Comments
GELFAND’S WORLD - On Tuesday, we woke to a normal winter day in Los Angeles -- that is to say, clear and almost warm, albeit with a breeze blowing up. It was just barely a week after the Rose Parade and the New Year's Day that is almost always perfect here in Southern California (and gets portrayed to the rest of the nation on national television).
But still, we had been warned that the Santa Ana winds would be with us.
Then, a little later in the morning a fire started over in the Palisades, and suddenly 30,000 people were told to leave home and get out.
While the Palisades were emptying, the various fire departments were struggling in the face of sheets of flame that were being driven by near-hurricane-force winds. Helicopters and aerial tankers could not fly. As we could see on the television news, fire fighters were getting blasted by showers of burning embers that were particularly dense and typically moving at anywhere between 30 and 60 miles per hour.
The problem for the authorities was that -- in an area of several hundred square miles, it was impossible to know if and when a fire would occur. The only thing that was really clear was that the conditions were there. Everybody knows what those conditions are -- dry air, winds, lots of dried out vegetation covering large areas -- and that any little flame could result in a huge fire within hours, and with only minutes available to stamp the first flames out before things get out of control.
And it could be anywhere from the outskirts of Santa Barbara down to the border of San Diego County. There are thousands of square miles fulfilling each item on that list of conditions, and not a fire hydrant to be found in the vast majority of those miles.
This is the truth in this era of global warming and with a local climate that has cycled from drought to deluge to drought in a matter of a couple of years. Where a fire will start is a random numbers game, and the ability to fight a fire depends on how close it is to a fire station and an airport, not to mention being close to a place that keeps trained fire fighters and aerial tankers.
It's therefore not surprising that it took a few hours to mount any kind of a response, although the LAFD representative explained that they got an aerial response going within minutes of the first calls about the Palisades fire. What we do know is that within the first 24 hours, a region-wide response had been mounted, including hundreds of fire fighters from all over the state (and other states) and a lot of trucks.
And then came the recriminations. It is an ugly element of our current political climate that in this moment of a natural disaster, there are those who seek to create political gain out of others' pain.
Let me dispense with the felon-in-chief, who wants to blame the difficulty in fighting the fires on a Northern California dispute over preserving endangered fish habitat. Trump continues to complain about what happens in the Sacramento delta and, in some perverted way, tries to turn the blame onto California's governor. On the other hand, he stil avoids admitting that there is this thing called global warming that leads to climate change. ABC has a nice piece that mentions how global warming contributed partially to the current fire disaster, and which you can find here. The ABC story is careful to point out that we can't blame the whole event on global warming, but that it was a perfect storm of multiple causes which includes warming-induced climate change.
As to Trump, with a little luck he will be kept busy over his sentencing coming up on Friday. (If the Supreme Court intervenes, we will know that they are totally corrupt, as opposed to being just corrupt.)
So much for that. But there was also griping and bitching on the local level. One complaint was that the city's fire department budget had been reduced by $17.6 million for this fiscal year. I suppose we are supposed to type it in screaming fonts and exclamation marks, like this:
THE LAFD BUDGET WAS REDUCED BY $17.6 MILLION THIS YEAR!!!!
I left out the part where this is attributed to Mayor Karen Bass.
Another bit of shrieking was the complaint that Bass had gone to some diplomatic event in Ghana in spite of being warned in advance that there would be winds blowing over the basin.
So in the face of the disaster, a few people have reacted opportunistically to the situation to make a few partisan points.
I asked a colleague who is involved in budget analysis, and at some point, we will receive a knowledgeable response as to the budget cut. But even at my own level, I can offer a modest response. The LAFD budget for this fiscal year is midway between $800 million and $900 million. Just a wee bit short of a billion dollars. That $17.6 million is what budget junkies refer to as "budget dust." It's the last two percent of expenses that, in total, amount to $220 for every man, woman, and child who lives in the City of Los Angeles. Well, maybe $215. If the naysayers want to argue about the last four bucks, let them.
As to the mayor being away, this is one of those cheap shots that doesn't deserve a detailed response. It's not like the burning of the Pacific Palisades was a planned event like contract talks or the next World Cup game. But Kevin Drum made the effort to mount a response, and it deserves to be read. You can find it here. I will add my own observation: In the first hours of the fire, the response seemed to be professional and, to the extent possible, as effective as the available resources allowed. I should point out that long ago, I heard a fire captain explain that the daily schedule begins with evaluation of the weather -- because that is what determines the danger of these hillside fires. The LAFD has been on its toes, year after year, looking for the conditions that promote fires and watching for the start of any fire, and it responded when it got that first call. I didn't really notice the absence of the mayor in any of the first press conferences.
Perhaps that's because the most informative remarks came from a fire department official standing on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway during the period when the fire was still ramping up.
Come to think of it, we would be well served if mayors and city council representatives and county supervisors do nothing but stand quietly while the fire chief talks about fires or the police chief talks about the latest shooting. It would save time.
Anybody who bothers to read this column will have noticed that I have been critical of emergency responses and emergency preparedness in this city. But if you look closely, I hope you will notice that I am not criticizing the professionalism of the fire department. Rather, I have criticized two things. The first is the failure by the City Council to appropriate adequate funding for emergency preparedness. This includes the Emergency Management Department and it includes funding for emergency preparedness among the civilian population. The second thing I have been critical about is the failure to get the professionals together with us civilians so that we could, if it were to be necessary, do our own part after a major earthquake while the professionals are doing their own thing.\
But none of that criticism has anything to do with the professionalism and performance of the fire fighters and police officers during a couple of days that were stressful and demanding and dangerous.
One aside: Television newscasters have gotten into this irritating habit of asking everyone, "How did you feel about your home of 60 years burning down?" Or "How did you feel scoring the winning touchdown?" I suppose this would be a slightly interesting topic for those few times when history would be served: "What were you thinking as you walked down the ladder as the first man about to step on the moon?" But for people enduring personal tragedies, it's both intrusive and it's becoming irritating.
And that brings up one last comment. During the buildup to the Altadena fire, there was a frantic effort to move some nursing home residents out of the path of the fire. Channel 4 was busy pointing the camera at people clad only in hospital gowns and maybe a sweater, without any regard to patients' personal privacy. It was offensive on NBC's part. Those patients didn't choose to be in the path of the fire anymore than a shooting victim chooses to be wounded. Television news is badly in need of an ethics transplant when it comes to protecting the privacy of those who are involuntary victims.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
