California has to invest more money into fire prevention and upgrade its infrastructure to prevent future fires, California State Legislature Assembly Member Bill Essayli says.
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00:00Yeah, you've been calling for your state to be fireproofed. I'm just wondering whether you can
00:05tell our viewers what it means to fireproof California. Yeah, so it's a change of two things.
00:10One is what we spend our money on, and two, our policies. So, for example, in 2021, we spent $1
00:18billion on fireproofing, or I'm sorry, fire prevention. That's thinning brush and things
00:24like that. We now only spend $200 million. So there's been an 80% reduction in the budget on
00:29just basic things like fire prevention. We need to be investing a lot more than that, probably
00:34several billion dollars a year. We need to upgrade our infrastructure, not only our water
00:40infrastructure, but also our power lines. So you have to, California has been around a long time.
00:45We have power lines that are over a hundred years old that have not been updated or maintained.
00:50And sometimes a lot of these fires get started when the wind blows these power lines down,
00:54and they start a lot of the fires. So we need to upgrade our infrastructure,
00:57our water infrastructure, our power lines need to be undergrounded or upgraded. We need to change
01:03our rules so we can get back to thinning the forests or doing these prescribed burns, lowering
01:08the fuel load. There's a lot of things we can be doing as a government that we're just not doing
01:12right now.