I’ve been reading my Altadena blog and LA Now, and I see that firefighters are making progress on the spate of blazes, and apparently saved Mount Wilson, though it’s still in some danger. This will continue for at least a week, at which point the firefighting emergency fund will be almost completely exhausted.
These are not “unpredictable” costs. We now have practically a year-round fire season, with damaging blazes cropping up in places where we never saw them before. And people die from bad budget choices relating to public safety.
There was a provision in the budget deal to have those living in areas most affected by fire hazards pay a fee on their homeowner’s insurance to fund firefighting efforts that save their residences. Republicans blocked them, as they have been doing for years. As a result we all pay the price in the long term, somehow in the name of “fiscal responsibility.” We’re essentially offering welfare for those who choose to live in danger zones.
Which leads us to the reason why these fires have continued to occur, and in greater numbers, year after year. It’s attributable to global warming, and as much as reactionaries and climate denialists hide their heads in the sand about it, the truth remains the same.
Roughly speaking, it turns out that land use issues are probably responsible for about half of the increase in western wildfire activity over the past few decades and climate change is responsible for the other half. The mechanism is pretty straightforward: higher temperatures lead to both reduced snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas and an earlier melt, which in turn produces a longer and drier fire season. Result: more and bigger fires. Plus there’s this, from CAP’s Tom Kenworthy:
In recent years, a widespread and so far unchecked epidemic of mountain pine beetles that has killed millions of acres of trees from Colorado north into Canada has laid the foundation for a potentially large increase in catastrophic fires. Climate change has played a role in that outbreak, too, as warmer winters spare the beetles from low temperatures that would normally kill them off, and drought stresses trees.
In the western United States, mountain pine beetles have killed some 6.5 million acres of forest, according to the Associated Press. As large as that path of destruction is, it’s dwarfed by the 35 million acres killed in British Columbia, which has experienced a rash of forest fires this summer that as of early this month had burned more than 155,000 acres. In the United States to date about 5.2 million acres – an area larger than Massachusetts -have burned this year.
Destruction of trees by the mountain pine beetle, combined with climate change and fire, makes for a dangerous feedback loop. Dead forests sequester less carbon dioxide. Burning forests release lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. More carbon dioxide adds to climate change, which raises temperatures, stresses forests, and makes more and bigger fires more likely.
Some would say that the possibility that forest fires like this are caused by human error contradicts this case, but actually, no. Dry forest areas are simply more susceptible to a lit cigarette or a spark from an electrical device, and that’s due to hotter temperatures and less rain.
We can choose to find other factors for these events, and we can choose to charge everyone for living in places where nobody should. But that’s a choice, made in budgets and made in lifestyle. It’s a choice that’s harming our planet, draining our budgets and killing our people.
Jackfolsum alludes to it, but I wanted to highlight it as well. Arnold got tripped up a little bit today in front of the Jesusita Fire, caught in between telling Californians what they wanted to hear, or telling them they’re all going to die. It’s pretty amusing:
One of Schwarzenegger’s strengths has been to respond to emergencies and assure local residents he will provide all support necessary. But that message clashes with his statements earlier this week that fire services would be jeopardized if voters reject the ballot measures on May 19.
Because he declared a state of emergency for the Santa Barbara fire, he said he was able to get the federal government to pay for 75 percent of the costs.
“This is very helpful for us because as you know, we have a financial crisis in California,” Schwarzenegger said. “But I wanted to make sure you all know, even though we have this crisis, we will not be short of money when it comes to fighting these fires.”
Oops! But Arnold’s “strong leader/warrior/protector” shtick clashes with his “vote for my spending cap or you will BURN BURN BURN!!!” shtick. So he backpedaled.
“First of all, let me just make it clear, because there’s always the question that comes up, what happens to the fire departments and to the budget if those initiatives don’t pass,” Schwarzenegger said. “The first thing you should know is, I will always fight and get every dollar I can for public safety, that is the important thing you should know.”
“No. 2, it is very clear that when the initiatives fail there will be $6 billion less that will be available, so therefore there will have to be additional cuts made, if it is in law enforcement, fire, education,” he added. “…But I will fight for every dollar, and will always make sure we have enough manpower and enough engines and helicopters ready to fight those fires.”
Interesting use of “when the initiatives fail,” not “if” there. Arnold reads the polls, I guess.
He really has no idea what he’s doing. He wants to scare and please at the same time, so it comes out like mush.
