CA ‘Eco-Bureaucrats’ Thwarted Wildfire Prevention to Protect a Shrub

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A burnt car sits outside a destroyed home amid the rubble of the fire-ravaged Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates in Los Angeles, California, on January 13, 2025. Firefighters were battling massive wildfires on January 13 that have ravaged Los Angeles and killed at least 24 people, with officials warning of incoming dangerous winds that could whip up the blazes further. (Photo by AGUSTIN PAULLIER / AFP) (Photo by AGUSTIN PAULLIER/AFP via Getty Images)

Information is coming out about how environmentalists thwarted firefighters’ ability to prevent the devastation of California wildfires; all to protect a shrub. A wildfire prevention project near the Pacific Palisades was underway in 2019 by the LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP). The organization was replacing roughly 100-year-old power line poles that were cutting through the Topanga State Park.

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However, within days, the project was halted by conservationists that were outraged that federally endangered Braunton’s milkvetch plants had been trampled during the process.

According to the LA Times the goal of the project was to improve fire safety for the Pacific Palisades area by replacing the wooden poles with steel, widening fire-access lanes in the area, and installing wind- and fire-resistant power lines — all after the area was identified as having an “elevated fire risk.”

“This project will help ensure power reliability and safety, while helping reduce wildfire threats,” the LADWP said at the time. “These wooden poles were installed between 1933 and 1955 and are now past their useful service life.”

It was a pathetically minute piece of information that halted the entire project. The New York Post reports:

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After an amateur botanist hiking through the park during the work saw the harm done to some of the park’s Braunton’s milkvetch — a flowering shrub with only a few thousand specimens remaining in the wild — and complained, the project was completely halted, Courthouse News Service reported.

Instead of fire-hardening the park, the city — which the state said had undertaken the work without proper permitting — ended up paying $2 million in fines and was ordered by the California Coastal Commission to reverse the whole project and replant the rare herb.

That work saved about 200 Braunton’s milkvetch plants — almost all of which have now likely been torched in the wildfires that consumed Topanga Canyon, along with nearly 24,000 acres (37 square miles) of some of LA’s most sought-after real estate.

At least eight people have died and 5,000 homes have been destroyed by the fire, which was still just 14% contained as of Monday.

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