Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to pump. As the California wildfires continue to reduce substantial portions of the Los Angeles area to ash, Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, LA’s possibly or possibly not fired lesbian Fire Chief and various other politicians are finger pointing and trying desperately to avoid questions while seeking someone, anyone to blame. While not every hydrant in the area was bone dry, far too many were, and the Chief don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout birthin’ no water:

Graphic: X Screenshot

We’re also learning more about the empty, 117-million-gallon Santa Yenez reservoir, which was initially said to have been empty for about a year due to a torn “floating cover.” The LA Times has published a photo from 2022 showing it empty then. Even better, there’s Google Earth evidence it may have been empty as far back as 2009:

Graphic: X Screenshot

Obviously, it may have been refilled, emptied, etc. since then, yet it’s certainly suggestive.

But wait. Wasn’t California supposed to have done something about water years ago? 

California voters approved a ballyhooed $7.5-billion bond issue eight-plus years ago thinking the state would build dams and other vital water facilities. But it hasn’t built zilch. True or false?

That’s the rap: The voters were taken. The state can’t get its act together.

In that article, The LA Times does its best to prop up California’s political sloth, but the fact remains when Californians needed water to save their homes, firefighters all too often had none and were reduced to standing there, watching homes burn to the ground. Some, beyond frustration, even resorted to using buckets, using what little water they had in fire engine internal tanks. This in a state that has yearly wildfires, but apparently has learned nothing and has money, homes and lives to burn.

Graphic: LA Dept. of Water and Power release. Public Domain.

The Daily Mail, doing work American Media won’t, notes LA’s water czar Janisse Quinones, an apparent DEI hire who makes $750,000 a year, knew about empty reservoirs and empty and broken hydrants long before the current firestorms. They apparently weren’t a priority.

But want a minute. Isn’t California on the Pacific Ocean, and aren’t oceans, you know, water? Isn’t Malibu rather closer to the ocean than the rest of the fire zones, which aren’t very far from it? Couldn’t, in a pinch, the ocean be a source of water for firefighting? Sure, salt water is corrosive, but it might be cheaper to replace fire trucks rather than lives and untold billions in property and memories.

If only there were an example of a nation bordering an ocean that had solved that problem…oh wait…there is! Scientific American—trust the science—explains: 

Ten miles south of Tel Aviv, I stand on a catwalk over two concrete reservoirs the size of football fields and watch water pour into them from a massive pipe emerging from the sand. The pipe is so large I could walk through it standing upright, were it not full of Mediterranean seawater pumped from an intake a mile offshore.

“Now, that’s a pump!” Edo Bar-Zeev shouts to me over the din of the motors, grinning with undisguised awe at the scene before us. The reservoirs beneath us contain several feet of sand through which the seawater filters before making its way to a vast metal hangar, where it is transformed into enough drinking water to supply 1.5 million people.

Only a few years back, Israel was short of water and now it has more than enough. Desalination provides 55% of Israel’s domestic water. Israel also recycles and treats 86% of its wastewater for irrigation, making the desert bloom. But isn’t delsalination expensive? Not so much:

Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents. Israeli households pay about US$30 a month for their water — similar to households in most U.S. cities, and far less than Las Vegas (US$47) or Los Angeles (US$58).

There’s no question California’s politicians have long prioritized lunatic wokery over providing the most basic services for citizens who pay among the highest taxes in the nation. In most respects, California’s water deficit is a choice rather than happenstance. But if little Israel can produce the water it needs from seawater, why can’t California, or does antisemitism extend to this too?

The states are “laboratories of democracy.” This particular one-party laboratory is producing only horror and destruction, and seems about as far from actual, productive science as it’s possible to get.

The old aphorism—"where there’s a will there’s a way”—probably doesn’t apply in California where the will seems to focus on virtue signaling rather than public virtue, and desalination can’t solve every ounce of California’s water dearth, but just maybe, it might have been handy when the current conflagration broke out—or maybe for the next?

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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.