In a matter of hours, the entire town of Paradise, Calif., burned to the ground. The Camp Fire killed at least 32 people, destroyed more than 6,000 homes, and rendered 100 people currently missing. Roughly 500 miles south of Paradise are Ventura and Los Angeles counties, with multiple cities still under mandatory evacuation as the Woolsey and Hill fires rage on. In total, a quarter of a million Californians have been forced to evacuate their homes.

Something’s rotten in the state of California, and it’s not as easy a diagnosis as either side of the political spectrum would have you believe. President Trump is correct that California has suffered a crisis of mismanagement. Both state and federal agencies have been remiss in conducting controlled burns or manually thinning out at-risk forests. Even though Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott derided Trump’s recent remarks as “uninformed,” as recently as last year, Pimlott partially attributed forest mismanagement to the state’s increasingly destructive wildfires. Pimlott specifically blamed the state for failing to properly fund fire prevention and forest maintenance.