January 9, 2025 • 49 mins
Special overnight fire coverage.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Can't. I am six forty. You're listening to the John
Cobel podcast on the iHeartRadio app. Welcome to our all
night fire coverage. Yes, it's me, and this is not
a recording. This is live John Cobelt here. Obviously this
is a special occasion because I can't. I haven't been
up in this hour working. I think there was only
(00:23):
one time I did an all night show for one night,
and it was a New Year's Eve show playing top
forty hits years ago. It's like a special taking requests
playing the hits. I volunteers gonna be a little opposite
of that tonight, right exactly. So this is now the
second time in my whole life. You know we should
we should call ken. Yeah, we should make them live
(00:45):
on the air. Hey, I'm working. What are you doing?
We got we got a catastrophe going on. Are you sleeping?
Move it? Yeah? So I'm gonna be on till three.
What happens after three? They find nil nil Savandro? Okay,
uh So he'll be on from three until five, and
then the normal schedule Amy King, Bill Handle and then
(01:05):
we're going to come back in the afternoon. I took
a nap for three hours eight o'clock, I just found
an empty bedroom in the house. They're all empty now,
but the kid's gone and fell asleep and had I
set an alarm at eleven o'clock. If I had sent
the alarm, I still may have been asleep because I
dropped my wife crazy because my wife's up all night.
And then Debora Mark, she's up all night. They actually
(01:27):
were texting each other two nights ago because neither one
of them sleeps, and both of them get pissed off
that I can fall asleep and wake up. And I
always say, it's like when it's time to go to sleep.
I always think, whatever the problems are going on, whatever
the issues are, is there anything I can do about
it now? And the answer every night is no, There's
nothing I can do. Therefore I'm going to sleep. I
(01:49):
can't do anything until tomorrow morning. Now. Last night we
did watch some fire coverage because the Hollywood Hills fire.
What are they calling that thing? The sunset fire? Right?
It's confusing to me. I screamed about this for many,
many years. Just call the fire by the name of
(02:13):
the town where it starts or the neighborhood where it starts, right,
like the Palisades fire. They call it the Palisades fire.
That makes sense to me. The Eaton fire gets me confused.
That's out Alta Dina. Call it the Outa Dina fire,
even if it's a couple of miles off. Just it
makes it easy. I don't know why the officials do this.
And then we have the Sunset fire, which is the
Hollywood Hills, which looked worse than I guess it's turned
(02:37):
out to be. I mean, the overhead coverage last night
had it looked like it was vast. But unless it's
an old acreage report I heard on the drive in,
maybe it is worse than So we'll see what that's about.
And then you've got there's another fire out there somewhere.
(02:57):
I think there were four major ones last night. Karen
Bastow got most of the attention from us. In the afternoon,
I tell you what we're gonna do. We're gonna play
some new stuff. We've got a lot of news clips
to play for your entertainment, and some of them are new.
(03:19):
Some of them is from our show we did yesterday
afternoon because we had Rick Caruso on, it'll probably play
a whole Caruso interview later on as well, because he
went on television last night and made a tour of
the TV stations and was ripping on LA government because
(03:41):
there's really no excuse for firefighters to show up in
the Palisades and run out of water. You could defend
government politicians fifty thousand different ways if that's what you're into,
but not on this one. There is no way that,
over the many decades that in modern life, LA has
(04:02):
been dealing with fires, that we should have a situation
where after seventeen hours the water runs out. All right.
Pacific Palisades may be the most remote part of LA
in a way, you have to go to the far
northwest quarter, and it is in a hilly region, especially
(04:23):
when you get up to the Pacific Highlands. It's adjacent
to Malibu, but in no way is it not very
close to modern Los Angeles civilization. And there is no excuse.
And again I'm never going to criticize the firefighters on
the front line, but it's it's management, and it's city politicians,
(04:43):
city bureaucrats, it's the people who make these decisions, their
decisions on how they're going to spend the money. And
they failed us, and they failed the people in Pacific
Palisades and sitting last night watching TV coverage and my
wife is on the phone and texting with a number
of and I said, how many people do we know
who lost the house? And I think she gave me
(05:06):
about ten different people because Palisades is adjacent to where
we live. And you know, over the years we had
three kids. You get to know a lot of parents
in three different classes. You get to meet a lot
of people through our kids, various sports teams and other
activities and friends of friends and all that people that
we work with. And it's like, oh, she kept going on,
(05:27):
it's like her two and him too, and oh it's
a big list. And the aerial shots. Yeah, it's funny
because all like I'm looking, we got all the TV
channels up, which normally like freaked me out. There's seven TVs.
This was the This is the major contribution of Garyan
(05:48):
Shannon Is. They introduced seven televisions. I don't know why.
I mean, they're out at nine in the morning. What's
going on at night in the morning? You need seven TVs?
You usually tell me to come in and turn all
of them off except for two. Oh, I know, because
there's too much flashing. Usually watch you know, the two
cable networks in case there's something spectacular around the world
going on, but you know, to see during the daytime,
(06:10):
it's all really really stupid talk shows. Yeah, I think
Gary likes to watch The view Is. Yeah, it was
yeah a download. Yeah, I think he's into that show
on three different screens. So you know, I come in
and everything's flashing at me, and it's like, you know,
I'm gonna have an epileptic fit here. I can't take
all this flashing, so we turn them off. But now
this is this is quite the array here. It's like
(06:33):
seven different views of all the fires. Yeah. Meanwhile, we
don't have any chairs in the studio. I know, we
don't have chairs. We don't have a shade for the
back window, so we get a big glare in the
afternoon and I can't see the screens anyway. In any event,
we're gonna play some clips because we got off the
air at four and Karen Bass took over a press
(06:54):
conference at five o'clock. Now you know her story and
by the way, we're getting we're getting embarrassing headlines around
the country. I mean, just go to back to the
Palisades for a second.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
That is.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
I saw some aerial footage, And what I was going
to say is understandably the new stations right now are
covering what's happening immediately in the present, which they should,
and so that's why you have seven screens and seven
different views of the current fires. But the Palisades, and
I don't know if the cameras just can't get in
(07:28):
there right now because the police are blocking the media.
There are some aerial shots the massive devastation, like in
some neighborhoods where it looks like every single home is gone,
and in some of the business district it seemed as
if every single business is gone. And I guess if
(07:49):
you don't live near the Palisades, maybe you've only been
there once in a while on your way to the beach.
It's one thing, but since it's next door to me
and it's a place that my wife and family and
I we go frequently. You know, every block in the
commercial district has, you know, some kind of meeting, has
(08:12):
some kind of place you know. You know, that's the
grow a grocery store we go to, that's a restaurant
we go to frequently, and over and over and over again,
and the idea that all of that is gone is
just it's so disorienting. And for the people in these neighborhoods,
(08:36):
it's not just they lost their house. They lost they
lost where they go out to eat. They lost the
grocery store, they lost you know, the barbershop. They maybe
lost the doctor's office. They lost their neighbors, they lost
where their kids friends live, they lost their school. It's
(08:56):
at the whole life is gone and it's never going
to come back. In the same way, people are going
to move to other places. Some people might not rebuild,
some people might sell. A lot of the businesses are
never going to come back. I saw this after the
stupid COVID lockdown. How many businesses closed and to this
day the storefronts are empty and they're not and they
(09:19):
never went back. And there's you know, parts of Santa Monica,
parts of La along Wilshire ghost town, and the real
businesses never came back. Maybe they have some you know,
cheap nail or tattoo shops, but I don't know why
nail and tattoo shops brought up. But you know, the
the the the the the idiotic lockdown did tremendous permanent damage.
(09:42):
Amazon has done tremendous permanent damage to neighborhoods, and now
here we have this this fire disaster where everything is gone.
I mean some people had no insurance. Do you know
in one zip code in the Palisades, UH State Farm
canceled seventy percent of the insurance policies just a few
(10:03):
months ago, and there was nowhere no one else to
go to to buy new insurance. I think we're gonna
be hearing about that in the coming days. How many
people are uninsured. And there's when we start seeing the
video and we start hearing from the people who are
suffering and the people without insurance. It's it's, you know,
(10:26):
it's almost like the worst there's even I don't know
the worst is losing your neighborhood, but it's it's going
to be bad to hear all these stories. And well,
here here's stories from around various newspapers that I was
looking at this evening in the La Times. Let's see
fire hydrants ran dry as Pacific Palisades burned. City officials
(10:49):
blame tremendous demand. No, it's not just tremendous demand. It
is lack of investment in preparation. It's irresponsibility by the
City of La. What they should do is stand up
and say we were widely irresponsible. We have spent way
(11:10):
too much money on homeless people, illegal aliens, criminals. What
we should have done is spent it protecting the people.
Because you knew. I think every neighborhood in LA, at
least the people, the normal people, know that your time
is going to come. At some point, there's going to
be a wildfire that affects your neighborhood or very nearby.
(11:34):
It's just a matter of time. You go along the
whole stretch of the Santa Monica Mountains on both sides,
the foothills, all the way down the two ten, all
the way down along the one on one, and in
other places as well, and you know one day it's
going to be your town that's going to get hit.
