And the lights of L.A. County
They look like diamonds in the sky …
— Lyle Lovett
As I write this, devastating wind-fed fires have killed at least 25 people and swept through 40,000 acres in the greater Los Angeles area. If you’re looking for a size comparison, that’s equal to a fourth of the acreage of the city of Memphis burned to the ground — an area equal to Downtown, Uptown, and everything inside the beltway. Thousands of people have lost their homes. Hundreds of schools, churches, businesses, studios, and iconic architectural structures are gone. Entire neighborhoods are reduced to ashes.
Los Angeles County officials characterized the fires as a “perfect storm” event in which hurricane-force gusts of up to 100 miles per hour prevented them from deploying aircraft that could have dropped water and fire retardant on the drought-ravaged neighborhoods when the fires first broke out. The combination of the winds, unseasonably dry conditions, and multiple fires breaking out one after another led to the widespread destruction.
But as L.A. firefighters battled the flames, disinformation was spreading like, well, wildfire: One theory pushed by right-wing media was that the blazes were raging because fire-fighting personnel were led by a lesbian fire chief and the department utilized DEI hiring criteria. X account Libs of TikTok, known for spreading anti-LBGTQ rhetoric posted: “DEI will get people k*lled. DEI MUST DIE.” Donald Trump Jr. said that donations the Los Angeles Fire Department sent to Ukraine in 2022 were somehow related to its response to the current fires.
Not to be outdone, the president-elect himself posted a deluge of misinformation on Truth Social, including this: “Governor Gavin Newscum [sic] refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snowmelt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”
And what’s a good tragedy without a trash take from Alex Jones, who posted that President Biden had grounded firefighters and that the fires were being spread as part of a “globalist plot to wage economic warfare”? First Buddy Elon Musk responded to Jones’ tweet in a now-deleted post with one word: “True.”
None of it was true. The level of diversity in L.A. Fire Department personnel is typical of most urban fire departments in the U.S. The Southern California reservoirs were full, above historic levels. Water intended for the city was not diverted to save a fish called the smelt. Some hydrants went dry because they were intended for use against urban fires — houses, buildings in a self-contained area for a limited time — not wild-blown wildfires spreading over many acres for many days.
Janisse Quiñones, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said, “We are fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is an unprecedented kind of event.” Quiñones added that experts have seen wildland fires move into urban areas only in the last 10 to 15 years and that they’re still figuring out how to address it.
“The way that firefighting has traditionally been, there are wildland firefighters and agencies, and then there are urban firefighters and agencies,” she said. “Are we having wildland firefighters fighting fires in urban areas or the reverse? Sometimes the approaches are really different.”
All this brings to mind an interview with Denzel Washington I saw last week. When asked about today’s media, he said: “If you don’t read the newspapers, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you’re misinformed.”
He went on: “What is the long-term effect of too much information? One thing is the need to be first. … We live in a society where it’s just, get it out there, be first! It doesn’t matter if it’s true, who it hurts, who it destroys, just be first. So what a responsibility [the media] have — to tell the truth!”
To which, I would add: What a responsibility you and I have — to seek out the truth, and to learn not to blindly swallow the first piece of information offered, no matter who offers it, no matter how it tickles your confirmation biases. A hot take is seldom the best take.
