Posted on 11/15/2023 10:16:28 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Some decisions are so negligent and with consequences so predictably disastrous that only a Big Stupid Government could ever make them. Over the weekend, a massive fire under I-10 at E. 14th Ave. in Los Angeles was severe enough to cause structural damage bad enough to close that section of the freeway "indefinitely."
The miracle — thanks to Big Stupid Government — is that it didn't happen sooner.
With more than 300,000 vehicles being rerouted each and every day until further notice, frustrated Los Angelenos demanded answers — and, on Tuesday, they got one.
"Bad actors" caused the fire, according to State Fire Marshal Daniel Berlant.
Some unknown arsonist is believed to have started Saturday's blaze, but that's not the "bad actor" to whom Berlant was referring. You see, the city government leases underpass space to people and companies for storage. In this case, "bad actors" filled the underpass with wooden pallets and containers of alcohol-based hand sanitizer.
In my report on Monday (and at the top of this story), you can see the pallets stacked so high under the freeway that they're almost touching the underside of the elevated road. The photos were courtesy of Google Street View, so it isn't like the towers of literal kindling were some dark secret.
The city is currently in a legal battle with a company called Airspace that leased the underpass storage area.
Let us pause here to consider the ill-considered wonder of stuffing underpasses full of kindling and flammable goo. Let us pause again to consider the bone-crushing stupidity of allowing unpoliced homeless encampments filled with vagrants, addicts, and the mentally ill to cohabitate with pallets and accelerants.
"Giving money and power to government," P.J. O'Rourke quipped, "is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Fortunately, this fire didn't have nearly as much fuel to burn and only resulted in some traffic slowdowns.
“We Now Know”. We knew day 1 about the underpass storage.
Yes the homeless are every where along the freeways on L.A.
Homeless is a big business for the non-profits and the city/county governments
Inside of 60 years, LA went from a shinny new big modern city, where most everyone was civil and united, to what it is today...Pure madness and decline in every direction...
That’s pretty much the rest of the country.
Newsom will do to America what he’s done to California.
stacks of pallets make excellent kindling
they sit out in the sun for a long time, so they’re completely dried-out, and if they do catch fire, there’s lots of airflow in the pallets to quickly grow the fire
and for that reason, they’re USUALLY stored in places where there’s nothing else around to catch fire ...
Yes it was, good government, schools etc.
No oh hell no. I hate the place I was born in
The worst part is, they had the example of Atlanta from 2017 on this. There, it was HDPE plastic fiber optic conduit, huge rolls of the stuff. Burned really nicely, took out a key section of I-85 for a month and a half.
You’d think after that every state and local DOT would be on their toes for this sort of thing. You would think wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_85_bridge_collapse
Newsome didn’t do it on his own. It was well underway long before Schwartzenegger. Fully approved by Fruit and Nut leftists.
Humans created cities/towns/villages many thousands of years ago to protect ourselves from harm. We are regressing into primitives.
Inside of 60 years, LA went from a shinny new big modern city, where most everyone was civil and united, to what it is today...
Atlanta suffered a similar fire a half dozen years ago on I85. Overpass was leased out for storage and homeless used it as a camp. Homeless started a fire that cause the overpass to collapse.
L.A. City is to blame for not getting the big meeting with China. Had they landed it, the homeless problem would have been cleaned up, at least for a week or two.
GTFO. I left Cal for Utah in 1982. You can do it. Just GTFO.
Search for “1866 East 14th Street, Los Angeles, CA” with Google Maps, then switch to Street View to see the “before” pictures.
Excess inventory of hand sanitizer containers left over from COVID most likely.
BINGO. In a sense, it doesn’t matter what started it. Fires happen, whether it’s homeless warming fires, stealing electricity, or whatever. If a small fire involving homeless tents or their shopping carts had broken out, the FD could send out a single engine, pull a line off the rack, and have it out in 10 minutes. The fact that the State allowed massive amounts of combustible material to be stored under a large unsprinklered area is criminal negligence.
There is (or was) so much unused/unsold sanitizer in Southern California that producers were desperate to find storage locations.
Companies that had the ability to produce sanitizer - be they cosmetic companies, alcohol distilleries and others - were “all in” during the first six or so months of the pandemic. The major producers (i.e. Purell etc) had major supply problems not so much with the alcohol, but they had a dozen different models each required a different type of bag to refill. They couldn’t get the correct bags produced and delivered, so everyone switched to bottled sanitizer and refillable dispensers. Accordingly the FDA granted an exemption to allow non-FDA producers to make sanitizer.
I toured a warehouse mid 2021 I considered renting. It was filled 10 wide, 3 pallets high, 80 pallets deep with excess sanitizer production. The location I ended up renting had 4 trailers full of sanitizer (which they moved out so I could move in) and ended up leaving half dozen more pallets on the street marked “free”. I have heard of many more locations full of sanitizer and it’s not easy or inexpensive to dispose of.
Some companies just overproduced trying to capitalize on the Pandemic (and, possibly, to generate offsetting revenues since some of them did lose revenues from the shutdowns). So it’s no surprise to me that there are still tons of sanitizers stored all over the place. I’d expect fire marshalls to step up policing - assuming they know where to look. In this case, it was in plain sight. Alongside kindling (which was probably treated wood, more toxic to breathe).
I didn’t know if it was a campfire gone wild, but now it seems to have been arson as there is apparently a ring of burn around the fence. Whether the arsonists knew that he had this special circumstance of alcohol and wood as accelerants is anybody’s guess.
Probably a contractor hired by government to store tons of excess hand sanitizer bought by the city or state with fed COVID grants - excess, as in, a payoff to a favored hand sanitizer contractor.
Exactly why they have no incentive to fix it. Its a magic cash machine the more tax dollars to throw at it the bigger the problem becomes.
30 years and tens of billions of dollars later there are 10 times more homeless than when we started.
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