Here's another thing, a healthscape in all directions. That's the
(11:58):
Wall Street Journal. The devastating fires that ignited crisis and
chaos in Los Angeles. Let's see New York Post. This
is one of my favorites. How years of corruption and
mismanagement led to La running out of water in the
middle of the Palisades wildfire. Yes, a lot of flattering
(12:19):
headlines here New York Times. In the Palisades, an evacuation
disaster was years in the making. Some Pacific Palisades residents
said the community had long asked for more detailed fire
preparation plans. When a fire raged through the community, gridlock ensued.
(12:42):
New York Times again raging wildfires in LA. Firefighters scrammling
to fight the worst fire in LA history with limited
water supply and strong winds. Limited water supply, It's just
it's unfathomable how that could be. You know, a seriously,
you look, you look to the west, less than a
(13:03):
mile away, but a tenth of a mile away. Got
the Pacific Ocean. It's it's it's not outrageous, it's it's
not absurd to say, wow, we've got this whole ocean.
Maybe at some point somebody should have built a desalination
plant and we could use all this water. I mean,
that's what you would do in a uh an irrational country.
(13:27):
Uh you would you would say, hey, wow, big big,
gigantic ocean out there, the largest one in the world,
the largest one in the whole solar system, and we
don't have one pipe to desalinate and and and use
for you know, drinking water and to put out fires.
Since the fire start right across the street from the ocean,
(13:48):
it's kind of astonishing. Uh, what is it? It's now
fifty five years since we landed on the moon, and
in fifty five years we could not build a pipe
to cross pch to go from the ocean to Pacific Palisades.
I don't know, huh. See National Review, mayor out of
(14:08):
the country. As Los Angeles burns, residents plead for help. Boy?
Is that a devastating headlines? Somebody we should everybody should
blow this up, print this out and send it to
Karen Bass. Mayor out of the country. As Los Angeles burns,
See what else we got here? Sunset Boulevard in ruins.
(14:30):
Fire's massive scale comes into focus in the Pacific Palisades.
That's the La Times. But you know, the La Times
was always cheerleading for Karen Bass and the city council
and the rest of these buffoons. Say hey, we got
something from the Washington Post. Much of Pacific Pacific Palisades
neighborhood is in Los Angeles is gone. As homes burned,
(14:53):
residents tried to douse fires with water from swimming pools.
So let's say we've got the LA Times, the New
York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the
National Review, just terrible, terrible headlines and they're all true,
and much of it is about the response because the
fires were given to happen. Let's see her we got
(15:15):
with California Globe, LA Mayor Karen Bass heavily criticized for
delayed return from trip to Ghana with historic wildfire spreading.
That's nice, boy, do we look like a bunch of idiots.
There's not going to be a whole lot of sympathy
from people around the country. They're going to say, it's like,
why did you why'd you elect her? Exactly? Why would
(15:37):
she take off for Africa right before a firestorm? A
well predicted firestorm and windstorm. Two thousand structures destroyed her
damage La Times and so on. So let's let's start.
Let's see what she asks to say for herself. Five
o'clock there was a press conference Mayor Karen Bass. Oh, listen,
(16:01):
typ number one here. What do you think she's talking about?
Climate change? Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I just remember two years ago when we were here
for a first ever weather event in Los Angeles, a
potential hurricane. And I think we all understand in our
city the due to climate change, we're going to continue
to see very unusual weather events. And this is a
historic event considering the strength of the winds.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Climate change. Huh. And I remember when this fad began
really an earnest. It's been around for decades, but about
ten years ago they really pushed climate change causes everything
right in order to try to shame us into giving
up our modern life. You drink too much water, you
(16:50):
drive too much. You shouldn't have a lawn. You know,
you shouldn't have a driveway because having a driveway means
you have a car and then you're driving. You shouldn't
have that either. In fact, you should all live.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
What is it?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
The idea is that the fifteen minute city that we're
going to live in a little tiny box apartment over
a string of stores on the bottom floor of your
apartment building. And in those stores you can buy everything
you need. And then you take your little bicycle or
your tricycle and bike down a block or two and
you go to work, and then you go back at
(17:21):
the end of the day. That's the fifteen minute city.
Then nobody has to drive anywhere, and nobody's entitled to
have you know, vast sprawling space like a fifty by
one hundred foot front yard, anything like that. Not supposed
to have swimming pool. You're not supposed to have plants,
remember right, drop resistant plants. Everybody have ugly cactuses for
(17:42):
a garden or for a front lawn. And it became
and every time, every time it turned on the TV,
somebody scolding you, some public officialists scolding you. You got
a plant, a drought resistant lawn, and you look at
it's like, that's a lot of ugly cactuses, isn't it. Well,
it's because they haven't built, you know, a reservoir in
(18:04):
the last fifty years. They never built a pipe to
a desalination plant to get the ocean water. They diverted
hundreds of billions of gallons out into the Pacific Ocean
to save one lousy fish or another. Says man made.
You got forty million people in the state. You got
to build the infrastructure. You got to live with it,
(18:25):
got to build a water system. You got to grab
all the available water because we want to live and
you know, you got you got to build a freeway
system so we can drive. You got to how you
drives in order to have a thriving economy, so we
all work. We're not all going to bike around carrying
our little reasonable grocery bags. And these people made all
(18:50):
their policy decisions all these decades, all these decades, they
made these policy decisions based on how can we curtail
human behavior, How can we limit human expression? How can
we limit the desire of humans to live in a
comfortable setting, because otherwise they're offending the planets. So of
(19:11):
course she's gonna blame it on climate change. Although most
of the fires that we had in in the teens,
nineteen seventeen eighteen, they were caused largely by power companies
who never spent the money on putting the power lines
down below the ground. And it's funny, ever since they
started putting power lines below ground, none of those power
(19:33):
lines have started any fires. I don't know how that happened. Yeah,
it's like locking up prisoners. You're not got prisoners. Amazing,
the prisoners can't commit any more crime. And when you
put power lines in the prison underground, the power lines
can't fall and burn you know entire towns, hundreds of
thousands of acres can't happen, but they everyone has spent
(19:53):
the money on that because the corporate bastards that ran
these power companies had to pay themselves millions and millions
of dollars. They had to keep their stock price inflated,
so they weren't going to spend money on putting power
lines under ground. So the fires don't start. We start
most of the fires. I'm going to see how many
these fires. How many you think we're started by homeless people?
(20:15):
What do you think the over under on that is,
how many you think we're start by crazy pyromaniacs. It's people.
Climate change doesn't start fire. Lightning strikes could start fire,
but those have been around since the beginning of the planet.
But there were no lightning strikes in La County? Were
there no at least started by lightning? Start by humans
(20:37):
one way or the other. Let's see, we got a
question here from La Times reporter David Zaneiser to Karen
Bass about Rick Caruso criticizing her for being in Ghatta
when this whole firestorm broke out. Play cut two.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Well, let me just say that we are actively fighting
this fire, and this is a time for vigilance and action,
not speculation. This is a time for Angelinos to come together,
unite it to protect themselves and their families and also
each other.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Right stop there? So I hate when they pull that card.
Don't you hate that? This is a time to come together.
This is not a time to play the blame game.
This is not the time for finger pointing. Yes it is.
This is exactly the time, because everybody is angry, everybody's
in shock. Nobody can believe that their lives have been destroyed,
that a huge piece of Los Angeles has has burned
(21:37):
is now an ashes and you look around and go,
how's going on? How'd this happen? The fire department didn't
have enough order? Really really? Oh, Karen bass Cutt, you
know seventeen million dollars from the fire department. Oh why
why would you do that? I think they asked that
question later as well, play some more.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
So, what we are seeing is the result of eight
months of negligible rain and wins that have not been
seen in La in at least fourteen years. It's a
deadly combination. And I've been in constant contact with our
fire commanders on the ground and our partners at every
level of government. I've spoken to President Biden, President Biden's
(22:20):
chief of Staff, Secretary of Majorcis from Homeland Security.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Stop stop President Biden. Seriously, she says that, And I've
got to believe that most people at home are laughing
or putting their head in their hands. Oh really, you
spoke to him, and how'd that go. We have a
have a tape in that conversation. I'd like to hear
(22:45):
how he what he mumbled back, if he remembered there
was a California. Yeah, yeah, sorry, Oh yeah, that's what
you get. Play some more.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Secretary Marry Toddman from Housing and Urban Development, Senator Padilla,
Governor Newsom, all.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Right, it's not it's not there. And she had all
these conversations, and what does that produce? What does that produce?
Talk to Alejandra may Orcus, the guy who lied to
us for four years that the border is secure. What
did he have to say? Exactly? But the fire didn't
burn the Palisades Palisade didn't burn down. I think that
was his quote. Now the fire had ever happened, like
(23:29):
the border is closed. But what would you talk to
him about? What would you talk to news about exactly.
I don't understand this. I what can these guys do? Now?