Come to think of it, Arnold sounds a lot like the Californians seduced by the Two Santa Claus Theory, who want to cut services in general but protect services in particular. So maybe he’s just giving the people what they want.
Today’s San Diego Union-Tribune has a long article on the failure of Proposition A, a $52 parcel tax for all of San Diego County that would have funded a regional fire authority and help provide badly needed additional resources at local fire departments. Interestingly, it was the most fire-prone areas of San Diego County – towns like Ramona, which nearly burned down in the 2003 fire – that turned in the strongest No votes. Why would they vote against protecting their own property?
“I think the people don’t believe the government,” said Peter Jorgenson, a Ramona resident who voted for the tax. “They don’t believe that they’re actually going to do anything with the money.”…
It did not win the support of Mary Eaker, 59, a clerk at a Circle K in Ramona.
“With the economy so bad, everybody’s voting against anything with taxes,” Eaker said. “Nobody wants more taxes. Forget it.”
The article describes many other possible reasons for Prop A’s failure, including poor leadership from San Diego County Supervisors, but the distrust of government does seem to be at the core of the problem.
Of course, this isn’t just some random development. Conservatives have had as a primary focus creating and capitalizing on distrust of government. Conservative politicians, activists, and editorial pages like those at the U-T (which did endorse Prop A) have frequently accused government of being wasteful and reckless with tax money as a way to ensure voters never do support a tax increase. They cried wolf so often that when the wolf finally appeared in the form of a catastrophic firestorm, the good people of San Diego County did what they had been trained to do – be skeptical of government and vote against a tax for services they desperately need.
It dates back to 1978:
Proposition 13 reduced property tax revenue to governments throughout California, leaving fire districts with revenue shortfalls as high as 80 percent.
It’s not likely we’ll ever see a conservative question Prop 13. But as we saw last year conservative criticism has extended to fire departments themselves. Firefighters in Orange County were frequent targets of right-wing criticism, with the OC Register accusing them of being wasteful and taxpayers as being “weak” for giving fire departments more money.
One of the primary reasons for California’s ongoing budget crisis is because conservatives have successfully created and exploited this distrust of government. If we’re going to solve the fire crisis or the budget crisis, we need to restore public trust in government.
Showing Californians the consequences of conservative policies is a good way to do that. Just as conservative anti-government policies left New Orleans vulnerable to a hurricane and left the city’s residents stranded when that hurricane finally arrived, so too has conservative policy and framing left Californians vulnerable to a similar disaster.
• The trial on prison overcrowding began today. This could blow another hole in our budget, or could end up in a mass release of prisoners. Either way, this is yet another sad day for a failed corrections system in the state.
• We’ve already run out of money in our fire fighting budget, and exceeded the budget allocation by over $200 million. Tack it on to the 12Billion in deficit, I suppose.
• Jerry McNerney as the Secretary of Energy? It seems like more rumor than fact, and his spokesman is denying any contact with Barack Obama. But this would start a chain reaction and would likely set up a contested special election. McNerney hasn’t been the best Congressman, but he does have fairly substantial knowledge about energy issues, particularly wind power.
• Markos has an important post on the Prop. 8 protests, the Human Rights Campaign, and grassroots politics.
• Disgraced conservative former SF Supervisor Ed Jew pleaded guilty to lying about where he lived in order to run for Supervisor. Ed Jew lasted only a few months before trying to shake down a business in the City. SF is better for his absence.
• “America’s Sheriff” Mike Carona’s exploits are getting detailed in his corruption trial. Yesterday we learned that one of his contributors got something of a “get out of jail free” card. Fun, just like a board game!
• In election counting news, Tom McClintock’s lead over Charlie Brown is down to 562 votes, with provisionals to come, which usually favor Democrats.
While this recent spate of wildfires have been put relatively under control today, the devastation is pretty severe. The number of houses destroyed in Yorba Linda shot up yesterday, the fire in Montecito claimed several dozen more homes, and the mobile home park in Sylmar is a near-total loss.
Even without getting back to his home, Mr. Grieb is fairly certain that all is lost.
He and his neighbors have seen aerial photos of the devastated development and, in stark black and white, a chalkboard at an evacuation center lists the homes, by lot numbers, that were spared. About 124 out of 600 homes are on the list, and Mr. Grieb’s home is not among them.
For the park’s residents, it was as if an entire village had vanished in the flames.
