Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT by Don Polson     Red Bluff Daily News 1/14/2024

  What would my SoCal places look like?

It’s worthwhile evaluating claims and accusations over the massively destructive fires in Southern California (see below). My heart weeps for the victims. Much of my 20s and 30s were spent working (with little recreation to show for it) in San Diego, Los Angeles, Ventura Counties, and the Palm Springs, Desert Hot Springs and Indio areas.

Thankfully, wildfires had little impact, save for one that roared down the Malibu Canyon area around Las Virgenes Road, which curved south from the Calabasas/Thousand Oaks area along Hwy 101 (the Ventura Freeway) to the Malibu coast. Malibu Creek State Park, parts of which have been featured in countless movies, was just across Los Virgenes Road.

Along with other staff at a church that’s still on Google Earth (different name and faith) southeast of the Las Virgenes/Mulholland intersection, we were deployed around buildings to beat down hot spots. I searched rooftops to spot and remove wooden pallets that had collected dead leaves. The church’s Pasadena campus kept me busy with nary a thought that wildfires could threaten our verdant foliage.

When my lovely bride, Barbara, and I began planning for an outdoor wedding in 1984/85, one location under state park authority was ruled out for a September ceremony, due to the possibility of fire conditions shutting it down to public use. The beauty of the spot couldn’t justify requiring a back-up location for the guests and caterer to use on a moment’s notice.

I’ll never forget driving west along the foothill area of the San Gabriel Valley and seeing plumes of smoke reaching thousands of feet into the air above the coastal mountains. The Santa Ana winds, just as you’ve seen in reporting on the fires, drive humidity into the single digits with winds in excess of 70 miles an hour, and have cursed the region for millennia.

Aside from lightning strikes (which burned millions of acres a year), Native tribes didn’t deal with fires like we see because they had the sense not to be reckless about fire usage. Indeed, what became Los Angeles was called the “valley of smokes.” Only the massive transfer of water from elsewhere allows millions of residents to exist in an area that would otherwise only support a fraction of the current population.

A restaurant where I worked at the intersection of Topanga Canyon and Little Topanga Canyon, the Inn of the Seventh Ray (still serving organic fare), suffered from the other curse of the region, floods that rush down steep canyons and overwhelm the drainage. Flood waters rose to about 5 feet above the floor, ruining all food stocks that weren’t in cans, including walk-in refrigerators. They recovered, reinforced the creek banks and creek side seating with rock walls, and still serve customers decades later.

***

The assertions and accusations that inevitably follow such devastating conflagrations like those in Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Altadena, etc—not unlike the destruction in Lahaina on Maui, and the town of Paradise—are sadly predictable, but not preventable. Is it true that mismanagement of water supplies; firefighting personnel (fired for not being vaccinated?) and equipment (sent to Ukraine?); homeless campers’ cooking and warming fires; as well as ideologically-driven “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs—have turned a natural disaster into a regional catastrophe?

In some ways, “it depends,” but it’s also a binary choice, such as the choice to prioritize water flows into the delta for environmental purposes, versus sending them to farms and cities. Or the choice to build, or not build, water storage to capture seasonal and perpetual water for use when such flows diminish. Certainly, a decade after voters approved nearly $10 billion to increase storage reservoirs, a choice was made to ignore the mandate.

Upon taking her administration position at DWR in 1988, Barbara told me about the Sites reservoir location that was identified for water storage. Forty years will have passed soon without that inherently sensible earthen dam-created storage being finished. Note that the water to fill it is no longer as plentiful with the permanent opening of the Diversion Dam gates, also a foolish, enviro-driven decision .

Together with another long-proposed storage location in the Sierra hills, Temperance Flat reservoir on the San Joaquin River, there would be enough capacity to supply nearly all of Los Angeles-area’s drinking water needs, as well as filling storage facilities for emergencies.

Scapegoating, and reducing water for, agriculture only cuts the financially abundant nose off the budgetary, economic and job-creating face of California—when monies have already been allocated for additional storage.

The political will and foresight that, in decades past, built freeways, dams, canals and reservoirs, must be renewed and harnessed—and environmental fanatics be damned—in the noble cause of once again building the hydrological structures, and extracting the energy lifeblood under our collective feet, that will enable our nearly-40 million residents to experience abundance. Why, it could even “make California great again.”