How hard is it do you think for the Palisades
people and everybody else in how Ta Dina and anybody
who's had their homes to short by fire? How hard
(23:50):
is it going to be to rebuild this these how homes,
this neighborhood? How much red tape, how much bureaucracy, how
how difficult is it to get a permit? I know
a friend of mine who fought with the LA bureaucracy
for about a year just to get a permit to
expand his garage. Seriously, I meet with him for lunch
(24:15):
about once a month, and every month for a year
there was an update on how he's still fighting the
government to expand a garage. What do you think it's
going to be like for these people if they if
they stick around? All right, So we are going to
(24:35):
take a break, and when we come back, we have
more Karen Bass. Oh, we've got the really good stuff,
all right. We got David Well, we just played the
Zandheuser thing. Then we got an Eric Leonard clip from
a former KFI newsman now NBC four reporter Eric Leonard
(24:56):
made Karen Bass do a dance with another pointed question,
and then we'll play the David Blevins clips that we
played on the show yesterday afternoon. It is now yesterday afternoon.
He's from Sky News, British guy and the British guys
they don't worship politicians the way idiot American journalists do.
And this was entertaining because he's questioning Karen Bass about
(25:19):
whether she owes an apology for being in Ghana while
the fires were happening. So we'll do that coming up.
You're listening to John Cobel's on demand from KFI, A
six all night coverage of the fires in southern California.
John Cobelt here, I took a three hour and app
(25:40):
very excited. This is fun. Now it doesn't matter what
I do. There's no pressure. I know there's a lot
of people listening, and since we're on at night, I
know we've got people listening probably in the western third
of the country, all the way to the Rocky Mountains.
Sometimes the signal bounces into the Midwest. So if you're
(26:01):
listening because you're a ghoul, you heard and saw all
the headlines and video of the California hellscape, and you're wondering,
is it really that bad here? Yes, it's really that bad. Yes,
we are run by idiots that destructive. Everything you hear
is true. This is not just a media caricature. This
(26:21):
is actually the way we have to live with the
people who run this place. And we are going to
talk further about that issue after one o'clock. After one
o'clock in the morning, we got Bill A. Saley. Look
at this. Nobody sleeps anymore. I think I'm the last
guy who sleeps a night. Everybody seems to be up,
like you're up in a wake. You don't seem to
have any problem, Erica, No, I'm all right. I know.
(26:41):
I know my wife was up when I left. I'm
sure Debra's up. They're probably listening. Yeah, So anyway, Bill
is Saley to come on and we'll talk about all
the bad decisions that Gavin Newsom has made over the
years and Jerry Brown has made over the years regards water, because,
(27:02):
in case you haven't heard, the La Fire Department ran
out of water in the Pacific Palisades while fighting the fire.
If you wondered why you were watching the Palisades burn
last night, and nobody was putting out the fires in
certain neighborhoods. Not the fault of the firefighters. They weren't
given the water because we have been run by idiots.
(27:25):
I hate to be repetitive, but there's no other way
to describe it. There's no defense for this. And Mayor
Karen Bass, fresh from her Africa trip, she landed here
and held a press conference yesterday afternoon, and one of
her questionnaires was our friend Eric Leonard from NBC four,
(27:47):
let's listen to cut three well.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
I am confident that it did not. I will call
up a representative from the fire department to address that.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
But I stop, We'll start it again. I should have
set it up. I forgot. He's asking about the budget
cuts because she did cut over seventeen million dollars Patrick
Sun Chong, publisher at the time, since it's twenty three million,
but the fire department not having enough resources. So he's
(28:17):
asking whether the budget cuts had a role here in
what happened right now? You play it well, I am
confident that it did not.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
I will call up a representative from the fire department
to address that. But I will also say that within
this fiscal year LAFD actually would go above what was
allocated on July first?
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Would you?
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Did you want to make a comment.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
So, good evening, Jacob Robbie, PIO LAFD. So when we discussed,
as a fire chief discussed earlier, this is an absolutely
unprecedented event. We have another fire that just broke out.
Any fire department, even our size, is stressed in, which
is why we call in our mutual aid partners our
(29:03):
additional resources. Of course, we can always use more resources,
which is why we ask for more resources, because we
always want to be the most prepared we possibly can.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Stop. Stop, stop, stop, Oh, the spokes soul. What's this
guy's name? Adam Jacob Robbie, Jacob Robbie, Jacob Robbie, the PIO,
it's the public information officer. So the guy identifies himself
with seven letters, p IO of LAFD and Taren Bass
doesn't have the guts to confront the question, so you
(29:35):
get the spokes stooge to answer the question and shower
you with with a lot of the alphabet. I'm the
PIO the LAFD, and of course we'd want more resources.
Here's the thing. They have to explain why, And I'm
going to round off numbers here, why you would spend
(29:57):
eight hundred million dollars on a big city fire department
and but one point three billion dollars on failed homeless programs.
And this goes on every year. Eight hundred million for fire,
one point three billion for homeless. Which is an interesting
decision because the homeless in twenty twenty three started about
(30:21):
fourteen thousand fires in LA So you pay more money
to fund the people who start the fires and less
money to the people who put out the fires. This
is the question that I would ask Karen Bass if
(30:42):
she ever had the nerve to come in here. You
explain to me, why give an extra half a billion
dollars to the people who start the fires a half
a billion less dollars to the people who put them out.
But there's nobody in public life, in the media or
(31:05):
other politicians who connect all these dots. I bet you
you didn't know this was going on. You people living
in Colorado listening in Hawaii. Yeah, this is what it's
like here. But homeless get a half a billion dollars
more for starting the fires. You wonder why, they say again,
I'm gonna keep asking this because nobody else wants to
(31:28):
had these fires start. I mean, it's got to be
a human cause one way or the other. Continue with
this non answer because we don't know what these wins
are going to do. This is something that we have
not seen.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
In my sixteen years in LAFD and five years and
another fire department, I've never seen wins that made it
to the Pacific Ocean turned around and went back up
the canyon. So this is not something that any fire
department can be prepared for. And we always want to
have more resources, and we're always going to ask the
mayor for more resources for that.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
And you know that in the last six months since
the Christal years, again, has there been training.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
That wasn't done, preparations that were it made?
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Because you're looking down, I'm not going to be able
to speak on the fire chief on that aspect of it.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
So I'm going to defer to Chief Proley on that.
So Beast defers to the PIO, who defers to the chief.
Nobody has any answers. Oh, I've never seen wind flight.
So in all these years, you didn't have all this
complex computer modeling. I mean, how many great universities do
(32:36):
we have in California? Right, we got USCA, we got UCLA,
We've got Stanford, We've got Berkeley, the whole uc system. Right,
there's got to be various science departments with massive computers
that could model how this happens. The Santa and the
Wins are are his oldest time. Fires are his oldest time.
(32:57):
I read, in fact, I've read one expert. I gotta
find this story maybe for tomorrow. Don't want to use
all the good material here. But one expert said this
has been going on at least for twenty million years,
what he called chaparral fires, in other words, brush fires,
(33:17):
all the stuff that naturally grows in southern California on
the hillsides right, chapparral, It's been burning for twenty million years,
he says. The only difference now is it's not climate change.
It's not anything other than we've got millions of humans
living in the hills. Now. We're build housing developments in
(33:41):
places that are gonna burn every so often, because fires
are natural, and because on top of the natural fires,
human beings start a lot of fires, sometimes on purpose,
sometimes inadvertently. So the problem is all the people living here.
(34:02):
That's not a problem necessarily, that's just the way it is.
But there's a reality in that if you pack millions
of people into a limited geographical area, in an area
which is been prone to droughts and heavy rainy seasons
since the beginning of time, you're going to get the
(34:25):
right conditions and the fires going to start. That's why
fires cost more. Palisades fire may be the most expensive
in history. That's a Lot's a sign of that's not
a sign of anything other than that. You know, go
back on a hundred years ago, how many people were
living in the Palisades, Go back fifty years ago, how
many people were in the Palisades. They built up way
way into the hills. You ever been to Pacific Highlands.
(34:48):
You go down Sunset Boulevard, you make a right Palisades
drive up, go up to the highlands. I've driven up there.
I know people who had homes up there. Beautiful, gorgeous.
I understand view of the Pacific Ocean. It's wonderful, except
prone to fires because that's our climate and humans, especially
(35:12):
when he allowed vagrants to live up in the up
in the brush. I remember some years ago, I think
this is in the Malibu area. There was there was
some kind there was some vagrant fires, right, and Garcetti
was the mayor, and this goof, this silly goof Garcetti
(35:33):
actually took law enforcement city workers and they went stopping
around the brush up in the hillside somewhere near Malibu Palisades.
I forget example, but they went look there. They were
looking to chase homeless people out seriously because one of
the homeless people had started a fire and it was
(35:54):
it was bad, and you know, they had to show
It's like, no, no, we're getting control of this. But
lots of people live in the woods or live in
the brush. You drive down PCH that, I mean, this
is my neighborhood. I see this a thousand times. I've
seen this. You drive down PCH. You sometimes look on
the cliff side and you could see blue tarps and
(36:18):
structures and sometimes shopping carts sticking out of the side
of the cliff and bedrolls and you know, and they're
out on the beach. That's what it is. How do
you think there's people keep warm? How do you think
they cook food? They start fires, some of them are crazy.
