To the editor: When catastrophe strikes, our intuition is to assign blame — and in Pacific Palisades, that blame has landed on Metropolis Corridor (“In fire-scorched Palisades, a library and rec heart turn into linchpins of fury with Metropolis Corridor,” Oct. 11). However searing mockery of our mayor doesn’t assist. She didn’t trigger the hearth — although she’s going to lead the restoration.
Months later, Palisadians are nonetheless in shock and in search of solutions. Many are additionally trying up and rebuilding. The mayor’s govt orders directing metropolis departments to behave with pace and coordination are good and welcome steps. The consultants she’s engaged are fulfilling the work assigned to them. All of this should be matched with measurable aid, seen to a group thirsty for outcomes.
Our group is motivated and united to rebuild. What we want are elected leaders and companies directed by them to match our urgency and work with us to focus sources that drive actual progress for restoration.
The wheels of Metropolis Corridor are turning — so are ours. Let’s do that, collectively.
Maryam Zar, Pacific Palisades
This author is the founding father of the Palisades Restoration Coalition.
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To the editor: We misplaced our dwelling within the Woolsey hearth in November 2018. Now, one month in need of seven years later, our authorities hasn’t discovered the lesson — or classes (“After Palisades hearth hydrants went dry, LAFD confronted expensive delays in getting extra water,” Oct. 11).
On that Friday, Nov. 8, many people noticed our houses burn whereas not insubstantial components of the hearth division stood on the prepared half a mile away, awaiting orders from their superiors within the chain of command to enter the fray.
So, a breakdown in clear, coherent, constant management. Due to this, so many misplaced their houses and all their possessions that day.
I’m not going to get into that in style buzz phrase, “accountability.” However efficient governance requires that we be taught from our errors. The Palisades/Eaton fires, 6½ years later, would seem to point in any other case.
So we’ve got right here a chance to be taught from our errors, to make sure such management failures don’t happen once more. On this, we needs to be concentrating on the repair, not the failures.
Jeff Denker, Malibu
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To the editor: Kristin Crowley was completely appropriate in her assertion that, within the article’s phrases, “extra [budget and resources] wouldn’t have made a distinction towards such a ferocious, wind-fueled hearth” (“After Palisades hearth failures, L.A. guarantees to beef up staffing throughout high-risk hearth climate,” Oct. 8). Casting mild on all that occurred in these essential days is actually welcome. Nevertheless, there may be one ineluctable conclusion to be drawn from your complete expertise: The centralized response to threats of main fires on the urban-rural interface can not present us with any assurance of success sooner or later. The historical past of failure has been too constant, going all the way in which again to the 1961 Bel Air hearth.
We merely should transfer towards a distributed, civil-defense sort of response that spreads the burden of safety of life and property broadly throughout the inhabitants in danger. Evacuation shouldn’t be our default response, however relatively defense-in-place, with assistance from a ready core of our citizenry. The identical holds for post-earthquake and post-flood conditions.
The payoff of this technique is clear from the person tales which have been lined by the Los Angeles Instances. However on the stage of the person, the technique is high-risk. It turns into low threat by the use of making this our default method, in order that it’s deliberate for and actively carried out. We succeed by cooperation.
This can be an enormous attain in our atomized tradition, and it could be massively resisted by the general public companies, however it could be a thrust towards a extra communitarian future that we very a lot want.
Siegfried Othmer, Woodland Hills
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To the editor: If Ronnie Villanueva, the interim hearth chief, has by no means heard of a holdover hearth, we want a brand new chief ASAP (“A ‘reignition’ led to the Palisades hearth, a discovering positive to enrage 1000’s of victims,” Oct. 9). Additional, why has the top of the Los Angeles Division of Water and Energy been allowed to maintain her job when the Santa Ynez Reservoir was empty throughout the hearth?
Jill Smith, Pacific Palisades
