Patricia Heaton sharply criticized California’s leadership, claiming officials had “dropped the ball” on the response to the Los Angeles wildfires.
Heaton, who has partnered with the LA Dream Center to help residents in need, said city leaders were unprepared and questioned where the taxpayer money went in an interview with Fox News Digital.
“Everybody Loves Raymond” star. called for change after a “very harsh lesson”.
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Patricia Heaton criticized the government’s response to the fires in Los Angeles. (Getty Images)
Heaton explained that Los Angeles did not seem prepared for the fires that began to burn on January 7 at Pacific Palisades neighborhood. Since then, multiple fires have burned in different parts of the star city, destroying thousands of homes and businesses. The actress stressed the need to manage forests and reservoirs that are actually full of water.
“I know some officials were saying, ‘Well, the system was overloaded.’ Well, in the case of a big fire, of course it’s going to be flooded,” she told Fox News Digital. “You should have known that and you were prepared for it. So I think a lot of money is being spent in LA and we can’t figure out where it’s going.”
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Heaton insisted that Californians “can’t just rely on the government to take care of things.”
“These are people who come together in your community and insist that things get done. And unfortunately, this is a very, very, very hard lesson.”
“But I guess that’s what it takes to sort of break through that red tape and do the things that government should be doing, which is looking after infrastructure first and foremost,” Heaton said.
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Patricia Heaton moved from Hollywood to Nashville. (Getty Images)
Heaton is partnering with the LA Dream Center to help with diaspora relief efforts, and she’s not the only one. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Kathie Lee Gifford and Chris Pratt donated needed items or money to a charity that helps those affected by the fires in Los Angeles.
“They stepped up. They showed up. We had advocacy,” Matthew Barnett, founder of the LA Dream Center, told Fox News Digital about the celebrity endorsement. “We got people like Snoop Dogg the other day – like I’ve never met in my life – but he did a whole minute and a half of, like, an Instagram post where I’m just talking.”
Matthew Barnett, founder of the LA Dream Center, told Fox News Digital that Dwayne Johnson, Kathie Lee Gifford and Chris Pratt have donated to the LA Dream Center to help with fire relief efforts. (Karwai Tang/WireImage | Getty Images)
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LA Dream Center it typically serves as a resource center focused “on providing support to those affected by homelessness, hunger and lack of education” through community programs, according to the website.
The charity has shifted gears as a number of wildfires continue to rage in Los Angeles.
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Patricia Heaton is known for her role in the TV sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond”. (Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times)
While Heaton once called Los Angeles home, the actress knows that moving to Nashville, Tennessee, was the “right decision” for her.
“My four sons still live in LA and we come back to hang out and have meetings,” she told Fox News Digital. “We have a lot of friends there and we do business there, but Nashville seems to get a lot of people from our industry. So I’m not the only one who made this decision.”
“It’s charging,” Heaton remarked. “I have a feeling that after this fire we’re going to get another huge amount of … talented, creative people who have decided, you know, they’ve had enough and they’re ready to live in a beautiful place with friendly people and where they can be creative without worrying about burning houses , about rising taxes and crime and all that stuff.”
For her part, Heaton helped friends in Los Angeles who had to evacuate and opened her home in Nashville to those who wanted to “escape” the city.
A person walks through the destruction left behind by the Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on January 9. (AP/Jae C. Hong)
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A house burns in the Eaton Fire in Altadena on Jan. 8. (AP Photo/Nic Coury)
The number of people who lost their homes due to fires in LAwhich began on January 7 with the Palisades Fire, has continued to grow. Multiple fires have destroyed thousands of homes and businesses, leaving 24 people dead so far.
Fierce winds from Santa Ana were largely blamed for turning wildfires sparked last week into an inferno that flattened entire neighborhoods around the nation’s second-largest city, which has seen no significant rainfall in more than eight months.
In less than a week, the four fires burned more than 62 square miles (160 square kilometers), about three times the size of Manhattan.
An aerial tanker releases retardant as it works to contain the Eaton fire in Altadena on January 13. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
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The Associated Press contributed to this report.