Then you have the pyros running around. I wonder, you know,
(36:39):
once the big fire started and suddenly there was a
spate of other fires, some of them big are still burning,
some of them small, and the fire department was able
to put them out. How many of those were the
pyromaniac crowd? Did we finish with Yeah, we finished with
Karen Bats avoiding Eric Leonard's question. All right, so now
(37:01):
this is this is my favorite moment yesterday, and we're
going to play you David Blevins chasing Karen Bass around
and then we had a quickie interview with him at
the very end of the show yesterday. So David Blevins
is with Sky News. Sky News is one of Rupert
Burdock's British satellite news operations out of the UK. It's
(37:27):
a European satellite news channel along the lines of Fox
or CNN. So David Blevins met Karen Bass as she
was coming. I guess she had a plane landing at
the airport. She had a military plane. And then she's
walking down a corridor and eventually out the door. And
this is about a minute and a half and I'm
not going to say a word. I'm not going to
(37:48):
stop this. So Bass is being questioned by David Blevins
about whether she owes La residents and apology for being
in Africa during the start and bass never answers. Listen
to this.
Speaker 5 (38:02):
Do you owe citizens and apology for being absent while
their homes were burning? Do you regret cutting the fire
department budget by millions of dollars?
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Madam? There?
Speaker 5 (38:13):
Have you nothing to say today? Have you absolutely nothing
to say to the citizens today? Elon Mosk says that
you're utterly incompetent. Are you considering your position, Madam Mayor?
Have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today
who're dealing with this disaster? No apology for them? Do
(38:44):
you think you should have been visiting Ghana while this
was unfolding? Back homes?
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Nothing, nothing, not a syllable? Just keep walking, atom man.
Speaker 5 (39:16):
Let me ask you just again, have you anything to
say to the citizens today as.
Speaker 4 (39:19):
You returned.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Pulls upon.
Speaker 5 (39:27):
Adam Mayor? Just a few words for the citizens today
as you returned to do you think atostrophe?
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Keep walking? Keep walking? No shame. You know when she
finally did talk is driving in I heard Moe playing
her prepared speech. You know, she just read like a
cardboard cut out whatever they printed for her. But she
(39:57):
had very little spontaneously to say. In the clips we
pat played, she was always passing it off to you know,
the Pio or the chief or whoever. She's got nothing
to say because what she knows, she just landed from Africa,
doesn't know. Apparently can't think on her feet. You think
she'd have a message for Los Angeles and yeah, apology,
(40:23):
and yeah, you got to explain why you cut the
budget eighteen million dollars. You got to explain why they
run out of water. I'm gonna play you the interview
did we did with Rick Caruso later tonight? You have
to I'm gonna you know, I gotta dangle these treats
get you to stay up till three o'clock. But we
had Rick Caruso on, and you listen to Caruso going
to great thoughtful detail on the problems with the water infrastructure.
(40:48):
Because he used to be a commissioner with the DWP.
He knows this, you know, obviously the most successful real
estate developer in Los Angeles, certainly on the West coast, right,
he knows stuff. And uh, you listen to him talk
and you compare it with a minute and thirty eight
seconds of silence from Karen bass and then the cardboard
(41:12):
cutout responses during the press conference. One thing I noticed
when I was driving in and I listened to the
tape of a press conference. She was so wedded to
her script. She came to a point where she was giving,
you know, a stream of public service announcements and then said,
for more information, go to URL. And then she continued
(41:33):
on and I got r L and URL is the
is the tech word for a website address. She had
a Biden moment. Yeah, exactly, that's exactly what he does.
What he would read his teleprompter and it's exit right.
Well that's what she did. The URL should be you know,
Cityofos Angeles dot com or whatever it is, but they
(41:56):
forgot to type in the website address. So for more
information go to URL. She was just reading. She wasn't
even paying attention to what she was reading. And you
could see without the script in front of her a teleprompter.
What do you get here? Gets silence? Absolute silence. Uh.
(42:21):
We had David Blevin's the Sky News reporter on with
us right at very end of the show, so we
had about a minute to talk to him. But play
the clip, all right, quickly, let's get David Blevins On,
the reporter for Sky News who was questioning Karen Bass there, David,
I only got a minute. Yes, Hi, yeah, what what's
(42:42):
a pretty icy interview you had with her? Hun? Did
she acknowledge you in any way?
Speaker 5 (42:46):
Not in this lightness.
Speaker 4 (42:47):
But we were rather for Juesus because we thoughted her,
or rather my eagle light camera mounts spotted her on
our flight from Washington, DC to Los Angeles this afternoon,
so we decided we would at least tempt to get
a few words from her. But the lady was not
for talking, as you could see. Didn't talk of trying, though.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
No, I'm glad you did. Nobody in Los Angeles media
would would do that, or maybe a couple of people would,
but most of them wouldn't. They're usually very very polite
and frightened of confronting politicians. It seems you British guys
have a lot more time think.
Speaker 4 (43:22):
Well, I like to think I'm quite polite as well.
But certainly our job was journalist, ask the questions. Whether
or not we got the answers, well, that's another question.
And today, certainly the mayor was not a day in
the business of giving assumbers.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Right, interesting that you got no explanation, no apology, no comment,
no nothing, and the devastation is so severe. Yeah, we
definitely excellent work. That was a very memorable minute and
a half. Thank you, Thank you so much. Okay, David
Blevins from Sky News. And that was earlier today from
(43:57):
the daytime show. And we're going to have Bill A.
Salley coming up in just a few minutes after the
one o'clock news, the one o'clock news, the one am news,
bill of sale the state assemblyman who apparently has nothing
better to do it one in the morning. Hey, maybe
he's drinking, maybe he's loaded. Sacramento do that to you. Yeah,
(44:20):
I know, I wouldn't blame him, I mean, but we're
going to talk about the failures. Katie Grimes wrote a piece,
a new piece in the Californiaglobe dot com that we
want to talk about about about Well, let me set
it up this way. We'll get into more detail. She writes,
The wildfire lays at the feet of California's Democrat politicians,
(44:43):
starting with Governor Gavin Newsom. This is a good one.
We've talked about this from time to time, but everybody
forgets when Gavin Newsom was Lieutenant governor California. Voters in
twenty fourteen approved a seven billion dollar bond for the
state water supply infrastructure projects. Of that, two point seven
(45:10):
billion designated for water storage. Ten years later, there are
no new dams or reservoirs, or any other water storage
project to collect and store California's winter runoff. Eighty percent
(45:31):
of the rain in California is sent to the Pacific
Ocean for environmental purposes, eighty percent. You know, the these
droughts there, the winters are drier than normal. Climate change, right,
that's why we have these fires. It's like, no, we
(45:53):
get plenty last two winters, come on, you couldn't get
more rain, right. The problem with too much rain flooding, flooding,
mud slides, landslides. Eighty percent sent to the ocean. After
we gave them the right to spend billions of dollars,
and you know what's amazing, they didn't even spend the
(46:14):
billions of dollars to waste it. They just didn't spend it.
It's bond, so it's it's borrowing. We have the right
to borrow seven billion. Uh, we didn't borrow it. That
credit line is untouched, untapped. Why why did they put
it on the ballot in twenty fourteen? How much would
they have built by now? But again, this is one
(46:37):
of those boring, you know, accounting stories that we vote
on it. It's hardly covered. At the time of the election,
you hear the result, you know, Proposition thirty two Bay
passed today with fifty nine percent of the that's it.
(46:58):
You don't even know. And then ten years later the
fire department shows up. It's like, hey, don't have any water.
What happened? Seven billion dollars? Because the history of California
climate is to have big rainfall years and big drought years.
(47:18):
Look at it. See I've actually looked at the year
by year rainfall totals. I think they have been going
back to eighteen seventy one. Look at it yourself. You'll
see a rough cycle where you have these wet periods
and you've got rainfall totals, you know, twenty five thirty
thirty five inch range, and then you have periods where
(47:40):
it's four five seven inches. It all averages to fourteen
you know, over one hundred and fifty years, but there
are rarely years where you get fourteen inches. You don't
get fourteen very often. You get, you know, the five
(48:01):
inch rainfall year, and then the twenty five inch rainfall year,
and that averages roughly to fourteen or fifteen inches. So
every year there's a good possibility you're gonna have a
drought year, which means you have to have reservoirs and dams,
and we should have desalination plants all up and down
(48:22):
the coast. That's what they do in the Middle East.
You see these thriving, wealthy nations in the Middle East.
They've got much drier climates than we do. They have
desalination plants. They draw water from the seas. It's not
that hard to do. We just don't do it. I
(48:48):
don't know why. I don't know who would it defend
if we took out the sea water and desalinated it
and then used it. All Right, we got more coming up.
Bellisale the Assemblymen will be our special guest on the phone.
Coming up, John Coblt with you KFI Am six forty.
