WSJ What’s News - L.A. Utility Lacked Common Wildfire Safety Measures

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

A.M. Edition for Jan. 10. As investigators look for the cause of deadly wildfires around Los Angeles, regulatory filings show one of city’s municipal utilities didn’t proactively shut off power in areas ravaged by blazes – a practice turned to by other utilities when fire risk is high. Plus, what to expect as the TikTok ban heads to the Supreme Court. And WSJ reporter José de Córdoba explains how the prospect of U.S. military strikes on Mexican drug cartels in Donald Trump’s second term are rattling the country’s political circles. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the director of The Greatest Showman comes the most original musical ever. I want to prove I can make it. Prove to who? Everyone. So, the story starts. Better Man, now playing in select theaters. The death toll climbs and thousands scramble for a place to stay as wildfires continue to rage in Los Angeles.

Plus the earth records its hottest year ever, shooting past a key climate threshold. And Mexico worries Donald Trump could order military strikes against drug cartels south of the border. What really terrifies the Mexicans is that it would be unilateral U.S. actions. It would be a disastrous blow for the relationship, probably ending all military and security cooperation. It's Friday, January 10th. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal and here is the AM edition of What's News,

the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. Ten people have now been confirmed dead in connection with wildfires around Los Angeles that have destroyed more than 10,000 structures. Firefighters are now battling a new blaze straddling LA and Ventura counties that began yesterday and has already spread to nearly a thousand acres. Dangerous weather conditions which have fanned blazes are expected to persist today, with officials warning that high winds are forecast to return early next week, potentially worsening fires that are not brought under control over the weekend.

In the Oceanside neighborhood of Pacific Palisades alone, some 5,300 homes, businesses and other buildings have been destroyed or damaged and the fire there is just 6% contained. Meanwhile, the massive Eaton Fire north of Pasadena remains 0% contained and has also damaged or destroyed more than 5,000 structures, including the home of Bridget Berg, a local who returned with her family to survey what remained. Today, I think the, you know, my family and the kids wanted to come back and see. See what it was. I watched this house burned down.

Live on on the news while I was at work, so just to kind of make it real and see what was here. I don't think I didn't expect to find much, but there's a few keepsakes. She is among thousands who've lost their homes or are under evacuation orders and who now face the daunting task of finding temporary shelter and longer-term accommodation. According to home listing site Zillow, LA had a shortage of 337,000 units in 2022, part of a chronic housing shortage that's triggered a sharp rise in property prices, especially for single-family units. Mayor Karen Bass yesterday pledged to try and clear red tape

to aggressively rebuild affected areas, but officials have cautioned that the scale of devastation could make that process long and difficult. In the meantime, as investigators try to look for the cause of the fires, we exclusively report that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power hasn't implemented a safety protocol to proactively shut off parts of its system in order to reduce the risk caused by sparks from its power lines in wind storms. That's according to regulatory filings. Power lines in California have ignited some of the nation's most deadly and destructive

fires in the past, and every other big power provider in the state has such a measure in place. An LADWP spokeswoman said the utility has other safety measures in place and added that widespread power outages pose risks to critical city and emergency services. The Hotest Year on Record 2024 was the hottest year on record, according to new meteorological data released today by the EU, UK, and Japan. Those findings show that the temperature jump last year made the earth more than 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than in the pre-industrial era

surpassing a key threshold in international climate diplomacy a Massive 2018 study by the United Nations found that holding global temperatures below that level could avert irreversible damage to coral reefs Keep Antarctic ice sheet loss at bay and prevent human death and suffering ice sheet loss at bay and prevent human death and suffering. According to Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service, each of the past 10 years was one of the 10 warmest years on record. TikTok is scheduled to argue its case before the Supreme Court today, which is deciding whether the government can ban it if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, doesn't divest itself of the platform by January 19th.

ByteDance has said selling TikTok is technologically, commercially and legally infeasible. Journal Supreme Court reporter Jess Braven says TikTok's arguments today are expected to center around free speech. And they're going to say that when the government wants to restrict speech under the First Amendment, it has to show that there is no less restrictive way to achieve that interest. And here TikTok says the government fails that test. They say that the government hasn't shown that this app really is a national security threat and the government acknowledges that China, the foreign adversary designated by

law, hasn't used it in a way to undermine U.S. national security yet. And TikTok is going to argue that there are less restrictive ways to address it. For example, greater disclosure, disclosing to Americans that the app is collecting a lot of data about them. What's the government's point of view? Foreign adversary governments have no First Amendment rights inside the United States, and so it's not even appropriate to look in that direction. And for more on what the arguments on both sides are likely to be, check out today's

