Michael Shellenberger
speaker
1,228 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 18 Feb
Michael Shellenberger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Like there was like zero doubt among anybody that knows anything about fire in Los Angeles, that the fires were coming, the fires were coming. So then like the governor should have been there, the mayor should have been there. Literally, it's all about prevention, in part because by the time the fire trucks are having to weave their way up those little hills of the Pacific Palisades, it's over.
I mean, so the other thing to keep in mind is that— Okay, well, so that's the first thing, is that they just have to mobilize in advance.
It's why it's so beautiful. Beautiful places are dangerous. That's exactly right. So— So that's like the main event. I mean, because I knew, my first thing I did is I was like, look, they're going to come out and say it was inevitable. And that's just a total lie. Because of global warming. Yeah, because of global warming and, I mean, anyway, there's so many places to go here.
But just on the most practical sense, they knew the fires were coming and they didn't do anything. The mayor leaves the country. She flies to Ghana after having promised not to leave the country, by the way, as mayor. She's traveled at least six times out of the country and she promised not to travel. Why is it important the mayor be there? Aren't there other people in charge?
Because it's a command. It's an emergency command situation. She has to be able to issue orders and to, you know, waive regulations and make things happen. The governor has to be doing that. They didn't do that. They should have had, by the way, they should get the fire trucks up into the fire areas. Right. They can also start, you know, they can start clearing brush.
They can start, you know, but literally they could just be in those neighborhoods just sitting there for days at a time waiting for the fires to happen, put them out as soon as they happen. I'm not saying that they would have been able to prevent all the fires from happening, but you remember like the big fire in 1993, I think it was Laguna Beach.
or maybe it was Malibu as well, but it was like 700 homes. We're at 10,000, you know, structures at this point, homes and buildings gone, you know, 200,000 people evacuated. I mean, it's like, it's madness. It never needed to get to that level. Okay, so that's the first thing. They just needed to have been there before the fire started.
And they didn't do that because the politicians are just, they're focused on themselves. They're focused on the next political office they wanna get. So that was the first thing. The second thing is the water runs out, right?
So that was the, and then you hear people go, oh, well, there's nothing you can do because like once the homes are burned down, like the water lines, you can see the pictures, you know, the water like will be spilling out, you know, of the homes. And so that lowered the water pressure.
that was a total lie there is something called the santa ines water reservoir which is the potable water meaning the drinking water that also goes into the fire hydrant system because the fire hydrant you know the the fire hydrant system is the drinking water system it's the same thing there's the exact same system that reservoir was empty and it was the second largest of the 10 potable water reservoirs that serve la county
there let me make one distinction here because there's actually two kinds of reservoirs there's the reservoir with the snow melt water these really big lakes basically um and then there's the and that's that's the um unpurified water and then those and then they purify it and then they feed into these reservoirs where they store the water for for all sorts of reasons for emergencies so that is an absolute crime that that santa ines reservoir
Why? Because first of all, it's right next to the Pacific Palisades. So for people that don't know, Pacific Palisades, of course, is like right near, it's on your way to Malibu. It's like the last big neighborhood before you get to the- And they're Palisades. They're over the water. Yeah. That's right. And so they have a reservoir.
You look at the Google Maps and you look at where the Santinese Reservoir is, it's right next to like a few thousand feet from Pacific Palisades. And it's above, it's really high up. And so if you had had water coming from that, the firefighters would have had plenty of water. It would not have, they would have had the water pressure, even if you had lost some homes and had those, the water out.
So, I mean, so two major reasons.
um failures the first was the failure to aggressively respond days in advance even though they had very clear warnings the second was the reservoir was empty one reporter has reported that the that the uh the firefighters had not been warned by the los angeles department of water and power that that reservoir was empty if that's true that's just additionally scandalous but
One of the things that we think probably happened is that they had been required to build, have a cover for the clean, for the Santinese Reservoir, which is the potable water, the cover to prevent the water from being contaminated in the old days, like the 50s and 60s. You know, birds would poop in those reservoirs and they would just put a bunch of chlorine in them.
And then we decided, well, that the water was still had a lot of, you know, it still was not not particularly clean. So we wanted to be cleaner. So you just put a cover over it, which is a kind of plastic or rubber lining. it appears that there was a tear in that. They had to repair it. They should not have removed that water ever during a fire season.
If you need to make that repair, you do need to drain right before you do the repair, but you would make that drain. The people that I interviewed said, said, look, it would take days, if not a couple of weeks to repair it. It was empty for at least a year. So it was sitting there for a year.
And the person I interviewed who works as a senior executive at a different water utility in California said, if we had any of our reservoirs empty, we would be super nervous the entire time. And you would also then have backup water systems.
so it's like any catastrophe you know you just have multiple errors occurring in advance and at the moment um and then the fires and then the actual ignitions you can't completely prevent ignitions but you can significantly reduce them one would be to not allow people to camp outside all over uh los angeles uh los angeles county with
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