Now we got news from the KFI twenty four hour newsroom. Hey,
you've been listening to the John Cobalt Show podcast. You
(49:09):
can always hear the show live on KFI AM six
forty from one to four pm every Monday through Friday,
and of course anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Can't. I am six forty. You're listening to the John
Cobel podcast on the iHeartRadio app. Welcome to our all
night fire coverage. Yes, it's me, and this is not
a recording. This is live John Cobelt here. Obviously this
is a special occasion because I can't. I haven't been
up in this hour working. I think there was only
(00:23):
one time I did an all night show for one night,
and it was a New Year's Eve show playing top
forty hits years ago. It's like a special taking requests
playing the hits. I volunteers gonna be a little opposite
of that tonight, right exactly. So this is now the
second time in my whole life. You know we should
we should call ken. Yeah, we should make them live
(00:45):
on the air. Hey, I'm working. What are you doing?
We got we got a catastrophe going on. Are you sleeping?
Move it? Yeah? So I'm gonna be on till three.
What happens after three? They find nil nil Savandro? Okay,
uh So he'll be on from three until five, and
then the normal schedule Amy King, Bill Handle and then
(01:05):
we're going to come back in the afternoon. I took
a nap for three hours eight o'clock, I just found
an empty bedroom in the house. They're all empty now,
but the kid's gone and fell asleep and had I
set an alarm at eleven o'clock. If I had sent
the alarm, I still may have been asleep because I
dropped my wife crazy because my wife's up all night.
And then Debora Mark, she's up all night. They actually
(01:27):
were texting each other two nights ago because neither one
of them sleeps, and both of them get pissed off
that I can fall asleep and wake up. And I
always say, it's like when it's time to go to sleep.
I always think, whatever the problems are going on, whatever
the issues are, is there anything I can do about
it now? And the answer every night is no, There's
nothing I can do. Therefore I'm going to sleep. I
(01:49):
can't do anything until tomorrow morning. Now. Last night we
did watch some fire coverage because the Hollywood Hills fire.
What are they calling that thing? The sunset fire? Right?
It's confusing to me. I screamed about this for many,
many years. Just call the fire by the name of
(02:13):
the town where it starts or the neighborhood where it starts, right,
like the Palisades fire. They call it the Palisades fire.
That makes sense to me. The Eaton fire gets me confused.
That's out Alta Dina. Call it the Outa Dina fire,
even if it's a couple of miles off. Just it
makes it easy. I don't know why the officials do this.
And then we have the Sunset fire, which is the
Hollywood Hills, which looked worse than I guess it's turned
(02:37):
out to be. I mean, the overhead coverage last night
had it looked like it was vast. But unless it's
an old acreage report I heard on the drive in,
maybe it is worse than So we'll see what that's about.
And then you've got there's another fire out there somewhere.
(02:57):
I think there were four major ones last night. Karen
Bastow got most of the attention from us. In the afternoon,
I tell you what we're gonna do. We're gonna play
some new stuff. We've got a lot of news clips
to play for your entertainment, and some of them are new.
(03:19):
Some of them is from our show we did yesterday
afternoon because we had Rick Caruso on, it'll probably play
a whole Caruso interview later on as well, because he
went on television last night and made a tour of
the TV stations and was ripping on LA government because
(03:41):
there's really no excuse for firefighters to show up in
the Palisades and run out of water. You could defend
government politicians fifty thousand different ways if that's what you're into,
but not on this one. There is no way that,
over the many decades that in modern life, LA has
(04:02):
been dealing with fires, that we should have a situation
where after seventeen hours the water runs out. All right.
Pacific Palisades may be the most remote part of LA
in a way, you have to go to the far
northwest quarter, and it is in a hilly region, especially
(04:23):
when you get up to the Pacific Highlands. It's adjacent
to Malibu, but in no way is it not very
close to modern Los Angeles civilization. And there is no excuse.
And again I'm never going to criticize the firefighters on
the front line, but it's it's management, and it's city politicians,
(04:43):
city bureaucrats, it's the people who make these decisions, their
decisions on how they're going to spend the money. And
they failed us, and they failed the people in Pacific
Palisades and sitting last night watching TV coverage and my
wife is on the phone and texting with a number
of and I said, how many people do we know
who lost the house? And I think she gave me
(05:06):
about ten different people because Palisades is adjacent to where
we live. And you know, over the years we had
three kids. You get to know a lot of parents
in three different classes. You get to meet a lot
of people through our kids, various sports teams and other
activities and friends of friends and all that people that
we work with. And it's like, oh, she kept going on,
(05:27):
it's like her two and him too, and oh it's
a big list. And the aerial shots. Yeah, it's funny
because all like I'm looking, we got all the TV
channels up, which normally like freaked me out. There's seven TVs.
This was the This is the major contribution of Garyan
(05:48):
Shannon Is. They introduced seven televisions. I don't know why.
I mean, they're out at nine in the morning. What's
going on at night in the morning? You need seven TVs?
You usually tell me to come in and turn all
of them off except for two. Oh, I know, because
there's too much flashing. Usually watch you know, the two
cable networks in case there's something spectacular around the world
going on, but you know, to see during the daytime,
(06:10):
it's all really really stupid talk shows. Yeah, I think
Gary likes to watch The view Is. Yeah, it was
yeah a download. Yeah, I think he's into that show
on three different screens. So you know, I come in
and everything's flashing at me, and it's like, you know,
I'm gonna have an epileptic fit here. I can't take
all this flashing, so we turn them off. But now
this is this is quite the array here. It's like
(06:33):
seven different views of all the fires. Yeah. Meanwhile, we
don't have any chairs in the studio. I know, we
don't have chairs. We don't have a shade for the
back window, so we get a big glare in the
afternoon and I can't see the screens anyway. In any event,
we're gonna play some clips because we got off the
air at four and Karen Bass took over a press
(06:54):
conference at five o'clock. Now you know her story and
by the way, we're getting we're getting embarrassing headlines around
the country. I mean, just go to back to the
Palisades for a second.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
That is.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
I saw some aerial footage, And what I was going
to say is understandably the new stations right now are
covering what's happening immediately in the present, which they should,
and so that's why you have seven screens and seven
different views of the current fires. But the Palisades, and
I don't know if the cameras just can't get in
(07:28):
there right now because the police are blocking the media.
There are some aerial shots the massive devastation, like in
some neighborhoods where it looks like every single home is gone,
and in some of the business district it seemed as
if every single business is gone. And I guess if
(07:49):
you don't live near the Palisades, maybe you've only been
there once in a while on your way to the beach.
It's one thing, but since it's next door to me
and it's a place that my wife and family and
I we go frequently. You know, every block in the
commercial district has, you know, some kind of meeting, has
(08:12):
some kind of place you know. You know, that's the
grow a grocery store we go to, that's a restaurant
we go to frequently, and over and over and over again,
and the idea that all of that is gone is
just it's so disorienting. And for the people in these neighborhoods,
(08:36):
it's not just they lost their house. They lost they
lost where they go out to eat. They lost the
grocery store, they lost you know, the barbershop. They maybe
lost the doctor's office. They lost their neighbors, they lost
where their kids friends live, they lost their school. It's
(08:56):
at the whole life is gone and it's never going
to come back. In the same way, people are going
to move to other places. Some people might not rebuild,
some people might sell. A lot of the businesses are
never going to come back. I saw this after the
stupid COVID lockdown. How many businesses closed and to this
day the storefronts are empty and they're not and they
(09:19):
never went back. And there's you know, parts of Santa Monica,
parts of La along Wilshire ghost town, and the real
businesses never came back. Maybe they have some you know,
cheap nail or tattoo shops, but I don't know why
nail and tattoo shops brought up. But you know, the
the the the the the idiotic lockdown did tremendous permanent damage.
(09:42):
Amazon has done tremendous permanent damage to neighborhoods, and now
here we have this this fire disaster where everything is gone.
I mean some people had no insurance. Do you know
in one zip code in the Palisades, UH State Farm
canceled seventy percent of the insurance policies just a few
(10:03):
months ago, and there was nowhere no one else to
go to to buy new insurance. I think we're gonna
be hearing about that in the coming days. How many
people are uninsured. And there's when we start seeing the
video and we start hearing from the people who are
suffering and the people without insurance. It's it's, you know,
(10:26):
it's almost like the worst there's even I don't know
the worst is losing your neighborhood, but it's it's going
to be bad to hear all these stories. And well,
here here's stories from around various newspapers that I was
looking at this evening in the La Times. Let's see
fire hydrants ran dry as Pacific Palisades burned. City officials
(10:49):
blame tremendous demand. No, it's not just tremendous demand. It
is lack of investment in preparation. It's irresponsibility by the
City of La. What they should do is stand up
and say we were widely irresponsible. We have spent way
(11:10):
too much money on homeless people, illegal aliens, criminals. What
we should have done is spent it protecting the people.
Because you knew. I think every neighborhood in LA, at
least the people, the normal people, know that your time
is going to come. At some point, there's going to
be a wildfire that affects your neighborhood or very nearby.
(11:34):
It's just a matter of time. You go along the
whole stretch of the Santa Monica Mountains on both sides,
the foothills, all the way down the two ten, all
the way down along the one on one, and in
other places as well, and you know one day it's
going to be your town that's going to get hit.
