OAN Staff Blake Wolf
10:45 AM – Wednesday, January 8, 2025
While swaths of regions in Los Angeles County are completely wiped away by raging wildfires, Los Angeles Democrat Mayor Karen Bass was reportedly attending a presidential inauguration in Ghana, West Africa.
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Multiple wildfires have broke out, devastating Los Angeles residents on Tuesday as the fire ripped through over 4,000 acres of land fanned by wind gusts peaking at 100 miles per hour.
Panicked residents quickly looked to their mayor for governmental support, only to realize that she was over 7,000 miles away on an unrelated political trip.
“Mayor Karen Bass is on a taxpayer-funded trip in Ghana right now. She previously defunded the budgets of both the firefighters and public works. Now her city is burning to the ground because they don’t have enough firefighters or water. Resign Mayor Bass,” one social media user wrote in an X post.
“LA Mayor Karen Bass laughing it up in Ghana while her city burns,” another added.
Bass reduced the budget of the Los Angeles Fire Department by $17.6 million this year, leaving firefighters battling the raging fires without adequate resources that they had in the past.
“Water supply just dropped,” one firefighter stated over the radio, according to the Los Angeles Times. “The hydrants are down.”
Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power confirmed reports of “empty hydrants” without providing further detail.
“The firefighters are there and there’s nothing they can do – we’ve got neighborhoods burning, homes burning, and businesses burning … it should never happen,” stated Rick Caruso, a former commissioner of the city’s water board and billionaire real estate developer.
Meanwhile, President-elect Donald Trump took to social media to place the blame on California Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.).
“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. 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 [to] blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
The major wildfires have claimed the lives of at least two people, with 0% of the fires currently contained, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Nevertheless, surfacing reports claim that Bass is now headed back to Los Angeles today and that she should be back in the city in a “few hours,” according to a source from the media outlet INKL News.
Bass was a member of a four-person U.S. presidential delegation that traveled to Ghana to attend the inauguration of John Dramani Mahama, the country’s new president.
Billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso, a fellow Democrat and the runner-up to Bass in the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral election, told Fox 11 that there has been a “failure” of leadership and management. He also noted that “everybody knew these winds were coming” and that the dire risk should have been anticipated.
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