It takes time, Barack Obama warned, for a community to recover from disaster, discarding poor prior practices and experimenting with new ones. Vigliotti\u2019s on-the-ground account suggests that at least some of the Los Angeles fire disaster of 2025 was the result of a rush to rebuild in the same old ways and in the same dangerous places after the previous devastating fire of 2018. That hurry, he writes, has certainly been at play in the aftermath of the 2025 fire and its demand for speedy recovery, because the 2028 Olympics are slated to be held in Los Angeles, and politicians will pay a price if the venue has to be changed for lack of that recovery\u2014especially L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, but also Governor Gavin Newsom. Preparing for the Olympics has included a costly and ineffective effort to remove homeless people from the city\u2019s streets, which, among other programs, diverted significant funds from the L.A. Fire Department\u2014and, as one firefighter said, \u201cwe still have nearly 100 broken-down fire engines, trucks and ambulances sitting in the maintenance yard because of those cuts.\u201d Those vehicles could have come in handy amid cascading failures that, the author writes, included lack of leadership (Bass was in Ghana when the fire that ravaged the Palisades neighborhood broke out, though she had ample warning of its likelihood), lack of coordinated communications, lack of firefighters and equipment in the face of ever-worsening climate change and the blazes it fuels. That chain of failures, Vigliotti writes, instantly took on a political dimension, with firefighters rendered as \u201ccollateral in a political war.\u201d The fire is now out, but the gold rush is on: Even as future conflagrations loom, speculators have bought up the ash-covered lots, \u201ccashing in on ruin.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It takes time, Barack Obama warned, for a community to recover from disaster, discarding poor prior practices and experimenting with new ones. Vigliotti\u2019s on-the-ground account suggests that at least some of the Los Angeles fire disaster of 2025 was the result of a rush to rebuild in the same old ways and in the same […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6307,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6306"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}