episode of our Tech News Briefing Podcast. Well, speaking of the Supreme Court, justices have rejected a last-ditch effort by Donald Trump's lawyers to block his criminal sentencing for covering up hush money paid to an adult film star, clearing the way for an unprecedented court proceeding that will brand the president-elect as a felon to go ahead today in New York. The presiding judge in the hush money case, Juan Mirchan, is likely to address Trump in court and speak about the conduct that led to his guilty verdict last May, though he's made clear he won't order a prison term and will sentence the president-elect to an unconditional discharge, which carries

no punishment. And in markets today, investor focus will be on December's jobs report, set for release at 8.30 a.m. Eastern. Economists polled by the journal expect the unemployment rate to hold steady at 4.2 percent, with the U.S. economy adding just north of 150,000 jobs in December, down from 227,000 in November. The data will be a key input for Fed policymakers ahead of their next interest rate decision due January 29. Coming up, could Donald Trump order missile strikes against Mexico's drug cartels?

The journal's José de Córdova joins us to discuss the president-elect's possible moves targeting organized crime south of the border and how they could reshape the U.S.-Mexico relationship after the break. Donald Trump has long been a hot topic of conversation in Mexican political circles, but the journals Jose de Córdova in Mexico City reports that a once unthinkable action that the incoming president could take has lately been dominating the discussion. That's the prospect of U.S. military action on Mexican soil targeting drug cartels. Jose, we have discussed here on the podcast before Trump's potential trade policy with Mexico. We've talked about, of course,

immigration, but not specifically how the president-elect might go after Mexican organized crime. What is potentially on the table? What's on the table is some sort of U.S. military action to basically take on Mexico's cartels, which are responsible for most of the fentanyl that is being smuggled into the United States that, as you know, is responsible for something like 70,000 overdose deaths a year. Trump mused about missile strikes against drug labs during his first term and taking military action against the cartels was also a big part of his policies during the campaign. Since he won the election, people who will be taking top positions in his governing team have also echoed his policy prescriptions.

Jose, is it at all clear whether that would be the kind of thing, I mean, we're in the realm of hypotheticals here, but that would involve Mexican government cooperation or is this kind of a unilateral US move? It's unclear. What really terrifies the Mexicans is that it will be unilateral US actions that would keep them out of the scene. That would really cause a huge crisis in the relations between the two countries. And remember, these two countries are enormously close trade partners.

It would be a disastrous blow for the relationship, probably ending all Mexican military and security cooperation with the U.S. to begin. And it probably wouldn't do any good, because you have to remember that these labs, I've been to three or four of them. Many of them are in cities, you know, they're in like in a regular street. You would probably cause civilian casualties. And all these labs, they cost a couple hundred dollars to set up. They're total, totally movable.

And there's lots of them. You know, knocking out one lab or two labs or three labs wouldn't do absolutely anything to stop the flow of fentanyl going north. Pete Slauson Jose, what has the Mexican government response been to this? Jose Fajardo Well, the Mexican government response has said no way, you know, we are very happy to cooperate with you and face this together. There was one big bust just a short time ago in which Mexican security forces captured 1.3 tons of fentanyl, which is a huge amount of fentanyl.

And that was obviously, I think, done to telegraph to the US government that they're on the case. I think the Mexican strategy is, you know, let's show the Americans that we can crack down on these guys, therefore that they don't have to come and do anything that's going to be very difficult to walk back afterwards. And what do the Mexican people make of all of this? The violence in some parts of Mexico is such that polls show that in some cases, a majority of Mexicans would be supportive of U.S. military action as long as they were able to clean the area of the violence that plagues so much of Mexico. Nevertheless, it would cause a crisis with Mexico and a regional political crisis because

most, if not all, of Latin America would back the Mexican government position against the United States military intervention. Can we say, especially looking back at Trump's first term for any clues as to how this relationship might go, is that likely to be enough to get Trump off of this idea? Well, it's hard to say. You know, in the first term, you had lots of people in the US government who would talk Trump off his crazier ideas. You had the famous guardrails. There are no guardrails in the second term.

And so everybody is very scared. There won't be any resistance to his crazier ideas such as this one. Wall Street Journal reporter Jose de Córdova is in Mexico City. Jose, thank you so much. Well, thanks for having me on. It's always a pleasure. And that's it for What's News for this Friday morning. Today's show was produced by Daniel Bach with supervising producer Cristina Rocca and I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal.

We will be back tonight with a new show. Otherwise, have a great weekend and thanks for listening.