Here's another thing, a healthscape in all directions. That's the
(11:58):
Wall Street Journal. The devastating fires that ignited crisis and
chaos in Los Angeles. Let's see New York Post. This
is one of my favorites. How years of corruption and
mismanagement led to La running out of water in the
middle of the Palisades wildfire. Yes, a lot of flattering
(12:19):
headlines here New York Times. In the Palisades, an evacuation
disaster was years in the making. Some Pacific Palisades residents
said the community had long asked for more detailed fire
preparation plans. When a fire raged through the community, gridlock ensued.
(12:42):
New York Times again raging wildfires in LA. Firefighters scrammling
to fight the worst fire in LA history with limited
water supply and strong winds. Limited water supply, It's just
it's unfathomable how that could be. You know, a seriously,
you look, you look to the west, less than a
(13:03):
mile away, but a tenth of a mile away. Got
the Pacific Ocean. It's it's it's not outrageous, it's it's
not absurd to say, wow, we've got this whole ocean.
Maybe at some point somebody should have built a desalination
plant and we could use all this water. I mean,
that's what you would do in a uh an irrational country.
(13:27):
Uh you would you would say, hey, wow, big big,
gigantic ocean out there, the largest one in the world,
the largest one in the whole solar system, and we
don't have one pipe to desalinate and and and use
for you know, drinking water and to put out fires.
Since the fire start right across the street from the ocean,
(13:48):
it's kind of astonishing. Uh, what is it? It's now
fifty five years since we landed on the moon, and
in fifty five years we could not build a pipe
to cross pch to go from the ocean to Pacific Palisades.
I don't know, huh. See National Review, mayor out of
(14:08):
the country. As Los Angeles burns, residents plead for help. Boy?
Is that a devastating headlines? Somebody we should everybody should
blow this up, print this out and send it to
Karen Bass. Mayor out of the country. As Los Angeles burns,
See what else we got here? Sunset Boulevard in ruins.
(14:30):
Fire's massive scale comes into focus in the Pacific Palisades.
That's the La Times. But you know, the La Times
was always cheerleading for Karen Bass and the city council
and the rest of these buffoons. Say hey, we got
something from the Washington Post. Much of Pacific Pacific Palisades
neighborhood is in Los Angeles is gone. As homes burned,
(14:53):
residents tried to douse fires with water from swimming pools.
So let's say we've got the LA Times, the New
York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the
National Review, just terrible, terrible headlines and they're all true,
and much of it is about the response because the
fires were given to happen. Let's see her we got
(15:15):
with California Globe, LA Mayor Karen Bass heavily criticized for
delayed return from trip to Ghana with historic wildfire spreading.
That's nice, boy, do we look like a bunch of idiots.
There's not going to be a whole lot of sympathy
from people around the country. They're going to say, it's like,
why did you why'd you elect her? Exactly? Why would
(15:37):
she take off for Africa right before a firestorm? A
well predicted firestorm and windstorm. Two thousand structures destroyed her
damage La Times and so on. So let's let's start.
Let's see what she asks to say for herself. Five
o'clock there was a press conference Mayor Karen Bass. Oh, listen,
(16:01):
typ number one here. What do you think she's talking about?
Climate change? Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I just remember two years ago when we were here
for a first ever weather event in Los Angeles, a
potential hurricane. And I think we all understand in our
city the due to climate change, we're going to continue
to see very unusual weather events. And this is a
historic event considering the strength of the winds.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Climate change. Huh. And I remember when this fad began
really an earnest. It's been around for decades, but about
ten years ago they really pushed climate change causes everything
right in order to try to shame us into giving
up our modern life. You drink too much water, you
(16:50):
drive too much. You shouldn't have a lawn. You know,
you shouldn't have a driveway because having a driveway means
you have a car and then you're driving. You shouldn't
have that either. In fact, you should all live.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
What is it?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
The idea is that the fifteen minute city that we're
going to live in a little tiny box apartment over
a string of stores on the bottom floor of your
apartment building. And in those stores you can buy everything
you need. And then you take your little bicycle or
your tricycle and bike down a block or two and
you go to work, and then you go back at
(17:21):
the end of the day. That's the fifteen minute city.
Then nobody has to drive anywhere, and nobody's entitled to
have you know, vast sprawling space like a fifty by
one hundred foot front yard, anything like that. Not supposed
to have swimming pool. You're not supposed to have plants,
remember right, drop resistant plants. Everybody have ugly cactuses for
(17:42):
a garden or for a front lawn. And it became
and every time, every time it turned on the TV,
somebody scolding you, some public officialists scolding you. You got
a plant, a drought resistant lawn, and you look at
it's like, that's a lot of ugly cactuses, isn't it. Well,
it's because they haven't built, you know, a reservoir in
(18:04):
the last fifty years. They never built a pipe to
a desalination plant to get the ocean water. They diverted
hundreds of billions of gallons out into the Pacific Ocean
to save one lousy fish or another. Says man made.
You got forty million people in the state. You got
to build the infrastructure. You got to live with it,
(18:25):
got to build a water system. You got to grab
all the available water because we want to live and
you know, you got you got to build a freeway
system so we can drive. You got to how you
drives in order to have a thriving economy, so we
all work. We're not all going to bike around carrying
our little reasonable grocery bags. And these people made all
(18:50):
their policy decisions all these decades, all these decades, they
made these policy decisions based on how can we curtail
human behavior, How can we limit human expression? How can
we limit the desire of humans to live in a
comfortable setting, because otherwise they're offending the planets. So of
(19:11):
course she's gonna blame it on climate change. Although most
of the fires that we had in in the teens,
nineteen seventeen eighteen, they were caused largely by power companies
who never spent the money on putting the power lines
down below the ground. And it's funny, ever since they
started putting power lines below ground, none of those power
(19:33):
lines have started any fires. I don't know how that happened. Yeah,
it's like locking up prisoners. You're not got prisoners. Amazing,
the prisoners can't commit any more crime. And when you
put power lines in the prison underground, the power lines
can't fall and burn you know entire towns, hundreds of
thousands of acres can't happen, but they everyone has spent
(19:53):
the money on that because the corporate bastards that ran
these power companies had to pay themselves millions and millions
of dollars. They had to keep their stock price inflated,
so they weren't going to spend money on putting power
lines under ground. So the fires don't start. We start
most of the fires. I'm going to see how many
these fires. How many you think we're started by homeless people?
(20:15):
What do you think the over under on that is,
how many you think we're start by crazy pyromaniacs. It's people.
Climate change doesn't start fire. Lightning strikes could start fire,
but those have been around since the beginning of the planet.
But there were no lightning strikes in La County? Were
there no at least started by lightning? Start by humans
(20:37):
one way or the other. Let's see, we got a
question here from La Times reporter David Zaneiser to Karen
Bass about Rick Caruso criticizing her for being in Ghatta
when this whole firestorm broke out. Play cut two.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Well, let me just say that we are actively fighting
this fire, and this is a time for vigilance and action,
not speculation. This is a time for Angelinos to come together,
unite it to protect themselves and their families and also
each other.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Right stop there? So I hate when they pull that card.
Don't you hate that? This is a time to come together.
This is not a time to play the blame game.
This is not the time for finger pointing. Yes it is.
This is exactly the time, because everybody is angry, everybody's
in shock. Nobody can believe that their lives have been destroyed,
that a huge piece of Los Angeles has has burned
(21:37):
is now an ashes and you look around and go,
how's going on? How'd this happen? The fire department didn't
have enough order? Really really? Oh, Karen bass Cutt, you
know seventeen million dollars from the fire department. Oh why
why would you do that? I think they asked that
question later as well, play some more.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
So, what we are seeing is the result of eight
months of negligible rain and wins that have not been
seen in La in at least fourteen years. It's a
deadly combination. And I've been in constant contact with our
fire commanders on the ground and our partners at every
level of government. I've spoken to President Biden, President Biden's
(22:20):
chief of Staff, Secretary of Majorcis from Homeland Security.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Stop stop President Biden. Seriously, she says that, And I've
got to believe that most people at home are laughing
or putting their head in their hands. Oh really, you
spoke to him, and how'd that go. We have a
have a tape in that conversation. I'd like to hear
(22:45):
how he what he mumbled back, if he remembered there
was a California. Yeah, yeah, sorry, Oh yeah, that's what
you get. Play some more.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Secretary Marry Toddman from Housing and Urban Development, Senator Padilla,
Governor Newsom, all.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Right, it's not it's not there. And she had all
these conversations, and what does that produce? What does that produce?
Talk to Alejandra may Orcus, the guy who lied to
us for four years that the border is secure. What
did he have to say? Exactly? But the fire didn't
burn the Palisades Palisade didn't burn down. I think that
was his quote. Now the fire had ever happened, like
(23:29):
the border is closed. But what would you talk to
him about? What would you talk to news about exactly.
I don't understand this. I what can these guys do? Now?
