How an LA News Anchor Got Humiliated Trying to Debunk Rick Caruso's Wildfire Claims

Matt Vespa | January 09, 2025 6:05 AM

Rick Caruso, the billionaire developer who unsuccessfully ran against Karen Bass in Los Angeles’ mayoral election, ripped into the local leadership for their unpreparedness to handle this crisis. Several fires are raging in Los Angeles County, and none have been contained.

Upwards of 70,000 people have been forced to flee, over 1,000 buildings have been destroyed, and the fire department is powerless to stop it. They don’t have enough personnel to combat the flames. Malibu and Pacific Palisades have been virtually destroyed. Caruso repeated the claim that there’s no water, which Fox 11’s Melvin Robert tried to debunk, only for on-the-scene reporter Gigi Graciette to fact-check him live on television:

In an attempt to debunk Rick Caruso, LA morning anchor Melvin Robert is embarrassingly fact-checked by their own on-the-ground reporter: pic.twitter.com/lCvfMEnXxJ
— MarioFakerREAL 🥸 (@mario_faker) January 8, 2025

What a humiliation.

Caruso was also on the board for Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (via Fox News):

Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer who unsuccessfully ran against Karen Bass for mayor in 2022, said stifled water supply as the Pacific Palisades fire reduces mulit-million-dollar real estate to ashes represents "absolute mismanagement by the city."
"There's no water in the Palisades. There's no water coming out of the fire hydrants. This is an absolute mismanagement by the city. Not the firefighters' fault, but the city's," Caruso, a former mayoral candidate, told Fox11 Los Angeles.
"We have got a mayor that is out of the country, and we have got a city that is burning, and there is no resources to put out fires," Caruso added. "It looks like we're in a third-world country here."
[…]
Janisse Quiñones, chief executive and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP), said that by 3 a.m. Wednesday, all fire hydrants in the Palisades "went dry."
"We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades. We pushed the system to the extreme," she said, according to the Los Angeles Times. "Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure."
Caruso, a former DWP commissioner and the owner of the Palisades Village mall in the Westside neighborhood, further argued that firefighters are at the scene but "there’s nothing they can do" without water supply, as businesses and homes burn.