Mark’s Soap Box

UPDATE: Score!

KUSI must be reading my blog. While talking to Duncan Hunter who is ripping up CALFIRE, their anchor said:

“Not to defend FEMA, but when Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on New Orleans; Mayor Ray Nagan was having dinner somewhere. … School buses sat idle …”

Damn straight! Local failure there, local victory here.

Diminishing the Results

The LA Times ever on the case to discourage any type of self-reliance or sensible foresty , is now blasting the recovery effort by attacking the numbers. 1 Million fled fires? As smoke clears, the numbers shrink.

Despite widespread estimates that as many as 1 million evacuees fled Southern California’s wildfires, the number of people displaced from their homes at any one time appears to have been substantially lower.

The first paragraph says it all. Nothing like admitting your argument is flawed right off the bat.

At the height of evacuations Tuesday morning in San Diego County, officials said nearly 350,000 households had received automated emergency phone calls warning them to evacuate. Using 2000 census data, emergency response officials estimated that they had ordered 513,000 of the county’s 3.1 million people out of their homes and advised 12,000 more to leave.

Wait, so they believe that each HOUSEHOLD only has less than 2 occupants on average? Where is the LA Times demographics to back that up? Could it be they intentionally underestimated the numbers for the article?

Why did they not consider the visitors who left to get out of the fire area? Did the LAT check the hotels in the area? No.

Last and most definitely not least, what about those poor undocumented workers that labor in the shadows unknown to anyone but their desperately poor families back in their country of origin? Don’t they usually shack up together?

Government works?

The LAT seems hell bent on attacking anything that works. Well anything that is not touchy feely nonsense. Take this paragraph from this brush thinning story , total nonsense.

To gain public acceptance, Clauson spent a year holding meetings, sometimes attending three a week, where he pushed the idea and urged private landowners to thin their trees.

That’s just bull. There was no need to get their “acceptance”. Landowners in SD county have been fighting to do this for years. In some areas it’s against the law to clear the brush around your house.

And then, it worked, but not really.

And yet there is only so much the Forest Service can do. Lake Arrowhead didn’t escape unscathed. In Grass Valley, an upscale part of the town about a mile from Lake Arrowhead, more than 100 homes were destroyed. Many had been surrounded by tall trees and lush vegetation left uncleared by the homeowners.

See it didn’t work.

There were scenes of total devastation — lakeside homes reduced to their foundations, torched cars and, in one house, only a pair of smudged lawn jockeys survived. Power lines littered the ground or hung perilously overhead.

“We can spend $100 million to put fuel breaks around every town up here but if individuals don’t take responsibility for their land I can’t save them,” Clauson said.

Whoa, how did that get in there. No comment from the LAT. The thinking at the LAT must be: when Dubya is Prez, gubment tis a failure and it’s expensive.

Sadly the LAT has made it’s self so partisan that even if what they say is true, who will believe them? Not me.

Pics of the day

courtesy NASA

Passing over Southern California at 3:10 p.m. on October 24, 2007, NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image of the massive wildfires that have devastated the area.

These startling images show the Southern California region covered in a thick blanket of smoke. Red pixels indicate fire activity. Smoke can also be seen billowing out over the Pacific Ocean.

While news agencies report that the strong Santa Ana winds that fueled these fires are expected to nearly disappear soon, there are still 15 large fires burning in the region. These blazes have charred 695 square miles and destroyed 1,609 homes, with damage estimated by the state Department of Insurance at more than $1 billion.

The largest fire currently burning in the area is the Witch fire in San Diego County, one mile east of Ramona. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, the blaze has burned 196,420 acres, destroying hundreds of homes, businesses, and other structures.

The National Weather Service is predicting cooler temperatures and higher humidity for this area as the week progresses.

Video of fires from orbit — must see

vidcap of satellite video of fires

courtesy NASA - click for really big pic

 

Previous Posts

• Day 5 - morning update
• Day 4 - evening update
• Day 4 midday update
• Day 4
• Calfire blocking Navy help
• Evening Update
• Midday Update
• Good Morning Ashes
• Late Night Update
• Fire Conditions
• Burn baby, burn!
• Four Years Later

Tags: harris fire, mccoy fire, rice fire, witch fire, buckweed fire, magic fire, ranch fire, canyon fire, malibu, san diego, wildfires, grass valley fire, slide fire, santiago fire, sedgewick fire, roca fire, coronada hills fire, office of emergency services, duncan hunter, arson