The grim lesson of the devastating wildfires in California over the past week, which turned my community into ruins, is clear: private services work, and public services do not.
I live in Pacific Palisades. My house is the last one standing on the corner. There is rubble in every direction. The streets along the route my wife and I used to walk in the evening are a post-apocalyptic scene. Every beautiful house we admired is destroyed; every child our kids played with is gone.
A mile away, the center of town — which we call the “village” — is a similar scene of destruction. The stately Business Block, a hundred-year-old landmark, is now a haunted, blackened façade. The mom-and-pop shops and the boutiques are a smoldering pile of bricks and twisted metal.
Yet across the street, the ornate Palisades Village mall, owned by billionaire Rick Caruso, is still standing. The lights are on and the upscale stores appear ready to open for business.
Caruso reportedly built his mall with new, fire-resistant materials. More important, he used private firefighters.
For days after the fire had subsided, giant water tanker trucks stood parked outside the mall. Caruso knew, before we did, that the City of Los Angeles would not protect us, nor would the county or the state. After all, he himself had been the commissioner of the Department of Water and Power, forty years ago. He knew the system was not ready for disaster.
Caruso is not alone. There are some fifteen private firefighting companies in town at the moment. And some private security companies, not formally trained in firefighting, were able to protect the properties they monitor by spraying the homes and gardens with water throughout the night, defying orders to evacuate.
While residents are grateful to the police and firefighters who did their best, there has never been a more stark contrast between private and public.
The Wall Street Journal — no longer delivered to my address — has an online report on how private firefighting, and private fire hydrants, performed in Palisades and Malibu during the fire.
The verdict: a stunning success. Expensive, yes, but effective.
Caruso knew it. He wanted to share his knowledge with the rest of us: that is why he ran for mayor in 2022. He lost to Democratic Party apparatchik Karen Bass by ten points. Voters regret it, but it is too late for that.
I still have a house. That is partly because of sheer luck; partly because a row of ficus trees on my fence shielded my home from burning embers; and partly because of neighbors who apparently hosed down my burning fence. But it is also because I could check on my house after media were let into the area.
My fence was on fire, as was my neighbor’s, and his trees. I had to use buckets of water from the gutter to put out the fires. Our own private firefighting service.
I have spent the last ten days documenting the fire. I am one of the only locals in town, at least during the daylight hours. Police and firefighters have asked me for various kinds of help because I am the only one on the ground who knows the town.
I have sent my neighbors photographs and videos of the ruined homes they are barred from visiting, for sentimental reasons and insurance claims. It has been a brutal experience. At times, I have cried while doing it.
The landscape has a haunting beauty. The views of the mountains and the ocean are just as dramatic as they have always been, but now they are framed by steel skeletons, lonesome chimney stacks, and burned-out cars.
There are occasional images of hope: the rainbow that appears in the spray of a firefighter’s hose; a Buddha that sits serenely, buried up to the neck in ash; the soaring seagull logo of the local public school, a tile mosaic that survived the blaze.
But I wonder whether we will ever be able to return here. My son is yearning to go home; he begs me to take him along on my rounds, which the police and the National Guard would never allow.
He does not yet comprehend the reality: he is one of two children, in a fourth-grade class of 23, who still has a home. His friends are far away — in distant suburbs, or even out of state. By the time children fill these streets again, his boyhood will be a memory.
I have a friend in South Africa who is roughly the same age as I am. He lives in Johannesburg, where public services are in a state of collapse. The streets are filled with potholes; the traffic lights do not work; the power is often out; the water is sporadic; and the police are corrupt or incompetent.
And yet he is very happy. He told me why: he has his own generator; he has his own private security; and he has his own borehole. If you can afford all that, you are fine.
The abandonment of public services for private services is a sign of Third World decline. We have already seen it in our education system, though there are enough exceptional public schools — like the one that burned down next to my house — for many of us to have believed, until now, that the rot could be contained.
The Black Lives Matter riots killed that illusion. The deliberate sabotage of public safety by a governing political party, in retrospect, was the final blow.
I still believe in the future of Pacific Palisades. But when I attended a town hall on Thursday night, where L.A. officials congratulated themselves on what a fine job they had done, my stomach turned. Not one took responsibility, though the county fire chief at least apologized to residents who had lost their homes.
They all should have resigned. They won’t, because they don’t actually work for the public. Not in Third World California.
The future here, if there is one, is private.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
