Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) refused to answer a reporter’s questions on whether or not she regrets touring to West Africa amid intensifying excessive climate warnings in her metropolis, which in the end led to essentially the most damaging wildfire in LA’s historical past.
Bass stayed tight-lipped for almost two minutes whereas being confronted by a Sky Information reporter about her latest journey to Ghana after touchdown at an airport Wednesday, video posted by reporter David Blevins reveals.
“Madam mayor, have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today who are dealing with this disaster?” Blevins asks within the video. “No apology for them?”
MediaNews Group/Orange County Register through Getty Photographs through Getty Photographs
“Do you think you should have been visiting Ghana while this was unfolding back home?” he continues.
Blevins additionally requested her about experiences that she not too long ago reduce town’s Fireplace Division annual finances by thousands and thousands of {dollars}. Although copies of the 2024-2025 finances revealed on-line present a drop in funds in comparison with the yr earlier than, Politico experiences that the LAFD was later given further funding, which raised the division’s annual finances by greater than $50 million in comparison with the yr earlier than.
Metropolis officers didn’t instantly reply to HuffPost’s requests for remark Thursday on that reported improve.
Bass returned to Los Angeles on Wednesday afternoon after attending the inauguration of Ghana’s president on Tuesday. She was a part of a four-person delegation despatched on President Joe Biden’s behalf.
Whereas overseas, Bass first warned residents Monday of “an expected destructive and potentially life-threatening windstorm” that might hit the LA space on Tuesday. The next day, the identical day the realm’s largest Pacific Palisades Wildfire began, she declared a neighborhood state of emergency.
However her critics have argued that there have been ample warnings concerning the fires within the days earlier than she left for her journey.
Late final week, the Nationwide Climate Service’s Los Angeles workplace warned of “extreme fire weather conditions” from Tuesday by way of Thursday.
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These warnings intensified over the following few days, with the Nationwide Climate Service on Monday warning of a “life-threatening, destructive, widespread windstorm” throughout a lot of Ventura and LA counties.