“I used to refer to it as our little Mayberry,” said Tracey Burns, 47. She and her partner, Wendy Dannenberg, 46, lived in Oakridge for 15 years. Ms. Burns’s parents lived nearby in a part of the complex that was spared by the fire.
“It was just a very nice community,” Ms. Burns said. “Someplace safe with a lot to offer from the pool to the tennis courts to bingo on Tuesday nights. It was a very nice way of living. People waved not because they had to but because they wanted to. We always took offense to people calling it a trailer park because you had a yard, a porch, a garage, a garden. It was a home, not a trailer.”
While some scientists are dismissing the idea that climate change has something to do with the increasing frequency of fires in the region, clearly the reduction of the snowpack in the Sierras, combined with the extended drought conditions, have extended the fire season to the point where it is year-round and unsustainable. And that is expecteed to only worsen in the future.
The current drought in the Southwest may simply be part of the normal cycle of wet and dry spells. But looking over the next century, Cayan said, regions with a Mediterranean climate such as Southern California are expected to get drier.
“I have to believe that is going to make us more vulnerable to some of these more intense fire episodes.”
While the relief efforts of the local communities are admirable, it’s simply not sustainable to have major parts of the region go up in smoke at regular intervals. We have barely enough money in the kitty to provide basic services, let alone a year-round fire season.
Through global warming, we have now fire season all year round. We used to have fire seasons only in the fall, but now the fire seasons start in February already, so this means that we have to really upgrade, have more resources, more fire engines, more manpower and all of this, which does cost extra money.
The scientists may want to be circumspect, but this is global boiling, a consequence of rising temperatures and a drier climate. And while myopic conservatives like Dan Walters don’t realize it, a massive shift to green technologies is essential for financial reasons as well as environmental ones. Fighting massive fires costs lots and lots of money that can be avoided if we reduce emissions and protect the planet. Backwards-looking folks like Walters always examine the up-front costs while paying no attention to the externalities. Burning the earth has severe monetary consequences, and on the flip side, creating greener ways to power our lives and transport our people is exportable technology that can make California a global economic leader.
Of course, it’s going to take more than one state, and fortunately we have a new President-elect who understands the need for immediate action. Not only is he raising money for relief organizations helping with the current wildfires, but today he made a surprise appearance at the Bi-Partisan Governors Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles, calling for “a new chapter of American leadership on climate change.” I’ve put the video and transcript below. We finally have leadership to heal the planet, which is as beneficial for California as it is for anywhere in the country.
Let me begin by thanking the bipartisan group of U.S. governors who convened this meeting.
Few challenges facing America – and the world – are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.
Climate change and our dependence on foreign oil, if left unaddressed, will continue to weaken our economy and threaten our national security.
I know many of you are working to confront this challenge. In particular, I want to commend Governor Sebelius, Governor Doyle, Governor Crist, Governor Blagojevich and your host, Governor Schwarzenegger -all of you have shown true leadership in the fight to combat global warming. And we’ve also seen a number of businesses doing their part by investing in clean energy technologies.
But too often, Washington has failed to show the same kind of leadership. That will change when I take office. My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process.
That will start with a federal cap and trade system. We will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80% by 2050.
Further, we will invest $15 billion each year to catalyze private sector efforts to build a clean energy future. We will invest in solar power, wind power, and next generation biofuels. We will tap nuclear power, while making sure it’s safe. And we will develop clean coal technologies.
This investment will not only help us reduce our dependence on foreign oil, making the United States more secure. And it will not only help us bring about a clean energy future, saving our planet. It will also help us transform our industries and steer our country out of this economic crisis by generating five million new green jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.
But the truth is, the United States cannot meet this challenge alone. Solving this problem will require all of us working together. I understand that your meeting is being attended by government officials from over a dozen countries, including the UK, Canada and Mexico, Brazil and Chile, Poland and Australia, India and Indonesia. And I look forward to working with all nations to meet this challenge in the coming years.
Let me also say a special word to the delegates from around the world who will gather at Poland next month: your work is vital to the planet. While I won’t be President at the time of your meeting and while the United States has only one President at a time, I’ve asked Members of Congress who are attending the conference as observers to report back to me on what they learn there.
And once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations, and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change.
Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high. The consequences, too serious.
Stopping climate change won’t be easy. It won’t happen overnight. But I promise you this: When I am President, any governor who’s willing to promote clean energy will have a partner in the White House. Any company that’s willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington. And any nation that’s willing to join the cause of combating climate change will have an ally in the United States of America. Thank you.
