‘Nothing they can do’: Rogan’s eerie prediction
As fires rage across Los Angeles, triggering mass evacuation orders and total chaos, an eerie Joe Rogan prediction from six months ago has emerged.
Los Angeles officials and the California Democratic administration have been blasted as “incompetent” after fire hydrants ran dry as crews battled devastating wildfires on multiple fronts that forced tens of thousands of people including Hollywood celebrities to abandon multimillion-dollar homes.
As blazes continued to burn out of control on Wednesday, local time, the blame game over the lack of water was well underway, while furious residents called on Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass to resign for being out of the country on a junket to Africa when the disaster began to unfold on Tuesday.
Ms Bass remained deathly silent when confronted by a Sky News reporter at the airport as she returned on Wednesday.
“Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent whilst their homes were burning?” David Blevins asked.
“Do you regret cutting the fire department’s budget by millions of dollars? Have you nothing to say to the citizens today? Elon Musk says that you’re utterly incompetent, are you considering your position?”
Blevins continued to pepper the Mayor with questions before she was whisked away through a security door.
MORE:Celeb homes destroyed in LA fires revealed
Joe Rogan’s eerie clip predicting bushfire
Meanwhile, an eerie clip of Joe Rogan revealing a conversation he had with a fireman six months before Los Angeles went up in flames has been doing the rounds on social media.
Speaking to comedian Sam Morril on his show in July, Rogan recounted being evacuated from his former LA home three times due to wildfires.
“I talked to a fireman once ... he was telling me, ‘One day, it’s going to be the right wind and fire is going to start in the right place and it’s going to burn through LA all the way to the ocean and there’s not a f**king thing we can do about it,’” Rogan said.
“I go, ‘Really?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, we just get lucky with the wind.’ These fires are so big, you’re talking about thousands of acres burning simultaneously with 40mph winds ... Once it happens it’s so spread out that there’s nothing they can do.”
‘Third world country’: Billionaire rips into Mayor
Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer who ran against Ms Bass ran for in 2022 as a Democrat, said crews battling the biggest blaze in the Pacific Palisades area, a favourite spot for celebrities, found “there’s no water coming out of the fire hydrants”.
Read our full coverage of the fire here
Mr Caruso called into a local TV station, slamming Ms Bass’ absence and saying the city looked like a “third-world country”.
“What is most concerning to me is, our first responders and our firefighters who are trying to battle this, there’s no water in the Palisades,” he told Fox 11 on Tuesday night.
“There’s no water coming out of the fire hydrants. This is an absolute mismanagement by the city. We’ve got a Mayor that’s out of the country and we’ve got a city that’s burning and there’s no resources to put out fires. If you look at your pictures, you don’t see the firefighters there because there’s nothing they can do. It looks like we’re in a third-world country here.”
Mr Caruso said there were “a lot of tough questions” that needed to be asked of the Mayor and other officials.
“Why didn’t you work to mitigate this? What was your brush mitigation program? The brush up in these hills that are controlled by the city and the county, I would bet you that they haven’t been handled, mitigated, pruned, removed for probably 30 or 40 years. This was a disaster waiting to happen.”
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power chief executive Janisse Quinones on Wednesday pleaded with people to save water, after hydrants in Pacific Palisades ran dry overnight.
She said three million-gallon tanks used to supply the neighbourhood’s more than 20,000 residents were exhausted by 3am on Wednesday.
“I need our customers to really conserve water … because the fire department needs the water to fight the fires,” Ms Quinones said.
“We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging.”
Los Angeles Mayor faces calls to resign
Ms Bass was 12,000 kilometres away when the fires turned the city into an apocalyptic hellscape on Tuesday.
She had travelled as part of a US delegation to Ghana for the inauguration of President John Dramani Mahama.
“RESIGN! WHY ARE YOU IN GHANA?!” one person commented on a post by her office giving an update on the wildfires.
“Resign in disgrace,” another said.
