Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT by Don Polson           Red Bluff Daily News 2/04/2024

        Not writing about airline disasters

Mowing our back yard and one-third acre lot is often an active meditation; the mind floats while the body aligns the mowed, parallel rows. There are disturbances: the jarring bumps left by moles, and the sharp, grinding sounds as the mower blade encounters the piles of dirt and rocks from said mole-hills. Bits of dead branches become smaller bits; no matter, as the blade will need sharpening anyway.

Anticipation accompanied our loading of the Highlander; we’re looking forward to months of skiing on Mount Bachelor in Oregon. Ensconced in our ski shack, we watch the weather forecasts assiduously, looking for those “bluebird” skies and ideal snow surfaces.

There’s a bit of guilt that our Red Bluff home will suffer from neglect, as the coiffed lawn becomes foot-tall grasses and weeds, waiting to mock us upon our return. They’ll get mowed down before they can threaten to feed a grass fire.

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There’s a concept: When people have the potential fire danger of overgrown foliage around their homes, and the means to reduce the threat, common sense says to keep the fuel load down. Rarely do folks ignore their overgrown weeds, whether for the visual blight, or fire safety.

And yet, the people of Paradise, Lahaina (Maui), and Palisades and Altadena—who no doubt were as attuned to fire safety as anyone—were left with ashes, twisted metal, and valuables lost in the conflagrations. None of those fires started on their own properties; all were started—some by faulty utility equipment, more often by human firebugs—outside their property lines but roared through, leaving rubble and memories. Did “authorities” consciously allow flammable foliage, heavy undergrowth and dried brush?

We are past immediate responses and firefighting; even as the crews performed their selfless duties, finger-pointing and blame-shifting arose. If causation and contributing factors are evident, fingers should be aimed at such dereliction of duty; if blame is wrongly assigned, let the truth correct the record.

Would that politicians could admit their failures, and news media separate truth from falsehood; news stories move on. PG&E has not been spared culpability; neither will the utility company whose lines were recorded sparking the Altadena fire. The Palisades fire is still under investigation, although the inception at a hiking area called Skull Rock is not in doubt.

Also not in doubt: an empty reservoir specifically built after previous local fires, to provide 117 million gallons of water for refilling smaller tanks and fire trucks; and fire hydrants that, due to lack of supply, went dry. Leadership dropped the ball by not preparing and pre-deploying assets for quick response to initial fires.

Consider the following stories, in no particular order: “How Jerry Brown Engineered California’s Drought” by Ed Driscoll, Victor Davis Hanson, and Glenn Reynolds (Pjmedia.com, April 2, 2015). “Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people.”

“Gov. Pete Wilson: California had a plan to store storm water, but Democrats blew it,” (Latimes/com/opinion, March 2, 2019). “But when year after year I included money in the state budget for surface collection and storage projects to bank against droughts, the money was removed by the Democratic majorities in the Legislature.”

“Guess What L.A. Officials Were Warned About Before the Fires (So This WASN'T 'Misinformation'?) by Doug P, Twitchy.com, 1/24.

“LA Times: Dems Knew Long Before the Winds Blew” by Ed Morrisey, Hotair.com, 1/24: “Just what did Democrat leaders in Los Angeles and in Sacramento know about the collapsing fire-fighting infrastructure in Southern California—and when did they know it? A new lawsuit might threaten to expose more than a decade of willful neglect by LA mayors and California governors…

“However, the LA Times uncovers a much stronger fact pattern of gross negligence and incompetence in a new report. County officials had asked for three dozen critical upgrades and expansions of water infrastructure more than a decade earlier, at a projected cost of less than $57 million (over 7 years). Successive city and state administrations did absolutely nothing on any of those projects to move them from planning to production;

“Many projects on a list of about three dozen ‘highest priority’ upgrades compiled by county officials in 2013 have yet to break ground in communities devastated by the fires. The county wrote that the upgrades would achieve ‘critical goals,’ including ensuring the system had enough water to meet ‘fire flow needs.’”

“Newsom Vetoed A Bill to Enhance Fire Mitigation So He Could Grab the Land for affordable Housing,” by Jennifer Oliver O’Connell, Redstate.com, 1/23.

The “fingers” of facts point one way: Gov. Newsom and state Democrats.