SoCal's burning
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Map from San Diego County Fires - KPBS Online, who are also providing twitter updates1.
Several news articles I've read recently have referred to the recent SoCal wildfires as a Hurrican Katrina-like event. Very fortunately for the residents of SoCal, lessons were learnt from the failure of State and Federal bodies. Also very fortunately for SoCal, California is a wealthy state, with a GDP greater than the whole UK (>$1.5 trillion as of a couple of years ago).
While all the early reports were rather silly pieces about actors' homes being "at risk" in Malibu, the real horror developed elsewhere in San Diego County and San Bernadino County. As of today, the estimated cost of rebuilding in San Diego County is over $1 billion, with over half a million people evacuated.
While it's a truly awful situation, the events of 2005 in New Orleans puts current events into perspective. Those 500,000 people managed to get evacuated relatively safely (so far, only one death has been reported). I hope they can see this silver lining when they return to their charred homes and businesses. And I keeo my fingers crossed for them.
1 While trying to find out what KPBS was about, I read that they went off the air when they lost power to their transmitter due to the Harris fire. But a kindly public-spirited neighbour, KBZT-FM, came to their rescue and will be broadcasting their news programming on FM 94.9. Don't you love hearing stories like this? Gives you hope that we may yet survive the apocalypse. Or at least have radio while it's happening.
2 Incidentally, while reading KBZT's page on the fires, that warm feeling of hope for survival of our species came in handy when I read about potential disaster scams and price gouging. Damn humans.
Labels: california, socal wildfires
posted by akatsukira @ 22:29
1 Comments:
i don't think that that many lessons were learned from katrina in so cal per se--natural disasters are relatively commonplace in the region and on generally large scales: earthquake in sf in '89, la/northridge 'quake in '94, wildfires in a number of so cal communities from 2003-the present (although i recall a spate of wildfires in the '70s and '80s, too)....there are state and local systems in place for this sort of thing that mostly work, and people seem to always be improving (? revising maybe) them. of course, there are problems, including a steady rumbling since 2003 from san diego county that the state has not provided enough money to organize a unified fire department for the county, nor for enough fire-fighting resources that would be needed (based on those '03 fires), should another big one occur (like, um, now).
if lessons were learned from katrina that were applied in so cal, it might have been more with the aid agencies. it is truly amazing that 500,000 people managed to evacuate safely, and so far it looks like there isn't too much trouble in any of the shelters or with looting and other crimes (although like you said, scamming and price gouging is an issue). certainly, no one wanted the same chaos as in katrina, but i think 2003's evacs played a major part in this year's success. but in every city, everyone seems to be working with each other.
basically, i think we're sort of primed for this sh** already.
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