Saturday night at the Democratic EBoard. Fires are raging all around. Outside, it is eerily calm, with only a hint of the earlier Santa Ana winds and smell of smoke in the air, while the TV tells us the fires are right here in Anaheim.
We are across the street from Disneyland. Will they shoot off their customary fireworks tonight? I would expect not.
On TV the whole left sid of the stucco house in Anaheim Hills, where the NBC crew is stationed, has collapsed. It is the hotttest day on record.
Believe in global warming yet?
Firestorms
Sunday morning; the firestorms are still raging, the triangle fire I think of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. Out my window, a huge plume of smoke rises into the blue.
New fire in Yorba Linda; we think of Oakland in 1991.
Firefghts
After the fizzle of the Death Penalty plank, the biggest excitement is the race for Chair of the Party. The candidates are John Burton, recruited by Barbara Boxer, arriving with a long list of elected officials supporting him, Eric Bauman, who has been running for a while, working hard to break into the red districts in LA, and surprisingly sans endorsement list; and Alex Rooker, current co-chair and the only woman.
Too soon to call; the vote is at the April Convention in Sacramento. I am torn. Although I “beat the Burton machine” to elect a Marin Count Supervisor, I embraced it to work with Senator Carole Migden last year. And there is no one with a longer track record for supporting progressive causes. The greasy underside to machine politics is the well-oiled gears and pulleys that determine elections, the flow of money to favored candidates, not always the best for the seat they seek, the high school quality of in and out crowds. I walk a line.
Another race already gaining traction is the decidedly un-machine like race of Hilary Crosby for Controller, challenging the incumbent. She is a terrific candidate, smart, funny, and lived in Cambridge during my time. Her campaign is based on transparency and an open process, obviously protecting the integrity of the budget process.
Go Hilary!
Fear of the Republicans getting all our secrets is rampant. Newsflash: They already have them. We the people, the rank and file of the party need in on the secret.
In the Rules Committee, a simple request that has been on the table for years, failed again; and that is to request Democrats seeking Party endorsement to read the Platform. Not agree to it; just say, yes I know what my Party stands for.
Again, there were those who said, this will give the Reps ammunition. Guess what, they have it; they’ll use it; they’ll make it up. Let’s arm our own candidates with knowledge and the strength of principle.
Here in Southern California, if you sit outside for more than half a minute you’re bound to see some pieces of ash falling on your head. The entire region is bathed in a film, the air quality is miserable, and the horizon is barely discernible. Two fires – one in the northern San Fernando Valley in Sylmar, another south in Orange and Riverside counties in the Chino Hills area – have devastated local communities, burning hundreds of homes to the ground, including an entire trailer park. Today, despite more favorable conditions, hundreds more homes have been burned and thousands evacuated.
More residents of Southern California were urged to leave their homes Sunday despite calming winds that allowed a major aerial attack on wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of homes and blanketed the region in smoke.
Fires burned in Los Angeles County, to the east in Riverside and Orange counties, and to the northwest in Santa Barbara County. More than 800 houses, mobile homes and apartments were destroyed by fires that have burned areas more than 34 square miles since breaking out Thursday.
No deaths have been reported, but police brought in trained dogs Sunday morning to search the rubble of a mobile home park where nearly 500 homes were destroyed. No bodies had been found by midday.
“This has been a very tough few days for the people of Southern California,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said after touring damage.
As my recent diaries have shown there is a shortage of firefighters to meet the unprecedented amount of fires burning across our state. As I began digging into this yesterday I came across the same report highlighted in today’s Monterey Herald – that US Forest Service firefighting efforts have been cut to the bone and left the nation vulnerable to massive fires. Deliberate staffing shortages have left the USFS unable to do vital off-season brush clearance, and left them without the staffing to get a quick jump on fires in their crucial initial stages.
The federal firefighting system is “imploding” in California, due to poor spending decisions and high job vacancy rates, as the region struggles to keep pace with what looks to be a historic fire season, a firefighters’ advocacy group charges.
As a result, the firefighters say, small fires have exploded into extended, multimillion-dollar conflagrations because the U.S. Forest Service has been unable to contain them during the early “initial attack” stage…
As the “sheer number” of California wildfires pushed the nation to its worst measurable level of wildland-fire preparedness last week – Level 5 – a national multiagency coordinating group announced in a memo Monday that firefighter staffing levels in Northern California “cannot be maintained.”
