On Friday, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough blamed the government’s “complete failure” to protect the homes of Los Angeles residents from wildfires this week.
Scarborough said, “Happy Friday, if we can even say that, with a view of hell in Los Angeles. You know, because of the proximity of where I lived in Pensacola, Florida, I went to Louisiana every day after Katrina and Lived in Mississippi. There are a lot of similarities here, the levees that were part of the city’s hurricane protection program resulted in budget cuts and subsequent flooding. Due to delays the project was only 60-90 percent completed.
He further said, “We do not know the exact reasons for the complete failure of the government to protect these houses. I don’t think we can say that it’s just the smell. We don’t know what it is. But I think it’s going to be like Hurricane Katrina. I mean, infrastructure has been cut. You can’t tell it’s Karen Bass. You can’t say it’s Gavin Newsom. This has been the trend for 30 years. There have been cuts to infrastructure across America. You have climate change, so you have wildfires spreading into urban areas. They are kind of like fighting the final war. But I, the more time we spend in this, the more I think about how New Orleans didn’t invest in their levy system, how they didn’t invest in critical infrastructure, and people are dying because of it. Went. It’s hard to hear people in one of the richest cities in the world saying, ‘Oh, we don’t have enough water to protect people’s homes.'”
“There are a few things happening,” Scarborough said. You have urban sprawl, where people are moving from neighborhoods to places they’ve never been before. Areas where wildfires are more prevalent than urban fires. Then you have climate change. With all that, you have a community, I think, a municipality, that has not adjusted to the realities of those dramatic, radical changes. Like New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, this should be a wake-up call, belatedly, not only to Los Angeles and California, but to politicians, local and state, across America. You will have to fight a new battle. With urban sprawl, with climate change, with people moving into flood zones, with people moving into areas where forest fires happen, something is going to happen. This happened with Katrina. “It happened right here.”
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