How hard is it do you think for the Palisades
people and everybody else in how Ta Dina and anybody
who's had their homes to short by fire? How hard
(23:50):
is it going to be to rebuild this these how homes,
this neighborhood? How much red tape, how much bureaucracy, how
how difficult is it to get a permit? I know
a friend of mine who fought with the LA bureaucracy
for about a year just to get a permit to
expand his garage. Seriously, I meet with him for lunch
(24:15):
about once a month, and every month for a year
there was an update on how he's still fighting the
government to expand a garage. What do you think it's
going to be like for these people if they if
they stick around? All right, So we are going to
(24:35):
take a break, and when we come back, we have
more Karen Bass. Oh, we've got the really good stuff,
all right. We got David Well, we just played the
Zandheuser thing. Then we got an Eric Leonard clip from
a former KFI newsman now NBC four reporter Eric Leonard
(24:56):
made Karen Bass do a dance with another pointed question,
and then we'll play the David Blevins clips that we
played on the show yesterday afternoon. It is now yesterday afternoon.
He's from Sky News, British guy and the British guys
they don't worship politicians the way idiot American journalists do.
And this was entertaining because he's questioning Karen Bass about
(25:19):
whether she owes an apology for being in Ghana while
the fires were happening. So we'll do that coming up.
You're listening to John Cobel's on demand from KFI, A
six all night coverage of the fires in southern California.
John Cobelt here, I took a three hour and app
(25:40):
very excited. This is fun. Now it doesn't matter what
I do. There's no pressure. I know there's a lot
of people listening, and since we're on at night, I
know we've got people listening probably in the western third
of the country, all the way to the Rocky Mountains.
Sometimes the signal bounces into the Midwest. So if you're
(26:01):
listening because you're a ghoul, you heard and saw all
the headlines and video of the California hellscape, and you're wondering,
is it really that bad here? Yes, it's really that bad. Yes,
we are run by idiots that destructive. Everything you hear
is true. This is not just a media caricature. This
(26:21):
is actually the way we have to live with the
people who run this place. And we are going to
talk further about that issue after one o'clock. After one
o'clock in the morning, we got Bill A. Saley. Look
at this. Nobody sleeps anymore. I think I'm the last
guy who sleeps a night. Everybody seems to be up,
like you're up in a wake. You don't seem to
have any problem, Erica, No, I'm all right. I know.
(26:41):
I know my wife was up when I left. I'm
sure Debra's up. They're probably listening. Yeah, So anyway, Bill
is Saley to come on and we'll talk about all
the bad decisions that Gavin Newsom has made over the
years and Jerry Brown has made over the years regards water, because,
(27:02):
in case you haven't heard, the La Fire Department ran
out of water in the Pacific Palisades while fighting the fire.
If you wondered why you were watching the Palisades burn
last night, and nobody was putting out the fires in
certain neighborhoods. Not the fault of the firefighters. They weren't
given the water because we have been run by idiots.
(27:25):
I hate to be repetitive, but there's no other way
to describe it. There's no defense for this. And Mayor
Karen Bass, fresh from her Africa trip, she landed here
and held a press conference yesterday afternoon, and one of
her questionnaires was our friend Eric Leonard from NBC four,
(27:47):
let's listen to cut three well.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
I am confident that it did not. I will call
up a representative from the fire department to address that.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
But I stop, We'll start it again. I should have
set it up. I forgot. He's asking about the budget
cuts because she did cut over seventeen million dollars Patrick
Sun Chong, publisher at the time, since it's twenty three million,
but the fire department not having enough resources. So he's
(28:17):
asking whether the budget cuts had a role here in
what happened right now? You play it well, I am
confident that it did not.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
I will call up a representative from the fire department
to address that. But I will also say that within
this fiscal year LAFD actually would go above what was
allocated on July first?
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Would you?
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Did you want to make a comment.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
So, good evening, Jacob Robbie, PIO LAFD. So when we discussed,
as a fire chief discussed earlier, this is an absolutely
unprecedented event. We have another fire that just broke out.
Any fire department, even our size, is stressed in, which
is why we call in our mutual aid partners our
(29:03):
additional resources. Of course, we can always use more resources,
which is why we ask for more resources, because we
always want to be the most prepared we possibly can.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Stop. Stop, stop, stop, Oh, the spokes soul. What's this
guy's name? Adam Jacob Robbie, Jacob Robbie, Jacob Robbie, the PIO,
it's the public information officer. So the guy identifies himself
with seven letters, p IO of LAFD and Taren Bass
doesn't have the guts to confront the question, so you
(29:35):
get the spokes stooge to answer the question and shower
you with with a lot of the alphabet. I'm the
PIO the LAFD, and of course we'd want more resources.
Here's the thing. They have to explain why, And I'm
going to round off numbers here, why you would spend
(29:57):
eight hundred million dollars on a big city fire department
and but one point three billion dollars on failed homeless programs.
And this goes on every year. Eight hundred million for fire,
one point three billion for homeless. Which is an interesting
decision because the homeless in twenty twenty three started about
(30:21):
fourteen thousand fires in LA So you pay more money
to fund the people who start the fires and less
money to the people who put out the fires. This
is the question that I would ask Karen Bass if
(30:42):
she ever had the nerve to come in here. You
explain to me, why give an extra half a billion
dollars to the people who start the fires a half
a billion less dollars to the people who put them out.
But there's nobody in public life, in the media or
(31:05):
other politicians who connect all these dots. I bet you
you didn't know this was going on. You people living
in Colorado listening in Hawaii. Yeah, this is what it's
like here. But homeless get a half a billion dollars
more for starting the fires. You wonder why, they say again,
I'm gonna keep asking this because nobody else wants to
(31:28):
had these fires start. I mean, it's got to be
a human cause one way or the other. Continue with
this non answer because we don't know what these wins
are going to do. This is something that we have
not seen.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
In my sixteen years in LAFD and five years and
another fire department, I've never seen wins that made it
to the Pacific Ocean turned around and went back up
the canyon. So this is not something that any fire
department can be prepared for. And we always want to
have more resources, and we're always going to ask the
mayor for more resources for that.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
And you know that in the last six months since
the Christal years, again, has there been training.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
That wasn't done, preparations that were it made?
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Because you're looking down, I'm not going to be able
to speak on the fire chief on that aspect of it.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
So I'm going to defer to Chief Proley on that.
So Beast defers to the PIO, who defers to the chief.
Nobody has any answers. Oh, I've never seen wind flight.
So in all these years, you didn't have all this
complex computer modeling. I mean, how many great universities do
(32:36):
we have in California? Right, we got USCA, we got UCLA,
We've got Stanford, We've got Berkeley, the whole uc system. Right,
there's got to be various science departments with massive computers
that could model how this happens. The Santa and the
Wins are are his oldest time. Fires are his oldest time.
(32:57):
I read, in fact, I've read one expert. I gotta
find this story maybe for tomorrow. Don't want to use
all the good material here. But one expert said this
has been going on at least for twenty million years,
what he called chaparral fires, in other words, brush fires,
(33:17):
all the stuff that naturally grows in southern California on
the hillsides right, chapparral, It's been burning for twenty million years,
he says. The only difference now is it's not climate change.
It's not anything other than we've got millions of humans
living in the hills. Now. We're build housing developments in
(33:41):
places that are gonna burn every so often, because fires
are natural, and because on top of the natural fires,
human beings start a lot of fires, sometimes on purpose,
sometimes inadvertently. So the problem is all the people living here.
(34:02):
That's not a problem necessarily, that's just the way it is.
But there's a reality in that if you pack millions
of people into a limited geographical area, in an area
which is been prone to droughts and heavy rainy seasons
since the beginning of time, you're going to get the
(34:25):
right conditions and the fires going to start. That's why
fires cost more. Palisades fire may be the most expensive
in history. That's a Lot's a sign of that's not
a sign of anything other than that. You know, go
back on a hundred years ago, how many people were
living in the Palisades, Go back fifty years ago, how
many people were in the Palisades. They built up way
way into the hills. You ever been to Pacific Highlands.
(34:48):
You go down Sunset Boulevard, you make a right Palisades
drive up, go up to the highlands. I've driven up there.
I know people who had homes up there. Beautiful, gorgeous.
I understand view of the Pacific Ocean. It's wonderful, except
prone to fires because that's our climate and humans, especially
(35:12):
when he allowed vagrants to live up in the up
in the brush. I remember some years ago, I think
this is in the Malibu area. There was there was
some kind there was some vagrant fires, right, and Garcetti
was the mayor, and this goof, this silly goof Garcetti
(35:33):
actually took law enforcement city workers and they went stopping
around the brush up in the hillside somewhere near Malibu Palisades.
I forget example, but they went look there. They were
looking to chase homeless people out seriously because one of
the homeless people had started a fire and it was
(35:54):
it was bad, and you know, they had to show
It's like, no, no, we're getting control of this. But
lots of people live in the woods or live in
the brush. You drive down PCH that, I mean, this
is my neighborhood. I see this a thousand times. I've
seen this. You drive down PCH. You sometimes look on
the cliff side and you could see blue tarps and
(36:18):
structures and sometimes shopping carts sticking out of the side
of the cliff and bedrolls and you know, and they're
out on the beach. That's what it is. How do
you think there's people keep warm? How do you think
they cook food? They start fires, some of them are crazy.
