Today, I had the opportunity to interview NCFPD Chief Keith McReynolds in the wake of the devastating fires in Los Angeles. While I’m not an expert on fire preparedness or infrastructure, the situation in Los Angeles appears to be a perfect storm of inadequate infrastructure planning, poor coordination in preparedness efforts, and a concerning tendency to prioritize ideology over capability when hiring or electing leaders. Based on media coverage, these factors seem to have played a significant role in the challenges faced during this crisis.Since the Gavilan Fire decades ago, I have been impressed with how our chiefs and their teams learned from our previous fires and created new systems and plans for the next disaster. With our climate and terrain, it’s not a matter of “if,”
