The fires that are raging in southern California are taking a terrible toll on lives and property. They have been intensified by the strong Santa Ana winds that reached high speeds passing through the funnel that makes up the valley and feeding on the dry vegetation.

Of course, whenever a disaster like this strikes, there is immediate finger-pointing at :(1) who or what might have been the cause of the fire; (2) who might be responsible for not responding correctly and quickly enough; and (3) who might be responsible for not anticipating the scale of the disaster and making sure that the response would be adequate. Some of this finger pointing is by people acting to deflect attention from themselves. But others indulging in this activity are those who have no connection to the events nor have any particular expertise in this area but still think they know what should have been done to deal with it and are not shy about sharing their conclusions.

Kevin Drum writes that this kind of after-the-fact pontificating is useless when you are dealing with events that lie outside the normal range that can be, and have been, anticipated, and this fire is one such event. He takes aim at one particular accusation, that authorities had not taken into account the amount of water needed is such a fire occurred in this location, and that using sea water or desalinated water would have helped.

The problem isn’t—and never has been—lack of water. The problem is pumping water up the hillside, where Pacific Palisades is. Seawater, whether desalinated or not, would be of no help.

The desire to prove that everyone else is incompetent is stupid bar stool talk. Smart people need to knock it off. The real story here is simple, even if no one wants to hear it: LA’s system of water cisterns was built to manage a disaster, but not the worst possible disaster ever. Nobody does that because it would cost a fortune.

For example: California codes require buildings to withstand roughly a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Quick: is that enough for Los Angeles? The Newport-Inglewood fault runs about ten miles from City Hall and can produce a magnitude 7.5 quake—but only every few hundred years. The San Andreas fault can produce earthquakes above magnitude 8.0, but never gets closer than 50 miles to LA.

So is 7.0 a high enough standard? Increasing it to 7.5—three times bigger—would be enormously expensive. And it’s a pretty unlikely event in LA. Should we do it anyway? You need to answer now, not after a worst-case event happens. It isn’t easy.

Unprecedented disasters will always strain resources to the breaking point. There might be incompetence or ordinary mistakes involved, but usually not. The Pacific Palisades fire, whipped up by 60 mph winds, destroyed the entire neighborhood in a day. Nothing would have stopped it. LA firefighters were like a squirt gun in the face of something like that. In terms of the immediate response, there’s no one to blame and no incompetence at play. Everyone needs to quit looking for politically convenient scapegoats.

Armchair critics are always around after any disaster who act as if they could have prevented it if they had been in charge. One key question that can be investigated and possibly solved is how the fire started and if anyone was responsible for it. But that is about it.

Thanks to climate change, we are now living in an age when what were once considered highly unlikely catastrophic events (earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes) are now more likely. Are they more likely enough that we should prepare for them, whatever the cost? Or should we instead put resources into trying to mitigate the problems that we know will occur but are creeping up on us, such as rising sea levels and droughts? Or should we focus on the fundamental forces driving all these things, which is climate change?

That is the real discussion to be had, not searching for scapegoats for each and every calamity.