Rep. George Whitesides: Major Fires Pose 'existential' Threat To California

LOS ANGELES — Rep. George Whitesides has spent years thinking about how to prevent out-of-control wildfires. Only days into his job as a freshman congressman from northern Los Angeles County, he returned to a region ablaze with exactly the kind of “megafires” he’s warned about.

The Democrat, a former CEO of Virgin Galactic and chief of staff at NASA, made headlines in November by winning one of the most competitive House districts in the country. His victory was among the rare bright spots for the party in a year that saw widespread Republican gains.

As Los Angeles battles the flames that have already destroyed thousands of homes and killed at least 10 people, Whitesides is monitoring the fires and helping constituents. It’s a role he’s uniquely positioned to play: In the years before joining Congress, he made combating fast-spreading, large-scale fires a core part of his work, advocating for policies to prevent their “existential” risk to the region.

As officials in California and Washington D.C. deploy emergency aid to those whose lives and homes have been devastated, Whitesides already has an eye on how the country can prevent the next big one — and what Congress must do to make it happen.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This has been quite an eventful week for you: going from being sworn in in D.C. to having your district and the Los Angeles area face fast-moving wildfires. What is it like settling into a job representing a district where you immediately have such an intense situation like this?

To be perfectly frank, a big part of why I ran was around the issue of wildfires. I started this organization called Megafire Action, and I've been involved in a space-based nonprofit project that's actually going to launch a first satellite soon that would detect the perimeters of fires, which is super important, because for one evening, we didn't have good perimeters. On the first big night, we didn't have good perimeters because we couldn't fly the planes.

Part of why I ran was because of this risk, which I viewed as existential to the folks in our district. And it just so happens that the thing that I was most terrified of has just hit other parts of LA County. But that risk still exists for our community, and it exists all over the West. So we need to have a national conversation about how we're going to address these kinds of huge climate risks that we see coming down the road.

You’ve spoken about the different components to managing megafires, including adapting communities, the landscapes themselves, and talking about using new types of fire management technology. How do you see those components functioning in LA County? 

We live in a fire-adapted landscape in Southern California, and so fires have always been present. Humans are not adapted to that fire. We have to develop a new relationship with fire, and that is going to take a lot of resources, it’s going to take the changing of our behavior, of what we're comfortable with. It's a big effort, and we need to use the latest science to keep ourselves relatively safer.

I don't want to get too deep in the weeds, but what I would say is those three principles that I talked about are still true. I still think that we need to pay our wildland firefighters better and give them a real career path, because we're having a lot of trouble, particularly at the federal level, to fill the recruitment pipeline. People are going to other stuff, they're going to structured departments, city fire departments, because it’s — I don't want to say easier, but it's better compensated work, and it's year-round work.

We’ve got to make sure that the workforce side is solid. That workforce side enables us to start doing the wildland fuels management that we know we need to do. People are surprised when I tell them that the rate at which we need to do fuels management is probably 10 to 100 times the speed that we're doing it now. It's hard for us to conceive of doing that.

We need to have much more comfort around prescribed burns, but we also need to develop technologies that enable us to keep those burns safer. Because, you know, you can have a situation like where in New Mexico, they had a prescribed burn that escaped, and then it was a huge fire.

I use the analogy of a ticking time bomb. These prescribed burns are trying to clip the right wire on bombs that we're literally living next to. It's hard to do that, and sometimes the bombs go off — and so that's another big part of things, field management.

We know we can do more in terms of community hardening or community resilience. Who has actually ripped out those favorite rose bushes that are right next to their house? Some people do it, but does everybody do it? No. And so we really need to get much more rigorous about that if we want to keep these houses safe.

Because once these wildland-originated fires go into a densely packed subdivision, the fuel is the houses. You’ve got trees, but when some of the houses start going on fire, it just goes house to house. That's what we saw in Lahaina, too, that’s what we saw in Marshall, and that’s what we saw in Pacific Palisades, where you have these densely packed subdivisions, where it just goes house to house to house, and it's all over.

And then the last piece is technology. I got into this because I think that we can use technology better. Is it the only answer? No. You have a lot of the fire professionals who are like, ‘Oh God, another technology guy saying technology's the answer.’ It’s not the only answer, but it is part of the answer. And on a really bad day, like what we just went through on Tuesday morning … when the wind is blowing 80 miles an hour, if you don't get to it in less than five minutes, it's over.

We have technologies that could potentially do something in that time frame. And so when you have something that is going to cost [based on some current estimates] maybe $50 billion, and could do it again in five years or 10 years, I think it makes sense to be spending more to come up with technologies that could actually do suppression in that small amount of time that we have.

Speaking about the potential costs, President Biden declared the fires a major disaster and said this morning that the federal government would cover 100 percent of the costs for the first 180 days. What else do you think the federal government can and should be doing in response, and what role do you think Congress specifically should play?

Clearly near-term, we've got to provide the financial support to these communities so that they can rebuild and rebuild their lives, rebuild their houses and rebuild their communities,

But in the longer term, if we just do that, we will still have failed because this is going to keep happening. And if we don't look at it from what I like to call a systems-architect perspective, looking at the whole problem, we're not serving our country. We've got to go down to the basics and understand, what can we do? What can't we do? And we have to understand the systematic impact of living in a world that has higher fire risk.

They are thinking about the insurance implications in particular, right? Unless we work on this stuff, we're going to be in a bad place when it comes to reinsurance and all of these more financial aspects. So yes, we need to, in the near term, provide these communities with help. But in the long term, we need to start making these long-term investments in fuels management, in new technologies, in workforce compensation. Those are the things that are going to help us bring our risk down and enable us to continue to live in these areas that we love.

In one week, President Trump will take office. He has blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom and California’s political leadership for the fires, and in the past has suggested that he might withhold federal aid from California. Do you worry at all about how the response to the fires will shift on Jan. 20?

The fact of the matter is that disasters strike all parts of this country, and we need to have a president who represents all of us. And my sincere hope is that the incoming administration will help the Americans in Southern California, just as I hope they help the Americans in North Carolina, who recently went through their own tragedy.

At the end of the day, I'm someone who wants to work across the aisle. And there are leaders on the other side of the aisle in wildfire issues. [California GOP Rep.] Doug LaMalfa is one of them, and there are others — we need to bring together a coalition of folks in the American West of both parties, not just to help the folks who need help today, but to work on these systemic issues that will keep or lower the risk for all of our communities.

What do you expect is ahead for you in the next couple of days, as firefighters work to contain and to stop the spread of the Hurst fire, but also the other large ones in the area?

My hope is that the Hurst Fire is fully contained, and is managed to a successful conclusion. And in particular, I'm thinking about [this week], when we have a new Santa Ana predicted, which can get fires to come back up.

I think as a delegation, California is going to be working to make sure that we do everything we can to bring the resources back to help rebuild the communities that have been devastated. And then my hope is to serve as a strong voice for working on these systematic issues — which won't be an emergency bill, it's going to be in bills that address the structure of the forest service workforce, that address what kinds of things aerial technologies can do. That kind of longer-term planning that I hope that we can get to once we take care of people in the near term.