The human toll from the 2025 California fires is heartbreaking. In my mind it rivals the damage from Katrina. So many people’s lives have been torn apart. I hope everyone does something, contributes something, to help out those who have been hurt. You can reach out personally. You can support the Red Cross. You can find GoFundMe pages like this one which is a recovery fund for Black residents of Altadena and Pasadena.

Every one of us can find a way make a difference for someone.

I wanted to write about two aspects of the fire and our reactions.

First of all, who is to blame?

We will all come up with our own story about why these fires got to be so catastrophic. That’s what the human brain does; we are all story-telling machines. We should remember, though, that our brains use stories as a very quick way to make sense of a situation. Whatever we believe is just a story. There are other stories, and that stories are just shortcuts used to explain reality, they are not reality.

Finding blame is one way our limbic systems create or latch onto stories to make sense of situations.

It’s likely that there wasn’t a thing anyone could have done over the last ten years to prevent these fires or materially affect their impact.

Here is something from Joe Rogan this past summer, 6-7 months before the fire:

I talked to a fireman once, this is one of the reasons it freaked me out, and he was telling me, he goes, “Dude, one day,” he goes, “It’s just going to be the right wind and fire’s going to start in the right place and it’s going to burn through LA all the way to the ocean, and there’s not a fucking thing we can do about it.” I go, “Really?” He goes, “Yeah, we just get lucky.” He goes, “We get lucky with the wind.”

He goes, “But if the wind hits the wrong way, it’s just going to burn straight through LA and there’s not going to be a thing we could do about it.” Because these fires are so big, dude. You’re talking about thousands of acres that are burning simultaneously with 40 mile an hour winds, and the wind’s just blowing embers through the air and those embers are landing on roofs and those houses are going up and they’re landing on bushes, and those bushes are going up and everything’s dry. And once it happens, it happens in a way where it’s so spread out that there’s nothing they can do. There’s nothing they can do.

This time our luck ran out. This was that wind, and instead of 40 miles an hour, it was 60-80. Even worse,

This echoes what I personally feel. Sometimes there is just a disaster, and there really is nothing you can do to prevent it.

Of course, that’s not to say that the optics of the actions taken by powers that be in LA and the state of California are good.

If I were Mayor of LA and was aware a disaster would strike at some point, I might not cut the firefighting budget.

If I’d been warned by experts that a fire was imminent (as both the LA mayor and the California governor were four days before the fire) I probably wouldn’t have gone abroad on an international junket.

If I’d been governor during the Bobcat Fire in 2020, and I’d pledged to do whatever I could to mitigate the risks of future fires in the LA/Pasadena area, I would have done something.

And in hindsight it certainly looks like the decision to turn down federal funds to increase the water supply in that area backfired.

What could have been done over the last five years to prepare emergency evacuation routes? Many people who were stuck in fleeing traffic that wasn’t moving were told to get out of their cars and walk, and then construction equipment had to bulldoze those vehicles out of the roadway to make room for first responders. Where was the evacuation plan? That says a lot.

Still, none of these would have prevented this fire, and probably none of these would have had a significant effect on minimizing the damage of the fire. In terms of lives lost, we will probably see death rates around 50, out of a population of millions. More than we’d like, and certainly our hearts are with all those families who have been hit, but the Lahaina Wildfire in Maui, with a population of about 13,000 people, killed over 100. A similar death rate in these fires would have killed tens of thousands of people. Thankfully we are not even close.

Pasadena and Altadena are in what systems people call chaos, a volatile situation with no immediate cure. In Chaotic situations, actions need to be taken to return to safety and equilibrium. Anything else is a waste of energy until the situation stabilizes. Any effort looking at causes, blame, long term plans, should be postponed until the situation is stabilized.

Focus on helping the people in need. Act, Sense, Respond.

You can find out more about how to approach different types of situations in the MindShifting: Resilient Mindsets for Long-Term Success course.

The second aspect I want to write about is Trump and his comments.

Trump has blamed California Governor Newsom for the blaze, and he lambasted Newsom, the entire state government and firefighting team, and LA Mayor Karen Bass as being grossly incompetent.

Arguments against Trump’s pronouncements are numerous:

1. They contain many inaccuracies
2. They don’t help solve the problem
3. They deflect attention away from the areas of most importance
4. They violate what our mothers taught us, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

And then there are counterarguments against these.

But for me, the genius of Trump’s remarks relate to his goals. Trump got exactly what he wanted.

• First of all, Trump craves attention. Look at all the media, social media, and real-life attention he has generated.
• Second, he cut down an enemy when they were weakest. It’s payback. Newsom rejected a number of Trump initiatives. Newsom has insulted Trump. Trump struck back now that Newsom’s power and approval are low. It’s going to be hard for Newsom to realize any future national run for office at this point.

Trump knows what he wants, and he is ultra focused on saying what he needs to accomplish that. The media and we feed that with our reactions. We say we want different pronouncements, yet we do the things that encourage those same statements and actions. Our cognitive dissonance is a very human cognitive deficiency.

Let me end with one last plea. Do something to help the California victims.