work any more. We’re doing everything we can to save money.

The sources briefed on the memo said Bass first made the demand for tens of millions from the cash-strapped department in a meeting with Chief Crowley on Friday.

‘Bass wanted to cut even more,’ one source briefed on the meeting said. ‘They asked for $49 million more on Friday last week. The Chief said “We don’t have it”. The Mayor said “Find it”.’

Chief Crowley had already warned Bass last month that $17.6 million of cuts the mayor successfully steered through a City Council vote had ‘severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.’

Crowley wrote the warning in a December 4 memo first reported by NBC LA, highlighting the $7 million reduction in ‘overtime variable staffing hours’ it caused, which ‘adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations, such as […] training, fire prevention, and community education.’

If Bass had fired Crowley, there is no way that Crowley would have been less talkative about the current budget situation. Letting her keep her fire chief job for the moment was probably the only thing that Bass could do, though that meeting was probably a “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” moment. But there is no way for Karen Bass to make this situation any better for herself. She’s the mayor, she pushed through the first round of cuts to the fire department, and now this memo that says they wanted another $49 million is out in the public square. The next mayoral election is scheduled for June 2, 2026 (with a runoff election in November if needed) and Bass is running. That means that election season will be starting in earnest by this coming summer. Does anyone really think that Karen Bass stands a chance of being re-elected after all of this?

In the meantime, pray for the firefighters trying to contain the spread, and for those who have lost loved ones in this devastation.

Featured image: view of wildfire on January 8, 2025 from West Hollywood, Los Angeles via YisroelB501 on Wikimedia Commons, cropped, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)