The report, by the FWFSA, has been around for a few months now. Wildland firefighters have been screaming about the issue to anyone who would listen, including Dianne Feinstein:
After facing pressure from California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and other lawmakers last spring, the Forest Service promised it would immediately fill its vacancies and launched a “Fire Hire” campaign to attract firefighters in Sacramento that concluded two weeks ago.
“I believe the agency should have been able to muster a stronger force,” Feinstein said. “All signs indicate that things will only get worse.”
Feinstein said that despite promises of full staffing from [USFS Administrator Mark] Rey, only 186 of the agency’s 276 engines were manned at the start of the 2008 fire season.
Ron Thatcher, president of the union that represents 20,000 Forest Service employees, has estimated that attrition has left the service at 70 percent to 80 percent of its authorized staffing levels, and that up to 39 percent of fire crew leader positions were vacant as the 2008 fire season kicked off.
Rey, Bush’s USFS administrator, has a long background in the timber industry. He blames environmentalists for the problems, but firefighters and those who know the issue are having none of it.
The problem, as the report and the article make clear, is that the USFS is not making an aggressive effort to recruit new hires during the offseason, and particularly their pay is low. The average USFS firefighter makes $56,000 a year whereas Cal Fire averages $64,000 a year. Further, Cal Fire offers better benefits than the USFS, which has resorted to absurd penny pinching to oversee its budget:
Another issue that firefighters say may come back to bite the region is a brand-new budgetary program – called “accountable cost management”- that was just introduced throughout the Forest Service. Judd said it should have been initiated well before the 2008 fire season started….
“The Indians Fire commander had no clue about this program, and they’re looking at (cutting) the least expensive resources. The bean counters are looking at these folks and basically timing them as to how long they spend on dinner. Accountable cost management is you’re looking at minutiae and ignoring the real costs,” Judd said.
The Herald article does not explain what the underlying reason is, but the FWFSA and its members aren’t shy about calling it out – privatization:
I recently had the opportunity to sit and chat with an old friend of mine who is an SFR2 with CALFIRE. He is no stranger to interagency response and the inherent problems that sometimes arise. We got on the subject of the USFS retention issue and he shed some light that I thought was interesting. In his dealings with the R-5 admin’s, the common thread, vocally expressed behind office doors, is that upper level USFS is purposefully and intentionally “gutting” the agency. The Washington folks are being pressured to eliminate the “fire” responsibility from the USFS and cover it up with budget cuts and the “we are fine” statements. There are plans in the works for a general privatization in R-5 in the near future.
According to him, CALFIRE is not happy to be in a position to accommodate any private contractors that will come along should there be a hardcore failure of the USFS, nor are they prepared to assume responsibility for the expanded response area that would be created. Sound’s like CATCH 22 to me.
Color me shocked. Bush is trying to destroy a government agency in order to turn it over to private contractors. As I explained last fall, destroying public firefighting and leaving folks to fend for themselves on the private market is a core conservative goal. Private military contractors rightly scare us, but private firefighting should be even more frightening – what incentive would they have to protect the homes of the poor?
The immediate effect of the intentional gutting of federal firefighting, however, is fires that burn hotter, larger, and longer. And in the absence of sufficient firefighting resources, some individuals take matters into their own hands, as with the family that set their own backfires in Big Sur over the weekend. In Mendocino County and other parts of our state volunteers are trying to pick up the slack but as hard as they work there’s no way volunteers can be a long-term substitute for professional full-time firefighters.
The situation is about to get worse in California. Many of the firefighters in our state are on loan from other states, especially USFS staffs from other Western states. They are due to be rotated out soon, and aren’t likely to return, as the fire season across the West is about to begin in earnest.
Here in California we face another problem: conservatives who oppose new firefighting revenues, preferring to close schools and hospitals to provide enough firefighters. We’re being squeezed between those California conservatives and the conservatives and timber interests in the federal government that have destroyed the USFS’ firefighting capacity.
We are in for a long, hot, destructive summer. Unless we beat back conservative anti-government philosophies and begin restoring federal firefighting to its past staffing levels, more homes will be destroyed, more lives ruined.
As David Dayen notes in the story just below this one, fires continue to burn across California, with the massive blazes in Goleta and Big Sur getting the focus of the state’s attention. And as he and other outlets have mentioned, California’s firefighting capacities have been strained beyond their limits.
