Another year is underway, and already the first calamity is striking: horrific fires in Los Angeles which have produced some truly apocalyptic photographs and videos.

As of this writing, some quick stats from the Associated Press:

— 42 square miles consumed. Because we were curious, we used a web tool that calculates measurements based on points placed on Google Maps. How much is 42 square miles? Imagine an area from the slopes of Bald Eagle Mountain in the south to back past Farrandsville in the north — drawn from just past Mill Hall in the west to Jersey Shore in the east.

This area is expected to grow.

— 130,000 people under evacuation orders, with 2,000 structures destroyed so far.

— 80 mile-per-hour wind speeds. For reference, a category one hurricane has wind speeds of 75 mph.

— 0.1 inches of rainfall since May 2024.

Over the last several days that the fire has raged, there have been some truly horrendous takes as various personalities weigh in, ranging from blaming the government for the lack of rainfall to the affect of alleged DEI practices on fire departments to the classic “well, they deserved it.”

Remember that Google Maps overlay? Would every soul within Mill Hall, Lock Haven, McElhattan, Avis, Jersey Shore and more deserve it?

We know that being edgy is the lingo of the day. The proliferation of social media — especially quick-form, two-sentence posts with little space for thought or value –rewards trolls who post spicy one-liners to stir up engagement.

But we would push back against that notion, in particular: politics cannot persevere over empathy in the face of tragedy, or we are already lost as a people — which we do not believe to be the case.

This crisis, as is the case with most, is multifaceted –and anyone stating otherwise is trying to sell you something.

Sure, DEI practices could have contributed. But it is just as likely that funding cuts to the fire department (which was reduced by $17.6 million this fiscal year, per their posted budget) played a role.

Another problem: reporting by the LA Times has stated that the fire hydrants ran out of water.

From the Times: “By 3 a.m. Wednesday, all water storage tanks in the Palisades area ‘went dry,’ diminishing the flow of water from hydrants in higher elevations, said Janisse Quinones, chief executive and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the city’s utility.

‘We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades. We pushed the system to the extreme,’ Quinones said Wednesday morning. ‘Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.'”

Remember that 0.1 inch of rainfall since May 2024?

We are rapidly moving into a world where water is an increasingly critical component of our ability to support our society.

Perhaps we are already there.

This fire is in Los Angeles, which is in the south of California. If you look at a map, you’ll see how the state has kind of a dent in it along the coast — LA is in the middle of that dent.

Most of the inland area to the east of the city is desert, and the region’s water struggles have been widely reported over the last few years — relating both to infrastructure concerns and dramatically less rainfall than they typically get, smashed between the coast and a mountain ridge which shields from the inland desert.

Under that lens, sure, water problems make sense. They’re horrible, but they make sense.

Luckily, most of the rest of the country doesn’t have this problem, right?

There’s a story in today’s Express on page A8 about cutting-edge farming technology which is being unveiled at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

In it, founders, entrepreneurs and tech heads are touting the benefits of AI to farmers: “[Jacqueline] Heard, [CEO and co-founder of Enko Chem], said she wouldn’t be surprised if AI can one day help farmers map out their land, showing them the different soil types and what kinds of crops would grow best there.”

Pretty cool!

But those AI servers, it turns out, absolutely feast on water.

Reporting by the Washington Post in September 2024 found that, on average, using ChatGPT-4 to produce a 100-word email consumes roughly one bottle of water.

Consider how this scales up: the same report shows that sending that same, 100-word email request once weekly for a year by one out of ten Americans consumes over 435 million liters — the amount that all households in Rhode Island will use, again on average, over one and a half days.

As a reminder, Lycoming County is roughly the size of Rhode Island, although obviously much more sparsely populated.

What is happening in Los Angeles right now is a tragedy, full stop, and the people there deserve our empathy just as much as those ravaged by hurricanes Helene and Milton last year.

But there needs to be serious reflection about how our choices are feeding into this — and, we are sure, future crises.