The key factor behind the Carolina wildfires

Michael Hiltzik, Tribune News Service

To address the most important point up front: the wildfires currently spreading across North and South Carolina are tragic. Thousands of acres have been burned by hundreds of fires since Saturday, taking property and placing livelihoods at risk. There are no reports of fire-driven deaths, as yet, but evacuations have been ordered and emergency declarations made. Firefighters continue to struggle to bring the blazes under control.

The causes include unusually dry conditions and wind gusts of up to 40 mph. That said, the Carolina fires may have a positive result that will be felt coast to coast, and especially in California they’re likely to quell all that stupid talk about attaching strings to federal wildfire disaster relief. That threat has been made by Trump; his disaster czar, Ric Grenell; House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.); Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a member of that chamber’s GOP leadership; and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), among many others. Also pitching in are members of the right-wing peanut gallery, such as Fox News mouthpieces Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters.

What they’ve tend to have in common is a focus on California policies that had nothing to do with the fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena but have been long-term targets of conservatives and Republicans.

Grenell called for the California Coastal Commission to be “defunded,” for instance. He didn’t explain what that had to do with the fires, but he called its policies “crazy woke left,” whatever that means. (The commission’s authority to regulate real estate development in the coastal zone, thus angering the developers who are among the GOP’s patrons, may have more to do with Grenell’s complaint.)

The others’ points were equally nonsensical. Trump rehearsed his long-discredited claim that California’s water supply has been wasted to serve the interests of the tiny delta smelt, an innocent bystander. Johnson talked of “our concerns with the governance of the state of California,” which he airily blamed for “complicity ... in the scope of disaster.”

Donalds said that “if a state is so grossly mismanaged that the initial disaster is not quickly contained, then we have a responsibility to do common-sense things.” On the CBS program “Face the Nation,” Barrasso asserted that “the policies of the liberal administration” in California “have made these fires worse.”

Before examining the natural disasters that have afflicted these blowhards’ own backyards, it’s proper to note that this isn’t California’s first encounter with political shortsightedness on this majestic scale.

In 1905, a flawed canal cut on the banks of the Colorado River produced a massive flood that threatened to destroy the Imperial Valley, which already was producing crops worth $2 million a year. By the mid-1920s, the valley’s efforts had placed a bill before Congress to pay for a high dam on the Colorado to hold back any further flood threats while providing water for irrigation. The measure ran into opposition from President Coolidge and his Treasury secretary, the multimillionaire Andrew Mellon, who thought private enterprise should take on the task. Across the Southeast, farmers and their elected officials raised further objections. Cotton growers objected to irrigating 1 million acres in the Imperial Valley, corn farmers objected to a million more acres of corn, and wheat growers to a million competing acres of wheat. But then nature intervened, with a massive flood in 1927 that killed 246 residents of the Mississippi River valley and breached levees along a thousand-mile stretch of the river. Rep. Phil Swing, who had been elected by Imperial Valley voters with the express goal of bringing the dam measure past the goal line, made sure that nobody overlooked the parallels between the 1927 flood and the disaster at home.

Trainloads of New Orleans business and civic leaders came to Washington to plead for relief.“I took on the New Orleans men,” Swing recalled, “putting to them again and again whether they could see any difference between the Mississippi’s flood threat to their people and the Colorado River flood threat to the people of the Imperial Valley.”

Two landmark federal measures were born as a result: the Flood Control Act of 1928, which created a levee construction program costing an unprecedented $300 million, and the Boulder Canyon Project Act, which authorized the construction of a $165-million high dam on the Colorado, eventually to be christened Hoover Dam. That brings us back to the present day, and the old adage, “What goes around comes around.” Republican politicians, to be fair, aren’t unanimous about calling for strings to be attached to disaster relief for California.

Among the holdouts are many members of the North and South Carolina delegations, in part because the most recent hurricanes to sweep across the region killed 200 people and caused more than $10 billion in damage — and that happened only last September. “I would ask those folks to put themselves in the same position as people of western North Carolina,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said of colleagues who have raised the prospect of withholding aid to California. “ You got to be consistent on disaster supplement, period.” Congress passed a$100-billion disaster relief bill after the hurricanes, no strings attached.

But other Republicans either have blinders on or short memories. Consider Barrasso’s home state, Wyoming. “Billion-dollar natural disasters are up 360% in Wyoming over the last 20 years,” according to a study funded by LendingTree and cited by LaramieLive.com. The state is especially vulnerable to wildfires, including a wind-blown fire in 2020 that scorched 177,000 acres, destroyed 66 properties and threatened Cheyenne’s drinking water with contamination.

Louisiana, Johnson’s home state? Since 2004, it’s been hit by 13 hurricanes as well as floods requiring federal assistance. If Johnson were to stick with his insistence that “governance” were to be a factor in the disbursement of federal assistance, observes Louisiana journalist Greg LaRose, the state might “no longer be entitled to federal assistance after hurricanes because state policy has allowed the fossil fuel industry to carve up its coastal marshes, making south Louisiana more susceptible to storm damage.”

The Census Bureau reported that Louisiana had the highest percentage of residents displaced by natural disasters of any state in 2023 — about 8.3%, compared with the national average of 1.6%.

Florida? it might as well be called the “hurricane state,” with the damage caused by more than 20 hurricanes requiring federal aid since 2004, including last year’s Hurricane Milton, which brought some $1.5 billion in federal assistance in its aftermath.

Louisiana and Florida ranked first and second in the level of direct assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government agencies from 2003 through 2024, according to an aid tracker compiled by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Louisiana received $47 billion and Florida received $28 billion. California was in the middle of the pack, at $7.6 billion. Every single state received some level of federal assistance. Barrasso, Donalds and Johnson didn’t reply to questions I sent through their congressional offices about their advocacy of attaching strings to assistance.