Re: Reality Star Spencer Pratt Sues City Of L.A. After His Home Burns Down

On 2025-01-27 3:04 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

On Jan 27, 2025 at 1:30:42 AM PST, "Ubiquitous" <weberm@polaris.net> wrote:
 

Former reality star Spencer Pratt and his wife, former THE HILLS alum Heidi
Montag, have made good on their promise to sue the City of Los Angeles for
the destruction of their $3 million home in the wildfires earlier this month.
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The 41-year-old filed the lawsuit in California’s Superior Court in Los
Angeles County on Tuesday, saying the house fire was "an inescapable and
unavoidable consequence" of the city's alleged mismanagement of water, per
People. Other plaintiffs besides Pratt and Montag include Pratt's mother,
Janet Pratt, and someone named William Pratt.
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Pratt's lawsuit mentions the Santa Ynez Reservoir, described as being "out of
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commission since February 2024". The suit alleges that the City of Los
Angeles and the Department of Water and Power (LADWP) decided to "operate the
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water supply system" despite the drained reservoir to save money.

 The 'progressives' aren't interested in saving money per se. They're happy to
spend billions upon billions of tax dollars. It's just that they don't want to
waste it on something as boring and (to them) unnecessary as public safety.
They'd much prefer to take that money and spend it on vagrants or hand it over
to illegals.
 

"With the Santa Ynez Reservoir effectively out of commission, hydrants in
Pacific Palisades failed after three tanks each holding one million gallons
of water went dry within a span of 12 hours," the document states.
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"Defendants deliberately designed and maintained this water supply system in
this way, despite Los Angeles being in a fire-prone area," it said.
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Pratt and his fellow plaintiff's lawsuit also notes criticism previously
stated by a union employee.
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"It's completely unacceptable that this reservoir was empty for almost a year
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for minor repairs," Gus Corona told The Los Angeles Times in an article
published January 10, which the lawsuit references. "This work should have
been done in-house, and they shouldn't have depended on a contractor to do
it; I truly believe it's something that could have been avoided."

 Except they couldn't do it in-house. They were forced by Karen Bass's DEI
policies to hire outside contractors that support DEI.
 According to a LAFD firefighter, "the city will only purchase from vendors
that support DEI. So when we're repairing critical infrastructure or
purchasing necessary equipment so that we can do our jobs, we have to
patronize vendors that charge twice as much for the products and services
and/or take twice as long to deliver those products and services because they
practice DEI, rather than go with a vendor that saves taxpayers significant
money or can get us our equipment to us tomorrow.
 This is a firefighter. He's talking about ordering fire equipment. You know,
the stuff they use to save lives. But because of the DEI obsession in the
Karen Bass administration, the DEI vendors trump all others, no matter the
cost to taxpayers, no matter the amount of time firefighters have to go
without critical equipment. And how does a vendor even prove their DEI bona
fides to qualify under these idiotic rules? Do they have to send in a
spreadsheet of all their employees and which DEI boxes they check?
 The firefighter goes on to say, "DEI programs also put both firefighters and
the public in actual danger. I've personally witnessed in my own drill tower,
training officials passing women who couldn't meet the physical criteria that
the men did so that LAFD DEI goals were met regarding percentage of women
firefighters. They couldn't perform the required number of push-ups, hold a
hose line of a required size, throwing up a ladder of the required size. We no
longer require two firefighters to be able to throw up a 35-foot ladder
because of the number of women who were failing that requirement. So now a
35-foot ladder is designated for three firefighters, not two."
 Yep, this is what I want outside my house if it's on fire and I'm trapped
inside. I want them to hold a committee meeting down below to see if they have
enough men on the brigade to throw up the ladder with only two firefighters.
 Anyone who implements such policies should be immediately removed from office.
That person is obviously not just incompetent, but borderline insane.
 Of the leftists here on RAT, one of you please justify why a policy like this
should exist. Why critical fire equipment should be held hostage and cost the
taxpayer significantly more because of DEI; why abilities critical to saving
lives are being eliminated from the LAFD training requirements in service to
DEI.
 

"They never came. The gate was still locked," Pratt said. "They never came. I
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watched from my security cameras until our house burned down. There were no
fire trucks."

 Meanwhile, the fire department is doing now in anticipation of more high winds
what they didn't do back in early January and pre-positioning firefighters and
equipment in areas of high fire risk.
 That's gotta be giving their lawyers heartburn, because by doing so, they're
tacitly admitting it's what they should have done in the first place and
failed to do, which isn't going to be good for them when all the lawsuits
start hitting the courts.
 

Have the reservoirs been refilled yet? If not, I'm not sure what good pre-positioning firefighters and gear is going to do since they can't do much without water.
Also, is anyone giving thought to converting the equipment so that it works with sea water? According to an article I read, they can't really use sea water because it damages the equipment, at least in the long term. I can't help but wonder if the equipment could be coated or treated with something so that it better resists the damage caused by salt water.
I don't know if that is realistic though. Has anyone looked at the consequences of dumping large quantities of salt water on the ground? Is it going to kill the grass and trees and even make it impossible for things to grow where the salt water has been? Somebody needs to find existing research or even do new research to figure out if salt water is ever going to be a reasonable solution to large forest fires.
--
Rhino