“There’s no water Karen,” a third wrote said.
Former US Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell also noted Bass’ absence in a post on X, writing, “The national media hasn’t even mentioned that Karen Bass is in Africa while our city is literally burning to the ground.”
Ms Bass was back in the city by Wednesday afternoon, sharing a video touring the devastation with California Governor Gavin Newsom — but that did not stop the flood of criticism.
“You cut funding to the fire department by nearly $20 million and wasted taxpayer dollars travelling to Africa while your city burned. You should be recalled,” one person wrote.
Another said, “You pulled ~10’s of millions of dollars from the Fire Department budget. They couldn’t check to make sure hydrants were connected to water reservoirs — and now they have no water. You failed and people have died — others have lost everything. Competence matters. Resign.”
Ms Bass reportedly cut fire department funding by $US17.6 million ($28.3 million) months before the fires.
Trump lets rip over bushfire catastrophe
Meanwhile, President-elect Donald Trump weighed in on the unfolding crisis on Wednesday by blaming Governor Newsom.
“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,” Mr Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!”
He said in another post, “The fires in Los Angeles may go down, in dollar amount, as the worst in the History of our Country. In many circles, they’re doubting whether insurance companies will even have enough money to pay for this catastrophe. Let this serve, and be emblematic, of the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the Biden/Newscum Duo. January 20th cannot come fast enough!”
Mr Trump’s comments echoed similar claims he made during the election campaign. At the time, he threatened to withhold federal disaster relief funding to California.
“We’re going to take care of your water situation, and we’ll force it down his throat,” Mr Trump said at an October 12 rally in Coachella, California.
“And we’ll say, Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving you any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires.”
A spokeswoman for Mr Newsom on Wednesday accused Mr Trump of “playing politics” as the fires raged.
“There is no such document as the water restoration declaration — that is pure fiction,” she told NBC News.
“The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.”
The outlet noted Mr Trump appeared to be referring to a 2020 presidential memorandum he signed that sought to divert water from northern California to farmland in the centre and the south of the state.
At the time, Mr Newsom and then-California Attorney-General Xavier Becerra denounced the move as a “harmful attack on our state’s critical ecosystems and environment”.
“We will file legal action in the coming days to challenge the federal biological opinions to protect highly imperilled fish species close to extinction,“ Mr Newsom said.
Trump ally, billionaire Elon Musk, echoed his criticisms on X and shared a number of posts attacking state and local officials.
“These fires are easily avoidable, but nonsense regulations in California prevent action being taken, so year after year homes burn down and more people die,” Mr Musk wrote.
In another post he accused the Los Angeles Fire Department of prioritising DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — “over saving lives and homes”.
Mr Musk was reacting to a post by Libs of TikTok who shared an image of the department’s 2021 “racial equity plan”.
“The LA Fire Dept passed a ‘racial equity plan’ to end ‘systemic, institutional, and structural racism’ in LA. Part of it is a chart to map out the race of every employee to make sure they’re racially diverse enough,” the post said.
The Tesla chief executive shared another post questioning why water storage and reservoirs had not been built following a 2014 ballot measure.
“In 2014, Californians overwhelmingly voted to spend billions on water storage and reservoirs,” Libs of TikTok wrote.
“Gavin Newsom still hasn’t built it. Now no water is coming out of the fire hydrants.”
Actor James Woods, who lost his home in the Palisades, slammed one user on X who blamed the fires on climate change.
“This fire is not from ‘climate change’, you ignorant a**hole,” he wrote.
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“It’s because liberal idiots like you elect liberal idiots like Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass. One doesn’t understand the first thing about fire management and the other can’t fill the water reservoirs.”
Brad Gerstner, founder of tech investment firm Altimeter Capital, said “heads should roll in LA and Sacramento”.
“The total failure of leadership with regard to these fires are impeachable offences,” he wrote. “This adds to the long list of failed progressive experiments that have crushed this state — California’s next Reagan revolution is getting closer by the day.”
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