When virtue signaling turns deadly

As the California wildfires began tearing through vast swaths of Los Angeles last week, a troubling reality emerged: The officials responsible for safeguarding the public were woefully unprepared, lacking a comprehensive disaster response plan to address the crisis.

Firefighters in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, where the first fire broke out, faced a critical obstacle: no access to water. Many fire hydrants, which had not been tested since the previous January, were discovered to have little or no water pressure. 

Further crippling firefighting efforts, the Los Angeles Times reported that the 117-million-gallon reservoir in the area was empty and offline.

On Jan. 2, the National Weather Service issued an urgent warning about the extreme fire danger posed by the hurricane-force Santa Ana winds expected in the

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