California Fires

It is interesting to see how the wildfires and evacuations are being handled in California this week.  There are several comparisons that can immediately made between the Hurricane Katrina mess and how California is handling things that speak to the ability of organizations to learn from their mistakes.

Katrina is still, by all assessments, a complete monkey-screw.  California, with a million evacuees and all kinds of losses, seems to be working as well as could be expected:  There has been no Superdome fiasco of dead people in wheelchairs covered with blankets.  The police haven’t been carting off possessions or dropping their guns and giving up. 

California is a different type of disaster.  Fire insists you leave.  Flooding means you could tough it out.

A second area where the Katrina comparison falls over is the type of people who are being evacuated.  Those living up in the hills of Malibu or San Diego are not dirt-poor.  Most interviews with ‘survivors’ start with "We got in the Benz and drove to a shelter with Pooksie and Muffy, our two dogs…" 

Compare that to Katrina where the people most affected were economically marginalized, without a Benz, or for that matter any other way to get out of New Orleans.  To the credit of the California authorities, they used as much technology as they could, to get people out of harm’s way.  Katrina? Tell you what, let’s just call it a learning situation:  The learning was that if you’re poor and inner-city, you’re on your own.

There are other areas where the two disasters don’t compare.  New Orleans is a fairly compact city and Katrina clobbered the densely populated downtown.  San Diego and Malibu are spread out.  The California fires nailed the urban, suburban and fringe rural areas where population density is less than the city proper.  There were no long lines of cars and trucks bumper to bumper clogging the one or two roads out of danger, like there was in New Orleans.

There are areas to investigate.  The various California fire services have almost been universal in their call for more help.  They don’t have enough gear or people to do their job which means they can only try to control things until the weather changes enough to allow them to fight the fire. 

There is a balance that has to be struck with emergency services, in that you have to scale things for known and sensibly predictable disasters.  The 2007 California wildfire season so far, looks like it might be beyond the test of ‘sensibly predictable’ so a shortfall in gear and people would be understandable, not good, but understandable. 

With Hurricane Katrina, the worst the Army Corps of Engineers had built for was a Category 3 storm, historically what had been experienced by New Orleans.  That was a sensible decision, as we have to think back to pre-Katrina time and Cat 3 was as bad as it had ever been.  One must be cautious about using after-the-fact eyes.

However, where the similarities exist, there is that constant theme:  "We don’t have enough resources to do this properly."  You’ve heard it from fire commanders in California and from cops in New Orleans. 

The reason the California fire services don’t have the resources is easy enough:  The gear and personnel are expensive.  Welcome to the fallout of the Regan and Bush-era, read-my-lips-no-new-taxes mentality. 

Emergency services Professionals (not "Brownie" but pros like David Paulison from FEMA) can scale their services to any disaster you can imagine, as long as they have the budget.  Budget means Taxes.

Here’s the conundrum.  You buy house insurance for the usual perils and pay the premium without question.  You don’t like it, but you pay because you know it is a sensible, prudent thing to do, in the event bad things happen.  But heaven’s forbid the politicians ask you pay a few more dollars to protect you and your neighbors with expanded emergency services that might sit unused for weeks on end. 

You know that newspapers and TV stations would be doing "Investigative Reports" on expensive people and gear that are waiting for the one time every five years when they’re really needed and complaining about ‘waste and inefficiency’ and ‘demanding answers’.  Of course, we’ll have all forgotten about the one time society needed the resources and they magically appeared.

You can’t have it both ways.