In an exclusive interview on "The Alex Marlow Show," Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT), a former aerial firefighter, explained the scope of the Los Angeles wildfires, the government's role in them, and the environmental policies that making firefighting more difficult.
The post Exclusive—‘No Excuse’: Former Aerial Firefighter Sen. Tim Sheehy Details What CA Got Wrong Ahead of Wildfire Disaster appeared first on Breitbart.
There was “no excuse” for California not to be prepared for the wildfires engulfing Los Angeles County, Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT), a former aerial firefighter, explained during a Friday interview on The Alex Marlow Show with Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.
Sheehy detailed the scope of the Los Angeles wildfires, the government’s role in the disaster, and the environmental policies that make firefighting more difficult.
Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL who founded the aerial fire fighting company Bridger Aerospace, explained that “the entire wildland fire community” has been sounding the alarm for years that “we are entering an era of complete unpreparedness” in fighting wildfires.
Sheehy noted that over the past 18 months there have been increasingly destructive wildfires in states as far-flung as Hawaii, New Jersey, and Texas; and, thus, he argued that there was “no excuse” for California to have been unprepared for a similar situation.
“It’s not just me saying it,” he said. “The entire wildland fire community has really been screaming from the rooftops for years that we are entering an era of complete unpreparedness for these types of disasters. Just look at the last 18 months. Lahaina, Maui — remember that was wiped off the map? One hundred people [were] killed. In December and November, we had fires burning in New Jersey. Last year in February, March, we had the Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas, [the] largest fire in Texas history, second largest fire in American history. And then, of course, now we’re seeing literally… L.A. burning to the ground in front of us.”
Sheehy added that wildfires were “threats we can prepare for and can fight.”
“What we’re seeing in L.A. particularly is the confluence and culmination of decades of wrong-headed policies that have put common sense on the back burner and instead prioritized a bunch of really goofy priorities,” he said.
Tim Sheehy, founder and CEO of the aerial firefighting company Bridger Aerospace, stands in front of his super scooper plane in Bozeman, Montana, on January 18, 2024. (Louise Johns/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Tim Sheehy’s super scooper airplane is serviced at the Bridger Aerospace hangar in Bozeman, Montana, on January 18, 2024. (Louise Johns/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
He noted that the wildfires that occurred in California were not a “Pearl Harbor moment where the first time it ever happened, nobody saw it happen.”
“This has been happening all the time. I mean, Paradise, California, wiped off the map; Lahaina, Maui, wiped off the map; as I said all the other fires I listed,” Sheehy explained. “This threat is not a one-time out-of-nowhere typhoon. This is something that happens every single year for decades. And there’s no excuse not to be prepared. I think for those in the industry, we were more prepared about 30, 40 years ago. We had a far more supportive environment for what we called full suppression, which is when we basically have a lot of helicopters, a lot of airplanes, a lot of firefighters ready to go.”
Sheehy explained that we had been seeing a “massive decrease in suppression preparedness,” and he attributed the decrease in wildfire suppression preparedness to environmentalists who have “taken over” and said, “‘Nope, fighting fire is bad.’”
He noted in particular the resistance from environmentalists to the use of water additives in fighting fires.
“Every other country in the world that fights wildfire puts foam and gel additives into the water so when they spray the fire, just like a fire extinguisher, the water foams up and is three to six times more effective to suppress that fire,” Sheehy explained. “Every other country in the world does that, except for, ding, ding, ding, America. And, why? Because the environmentalists have said, ‘Nope, those foams could be bad for the endangered goldfish in that pond, so therefore you can’t use that.’”
“Two things can be true,” Sheehy added. “We can want to protect our environment and take care of our endangered species. We can also want to protect our communities and protect our people from getting burned alive and their houses burned down. We can do both. Right now, we’ve chosen, instead to prioritize the protection of spotted owls, and trees, and salamanders, and goldfish instead of our communities.”
The Alex Marlow Show, hosted by Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow, is a weekday podcast produced by Breitbart News and Salem Podcast Network. You can subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Rumble, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
