Dominating the skyline of much of Southern California is Mount Wilson, one of the tallest peaks in the San Gabriel Mountains. It’s home to the broadcast transmitters for virtually every TV and radio station in the region, and houses the historic Mount Wilson Observatory, where Edwin Hubble discovered the redshift that suggested the universe was expanding.<\/p>\n
It is now under threat from the Station Fire<\/A>, along with the Antelope Valley town of Acton<\/a>. Large portions of La Ca\u00f1ada Flintridge, northern Glendale and the Tujunga area are still under threat and\/or evacuation orders.<\/p>\n As with other recent large fires<\/a> this raises the question of how state budget cuts have hurt California’s ability to fight these fires. The LA Times claims it hasn’t<\/a>, looking at the story of a DC-10 tanker that Arnold vetoed funding to bring permanently to CA. We now rent it as-needed:<\/p>\n The state budget that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed last month canceled the contract for California’s largest firefighting tool, a DC-10 jet, to save taxpayers about $7 million.<\/p>\n It was replaced with a contract for two DC-10s on a pay-as-you-go basis, but at a higher hourly rate. But after several fires hit Northern California earlier this month, authorities reversed that decision and signed a 90-day contract for the plane, which costs taxpayers an average of $43,404 a day.<\/p>\n “The determination was made that it would cost more to have it on an as-needed basis than on an exclusive-use contract,” said Cal Fire aviation chief Bill Payne.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Cal Fire supplements these with two more tankers owned by the province of Quebec (yay for French Canadian socialists!), and for now they appear to be getting the job done.<\/p>\n But as California enters the high season for wildfires, it’s another sign of how the zeal for budget cuts is trumping every single other consideration. The decision about whether to buy or rent an aerial tanker should be based on need, utility, and best operational practice. Instead we are basing it on what helps enable Arnold Schwarzenegger to keep rich people’s taxes low.<\/p>\n There is a much bigger discussion to be had, as Mike Davis reminds us, about the fundamental injustice of spending all this money to defend homes built in known fire zones. But as long as we believe that fires should be fought no matter where they occur, we need to be ensuring that firefighters have the resources they need – and not working them on the cheap because our political leadership has decided that revenue increases are scarier propositions than properly fighting fires.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dominating the skyline of much of Southern California is Mount Wilson, one of the tallest peaks in the San Gabriel Mountains. It’s home to the broadcast transmitters for virtually every TV and radio station in the region, and houses the historic Mount Wilson Observatory, where Edwin Hubble discovered the redshift that suggested the universe was expanding.<\/p>\n It is now under threat from the Station Fire<\/A>, along with the Antelope Valley town of Acton<\/a>. Large portions of La Ca\u00f1ada Flintridge, northern Glendale and the Tujunga area are still under threat and\/or evacuation orders.<\/p>\n As with other recent large fires<\/a> this raises the question of how state budget cuts have hurt California’s ability to fight these fires. The LA Times claims it hasn’t<\/a>, looking at the story of a DC-10 tanker that Arnold vetoed funding to bring permanently to CA. We now rent it as-needed:<\/p>\n The state budget that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed last month canceled the contract for California’s largest firefighting tool, a DC-10 jet, to save taxpayers about $7 million.<\/p>\n It was replaced with a contract for two DC-10s on a pay-as-you-go basis, but at a higher hourly rate. But after several fires hit Northern California earlier this month, authorities reversed that decision and signed a 90-day contract for the plane, which costs taxpayers an average of $43,404 a day.<\/p>\n “The determination was made that it would cost more to have it on an as-needed basis than on an exclusive-use contract,” said Cal Fire aviation chief Bill Payne.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Cal Fire supplements these with two more tankers owned by the province of Quebec (yay for French Canadian socialists!), and for now they appear to be getting the job done.<\/p>\n But as California enters the high season for wildfires, it’s another sign of how the zeal for budget cuts is trumping every single other consideration. The decision about whether to buy or rent an aerial tanker should be based on need, utility, and best operational practice. Instead we are basing it on what helps enable Arnold Schwarzenegger to keep rich people’s taxes low.<\/p>\n There is a much bigger discussion to be had, as Mike Davis reminds us, about the fundamental injustice of spending all this money to defend homes built in known fire zones. But as long as we believe that fires should be fought no matter where they occur, we need to be ensuring that firefighters have the resources they need – and not working them on the cheap because our political leadership has decided that revenue increases are scarier propositions than properly fighting fires.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-117"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-2AF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}