Then you have the pyros running around. I wonder, you know,
(36:39):
once the big fire started and suddenly there was a
spate of other fires, some of them big are still burning,
some of them small, and the fire department was able
to put them out. How many of those were the
pyromaniac crowd? Did we finish with Yeah, we finished with
Karen Bats avoiding Eric Leonard's question. All right, so now
(37:01):
this is this is my favorite moment yesterday, and we're
going to play you David Blevins chasing Karen Bass around
and then we had a quickie interview with him at
the very end of the show yesterday. So David Blevins
is with Sky News. Sky News is one of Rupert
Burdock's British satellite news operations out of the UK. It's
(37:27):
a European satellite news channel along the lines of Fox
or CNN. So David Blevins met Karen Bass as she
was coming. I guess she had a plane landing at
the airport. She had a military plane. And then she's
walking down a corridor and eventually out the door. And
this is about a minute and a half and I'm
not going to say a word. I'm not going to
(37:48):
stop this. So Bass is being questioned by David Blevins
about whether she owes La residents and apology for being
in Africa during the start and bass never answers. Listen
to this.
Speaker 5 (38:02):
Do you owe citizens and apology for being absent while
their homes were burning? Do you regret cutting the fire
department budget by millions of dollars?
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Madam? There?
Speaker 5 (38:13):
Have you nothing to say today? Have you absolutely nothing
to say to the citizens today? Elon Mosk says that
you're utterly incompetent. Are you considering your position, Madam Mayor?
Have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today
who're dealing with this disaster? No apology for them? Do
(38:44):
you think you should have been visiting Ghana while this
was unfolding? Back homes?
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Nothing, nothing, not a syllable? Just keep walking, atom man.
Speaker 5 (39:16):
Let me ask you just again, have you anything to
say to the citizens today as.
Speaker 4 (39:19):
You returned.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Pulls upon.
Speaker 5 (39:27):
Adam Mayor? Just a few words for the citizens today
as you returned to do you think atostrophe?
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Keep walking? Keep walking? No shame. You know when she
finally did talk is driving in I heard Moe playing
her prepared speech. You know, she just read like a
cardboard cut out whatever they printed for her. But she
(39:57):
had very little spontaneously to say. In the clips we
pat played, she was always passing it off to you know,
the Pio or the chief or whoever. She's got nothing
to say because what she knows, she just landed from Africa,
doesn't know. Apparently can't think on her feet. You think
she'd have a message for Los Angeles and yeah, apology,
(40:23):
and yeah, you got to explain why you cut the
budget eighteen million dollars. You got to explain why they
run out of water. I'm gonna play you the interview
did we did with Rick Caruso later tonight? You have
to I'm gonna you know, I gotta dangle these treats
get you to stay up till three o'clock. But we
had Rick Caruso on, and you listen to Caruso going
to great thoughtful detail on the problems with the water infrastructure.
(40:48):
Because he used to be a commissioner with the DWP.
He knows this, you know, obviously the most successful real
estate developer in Los Angeles, certainly on the West coast, right,
he knows stuff. And uh, you listen to him talk
and you compare it with a minute and thirty eight
seconds of silence from Karen bass and then the cardboard
(41:12):
cutout responses during the press conference. One thing I noticed
when I was driving in and I listened to the
tape of a press conference. She was so wedded to
her script. She came to a point where she was giving,
you know, a stream of public service announcements and then said,
for more information, go to URL. And then she continued
(41:33):
on and I got r L and URL is the
is the tech word for a website address. She had
a Biden moment. Yeah, exactly, that's exactly what he does.
What he would read his teleprompter and it's exit right.
Well that's what she did. The URL should be you know,
Cityofos Angeles dot com or whatever it is, but they
(41:56):
forgot to type in the website address. So for more
information go to URL. She was just reading. She wasn't
even paying attention to what she was reading. And you
could see without the script in front of her a teleprompter.
What do you get here? Gets silence? Absolute silence. Uh.
(42:21):
We had David Blevin's the Sky News reporter on with
us right at very end of the show, so we
had about a minute to talk to him. But play
the clip, all right, quickly, let's get David Blevins On,
the reporter for Sky News who was questioning Karen Bass there, David,
I only got a minute. Yes, Hi, yeah, what what's
(42:42):
a pretty icy interview you had with her? Hun? Did
she acknowledge you in any way?
Speaker 5 (42:46):
Not in this lightness.
Speaker 4 (42:47):
But we were rather for Juesus because we thoughted her,
or rather my eagle light camera mounts spotted her on
our flight from Washington, DC to Los Angeles this afternoon,
so we decided we would at least tempt to get
a few words from her. But the lady was not
for talking, as you could see. Didn't talk of trying, though.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
No, I'm glad you did. Nobody in Los Angeles media
would would do that, or maybe a couple of people would,
but most of them wouldn't. They're usually very very polite
and frightened of confronting politicians. It seems you British guys
have a lot more time think.
Speaker 4 (43:22):
Well, I like to think I'm quite polite as well.
But certainly our job was journalist, ask the questions. Whether
or not we got the answers, well, that's another question.
And today, certainly the mayor was not a day in
the business of giving assumbers.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Right, interesting that you got no explanation, no apology, no comment,
no nothing, and the devastation is so severe. Yeah, we
definitely excellent work. That was a very memorable minute and
a half. Thank you, Thank you so much. Okay, David
Blevins from Sky News. And that was earlier today from
(43:57):
the daytime show. And we're going to have Bill A.
Salley coming up in just a few minutes after the
one o'clock news, the one o'clock news, the one am news,
bill of sale the state assemblyman who apparently has nothing
better to do it one in the morning. Hey, maybe
he's drinking, maybe he's loaded. Sacramento do that to you. Yeah,
(44:20):
I know, I wouldn't blame him, I mean, but we're
going to talk about the failures. Katie Grimes wrote a piece,
a new piece in the Californiaglobe dot com that we
want to talk about about about Well, let me set
it up this way. We'll get into more detail. She writes,
The wildfire lays at the feet of California's Democrat politicians,
(44:43):
starting with Governor Gavin Newsom. This is a good one.
We've talked about this from time to time, but everybody
forgets when Gavin Newsom was Lieutenant governor California. Voters in
twenty fourteen approved a seven billion dollar bond for the
state water supply infrastructure projects. Of that, two point seven
(45:10):
billion designated for water storage. Ten years later, there are
no new dams or reservoirs, or any other water storage
project to collect and store California's winter runoff. Eighty percent
(45:31):
of the rain in California is sent to the Pacific
Ocean for environmental purposes, eighty percent. You know, the these
droughts there, the winters are drier than normal. Climate change, right,
that's why we have these fires. It's like, no, we
(45:53):
get plenty last two winters, come on, you couldn't get
more rain, right. The problem with too much rain flooding, flooding,
mud slides, landslides. Eighty percent sent to the ocean. After
we gave them the right to spend billions of dollars,
and you know what's amazing, they didn't even spend the
(46:14):
billions of dollars to waste it. They just didn't spend it.
It's bond, so it's it's borrowing. We have the right
to borrow seven billion. Uh, we didn't borrow it. That
credit line is untouched, untapped. Why why did they put
it on the ballot in twenty fourteen? How much would
they have built by now? But again, this is one
(46:37):
of those boring, you know, accounting stories that we vote
on it. It's hardly covered. At the time of the election,
you hear the result, you know, Proposition thirty two Bay
passed today with fifty nine percent of the that's it.
(46:58):
You don't even know. And then ten years later the
fire department shows up. It's like, hey, don't have any water.
What happened? Seven billion dollars? Because the history of California
climate is to have big rainfall years and big drought years.
(47:18):
Look at it. See I've actually looked at the year
by year rainfall totals. I think they have been going
back to eighteen seventy one. Look at it yourself. You'll
see a rough cycle where you have these wet periods
and you've got rainfall totals, you know, twenty five thirty
thirty five inch range, and then you have periods where
(47:40):
it's four five seven inches. It all averages to fourteen
you know, over one hundred and fifty years, but there
are rarely years where you get fourteen inches. You don't
get fourteen very often. You get, you know, the five
(48:01):
inch rainfall year, and then the twenty five inch rainfall year,
and that averages roughly to fourteen or fifteen inches. So
every year there's a good possibility you're gonna have a
drought year, which means you have to have reservoirs and dams,
and we should have desalination plants all up and down
(48:22):
the coast. That's what they do in the Middle East.
You see these thriving, wealthy nations in the Middle East.
They've got much drier climates than we do. They have
desalination plants. They draw water from the seas. It's not
that hard to do. We just don't do it. I
(48:48):
don't know why. I don't know who would it defend
if we took out the sea water and desalinated it
and then used it. All Right, we got more coming up.
Bellisale the Assemblymen will be our special guest on the phone.
Coming up, John Coblt with you KFI Am six forty.
Now we got news from the KFI twenty four hour newsroom. Hey,
you've been listening to the John Cobalt Show podcast. You
(49:09):
can always hear the show live on KFI AM six
forty from one to four pm every Monday through Friday,
and of course anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
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