Guest post: Thousands of our brother and sister firefighters are putting their lives on the line
Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on Trump chastises the people of California.
As the Washington Post reported, the California Professional Firefighters president Brian Rice issued a response that I’ll copy here in full:
The president’s message attacking California and threatening to withhold aid to the victims of the cataclysmic fires is Ill-informed, ill-timed, and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines.
At a time when our every effort should be focused on vanquishing the destructive fires and helping the victims, the president has chosen instead to issue an uninformed political threat aimed squarely at the innocent victims of these cataclysmic fires.
At this moment, thousands of our brother and sister firefighters are putting their lives on the line to protect the lives and property of thousands. Some of them are doing so even as their own homes lay in ruins. In my view, this shameful attack on California is an attack on all our courageous men and women on the front lines.
The president’s assertion that California’s forest management policies are to blame for catastrophic wildfire is dangerously wrong. Wildfires are sparked and spread not only in forested areas but in populated areas and open fields fueled by parched vegetation, high winds, low humidity and geography. Moreover, nearly 60 percent of California forests are under federal management, and another one-third under private control. It is the federal government that has chosen to divert resources away from forest management, not California.
Natural disasters are not “red” or “blue” – they destroy regardless of party. Right now, families are in mourning, thousands have lost homes, and a quarter-million Americans have been forced to flee. At this desperate time, we would encourage the president to offer support in word and deed, instead of recrimination and blame.
I admire how well that response was written. Trump is so blatantly narcissistic and solipsistic, it’s hard to know how to respond to him. I expect him to learn nothing, but people still need to say something. The response was intelligent to address the public more than the president, and to tell the public how the president was wrong and what he should do instead.
Among the painful ironies here, there IS an environmental disaster that regularly occurs in this country that is heavily (though not exclusively) worsened because of local policies–flooding, especially along rivers. For over a century, we’ve overbuilt the land along riverfronts and then responded to the floods by building levees that mainly serve to push the flooding further downstream, making the flooding there even worse, instead.
And we keep building there, because developers love to sell the view to homeowners, and the convenience of river-access to industrial and commercial properties. And we continue to build homes in flood plains.
But because those problems typically strike the Midwestern states (read: Blue heartland states), well, we can’t ever even suggest that maybe it’s time to require the states to work with the feds to develop a large-scale approach to the matter. Instead, it’s all “states’ rights” and sovereignity–until the rains come, and the floods force an application for federal disaster relief.
It happens a lot here – in the giant valley that is the lowland between the Cascade mountain range and the (much smaller) Olympic ditto. There are a lot of rivers, and there are a lot of houses on them, and every November there are floods, and every few years the floods are massive. I doubt it’s getting any better right now with the huge influx of people.