I think it's going to be a while before all the facts as to what went wrong comes to light. Right now all I see is a lot of finger pointing. One fact that can't be disputed is that two years ago we had record rainfall and last year we had hardly any. Anyone familiar with Southern California knows that when we get rain all the hills green up and it looks like other parts of the country that always get a lot of rain. If we get a lot of rain we get a lot of plant growth. When we don't get rain all the plants that looked very green and healthy dry up in a very short amount of time creating a huge fire hazard. Combined that with Santa Ana winds and the chance of a brush fire goes way up. Make those Santa Ana winds blow through the area at close to 100 miles and hour an fire would be pretty much uncontrollable no matter the amount of resources you have to fight it.
One thing saw I think about six months ago was a story about people stealing fire hydrants around LA. You can look this up and see videos of people stealing them. At the time I wondered why people were able to just unbolt them and take them without any water coming out. I heard that about 100 fire hydrants had been stolen. My question then was why is no water coming out. My question now is wouldn't the police and fire department notice that not only were the hydrants being stolen but it was relatively easy because on water came gushing out.