More and more residents, especially in Big Sur, have noticed just how many fewer firefighters there seem to be for this blaze, as compared to previous fires in the area. As conservative demands for low taxes and budget cuts have helped slash available fire protection, residents in Big Sur increasingly feel they are on their own, though they appreciate the fire protection they have received. The legacy of Hurricane Katrina – when nobody came to help New Orleans – has led some residents to refuse to evacuate out of a belief that if they don’t protect their homes, nobody will.
It’s a frustrating and sometimes chaotic situation that is the direct product of conservative attacks on basic government services – they want people to fend for themselves, and often that is extremely difficult to do.
One of the most high profile Big Sur residents who has stayed behind to protect his property is Kirk Gafill, whose family opened the famous Nepenthe restaurant in 1949. As he and his employees stayed behind to put out burning embers themselves, he explained to a reporter why he stayed:
“We know fire officials don’t have the manpower to secure our properties,” Gafill said. “There are a lot of people in this community not following evacuation orders. Based on what we saw during Katrina and other disasters, we know we can only rely on ourselves and our neighbors.”
Such do-it-yourself firefighting led one Big Sur resident to be arrested for setting his own backfires. Another resident defended that person’s actions on the Ventana Wilderness Society’s forums, one of the main sources of community information on the fire:
We have been working on defending Apple Pie from this fire day and night since it started. We watched it grow over the coast ridge, down to the Big Sur River and up over Post Summit. The gov was not going to help defend the ranch even when our homes were about to burn. We didn’t think they would either. But they didn’t have any problem sending someone to arrest us. Our comminity just can’t accept actions like this. If we didn’t do what we did the ranch would be nothing but ashes. I say thank you to everyone who helped us and a thank you for all the firefighters, and pilots who TRIED to stop it from crossing the firebreaks to our homes.
Setting one’s own backfires is a desperate and even reckless act – but those who do not believe their government will or wants to help them are likely to resort to desperate measures.
Meanwhile California does not have enough money saved for firefighting efforts. Almost every year for the last ten years California has had to dip into reserves to pay for firefighting, but this year the SF Chronicle reports the gap is much wider:
But in the just-completed fiscal year, there was a big gap between the actual cost of firefighting and the budgeted amount. The state had set aside just $82 million for such emergencies, forcing it to spend more than $310 million from the state’s general fund cash reserves of $858 million.
California will have to continue dipping into its reserves until the Legislature and the governor approve a new budget for the fiscal year that began Tuesday…
But Assembly Republican Rick Keene from Chico said he opposes the fee proposal, arguing that fire protection is a basic service that the state should cover in its current budget.
“It’s something that our government system is already supposed to be paying for and we’re asking taxpayers to pay for it?” he said. “We’re hoping that our Democratic friends would just stop ringing the bell of raising taxes, raising taxes and raising taxes.”
And so California comes full circle. Hurricane Katrina became such a human catastrophe because conservative budget and spending cuts left New Orleans residents without adequate protection and aid. Californians in places like Big Sur, mindful of that experience and aware that firefighting is currently understaffed, are making increasingly risky efforts to try and protect themselves. Efforts to provide funding for adequate fire protection are opposed by conservatives who prioritize tax cuts over fire protection and who think schools and hospitals should be closed instead to pay for it.
California firefighting has already been badly neglected by decades of conservatism. It’s time we rebuilt our public services so that individuals do not feel the need to risk their lives to defend their property – at least not in these numbers.
The latest on the California wildfires is that Goleta has been saved for the moment. Firefighters are diverting their resources to protecting the much larger city of Santa Barbara.
Fire crews, backed by 10 airtankers, will now concentrate on rugged terrain near Goleta to block a potential advance toward Santa Barbara, said Rolf Larsen, another spokesman for the multi-agency effort.
“The priority is to put a lot of resources in and order where there are homes and specifically to the east … where it could move toward Santa Barbara,” Larsen said.
The area’s steep slopes and canyons are filled with dry brush that in some spots has not burned for a half a century.
Weather is aiding the effort to protect Big Sur as moist air has rolled in for a day, but already 20 homes have been lost.
The real problem is that we have so many fires and scant resources to deal with them. We need money, not just for more firefighters and planes, but to deal with the public health threat that arises from weeks’ worth of smoke Over time we’re going to need to find a way, with the increasing year-round fire season, to provide more equipment and staff to attack what will probably grow as a problem. It’s yet another constraint on the budget that conservatives in the Yacht Party will dismiss as unimportant.
