The assessment of Prop 13’s effects on CA State services is simple fact – not a reflection of any research skills on this end.

This fact is not popular with those who choose to believe that govenrment can be funded indefinitely with no tax increases.

Excellent post Kirk.

California’s underfunded emergency services and the resulting devastation, the Minnesota bridge collapse, the destruction of New Orleans, and so many other preventable disasters are the inevitable result of putting government in the hands of people who don’t believe in it, like Norquist and his fellow goons.

The assessment of Prop 13’s effects on CA State services is simple fact – not a reflection of any research skills on this end.

This fact is not popular with those who choose to believe that govenrment can be funded indefinitely with no tax increases.

If you choose to misconstrue that fact and use your misconstrual as a basis to question the research in the piece, I admire your skill with rhetorical tricks and their use in misdirection.

As Calif. Fires Burned, Copters Grounded

LOS ANGELES (AP) — As wildfires were charging across Southern California, nearly two dozen water-dropping helicopters and two massive cargo planes sat idly by, grounded by government rules and bureaucracy.

How much the aircraft would have helped will never be known, but their inability to provide quick assistance raises troubling questions about California’s preparations for a fire season that was widely expected to be among the worst on record.

It took as long as a day for Navy, Marine and California National Guard helicopters to get clearance early this week, in part because state rules require all firefighting choppers to be accompanied by state forestry “fire spotters” who coordinate water or retardant drops. By the time those spotters arrived, the powerful Santa Ana winds stoking the fires had made it too dangerous to fly.

[snip]

And some fire officials have grumbled that a quicker deployment of aircraft could have helped corral many of the wildfires that quickly flared out of control and have so far burned 500,000 acres from Malibu to the Mexican border.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other state officials have defended the state’s response, saying the intense winds prevented a more timely air attack.

“Anyone that is complaining about the planes just wants to complain,” Schwarzenegger replied angrily to a question Wednesday. “The fact is that we could have all the planes in the world here – we have 90 aircraft here and six that we got especially from the federal government – and they can’t fly because of the wind.”

Liar.

Indeed, winds reaching 100 mph helped drive the flames and made it exceedingly dangerous to fly. Still, four state helicopters and two from the Navy were able to take off Monday while nearly two dozen others stayed grounded.

Thomas Eversole, executive director of the American Helicopter Services & Aerial Firefighting Association, a Virginia-based nonprofit that serves as a liaison between helicopter contractors and federal agencies, said valuable time was lost.

“The basis for the initial attack helicopters is to get there when the fire is still small enough that you can contain it,” Eversole said. “If you don’t get there in time, you quickly run the risk of these fires getting out of control.”

The first of the 15 or so fires started around midnight Saturday. By Sunday afternoon, fires were raging in Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange counties.

At the request of firefighters on the ground, at 4 p.m. Sunday the state Office of Emergency Services asked the National Guard to supply four helicopters. Under state rules, a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection “spotter” must accompany each military and National Guard helicopter to coordinate water drops.

The spotters have 24 hours to report for duty, and it took nearly all that time for them and the National Guard crews to assemble. By the time they were ready to go, the winds had made it unsafe to fly.

The helicopters finally got off the ground Tuesday.

Mike Padilla, aviation chief for the forestry department, acknowledged the Guard’s helicopters were ready to fly before the spotters arrived. He said state officials were surprised.

“Typically we’re waiting for them to get crews,” Padilla said.

[snip]

But high winds after the fires began meant “there was very little opportunity” to fly, said the forestry department’s director, Ruben Grijalva.

“This is not a resource shortage on those days, this is a weather-condition problem,” he said.

That explanation doesn’t jibe with what U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray said state officials told him Tuesday night. Bilbray, who represents parts of San Diego, and other lawmakers were informed that 19 Navy and Marine helicopters were ready to fly, some as early as Sunday, but didn’t take off because there were no state fire spotters to accompany the crews, said Bilbray’s spokesman, Kurt Bardella.

[snip]

By the time the helicopters got airborne, the area burned had quadrupled to more than 390 square miles, and the number of homes destroyed jumped from 34 to more than 700.

Criticism from Bilbray and other lawmakers on the call helped lead Grijalva on Wednesday to abandon the state’s long-standing policy to have a spotter aboard each aircraft and instead let one spotter orchestrate drops for a squadron of three helicopters.

“I directed them to do whatever was necessary to get those other military assets into operation,” Grijalva said.

He said he could not explain why more spotters were not deployed before the flames spread to ensure that every aircraft ready to fly could take off.

[snip]

Regardless, he said, safety – not availability of spotters – was the overriding concern in determining when to allow aircraft into the skies.

Here’s the dirty little secret your political bosses won’t let you speak, Mr Grijalva:

Arnold and the CA Rethugs deliberately chose not to spend enough money to have spotters to be ready to go 24/7 during the Santa Ana season.

Fully staffed services on the scene, ready to go – that costs money.

More money than Arnold and the CA Rethugs wanted to spend.

The Club for Greed Growth would spank them if they raised taxes – and threaten their jobs.

Arnold and CA Rethugs protected their jobs -

And sacrificed SoCal homes and communities.

Sorry, Kirk, but when you make an egregious mistake like that, I cannot read the rest without wondering if the same sloppy research is behind the rest.

Ah sorry Kirk, I forgot about the explanation in the above post in my rant.

eCAHNomics @ 8

May I be impolite enuf to ask why people live in areas where it’s highly likely that their house will burn down in a wild fire? I’ve been to such houses in CA, and I think the owners are nuts, in a word.

This sounds dangerously close to questioning why someone would live in the Midwest (tornado alley), or along the Eastern or Southern coasts (hurricanes), or the Northeast and Mountain West(blizzards and ice storms). There’s not a place I can think of where there isn’t a risk of Mother Nature reminding us we are but a speck on her back. People live where they live, they try to mitigate the possibilities from whatever disaster the area is prone to, and get on with their lives. It is a dangerous assumption to think that there is some safe place where nothing bad ever happens and anyone who doesn’t choose to live there deserves whatever they get.

It’s not “dangerously close” to it at all, and attempting to equate the risks of choosing to locate in high-risk, fire-prone ecosystems to the extremely low risk of tornado damage in the Midwest is nothing short of irresponsible.

You can’t build in 100-year floodplainz, either, and these ecosystems will burn. That is what they do, regardless of misguided (and irresponsible) efforts of humans to control those natural systems. They burn more intensely when natural fire regimes are suppressed.

Planetizen headlines a (CSM) story this way:
Growth Pushes People Into Fireplace (links are embedded in prevous post/thread).

… referring to a Christian Science Monitor article that gets right to the heart of the story:

California’s age of megafires

Megafires, also called “siege fires,” are the increasingly frequent blazes that burn 500,000 acres or more – 10 times the size of the average forest fire of 20 years ago. One of the current wildfires is the sixth biggest in California ever, in terms of acreage burned, according to state figures and news reports.

The trend to more superhot fires, experts say, has been driven by a century-long policy of the US Forest Service to stop wildfires as quickly as possible. The unintentional consequence was to halt the natural eradication of underbrush, now the primary fuel for megafires.

Three other factors contribute to the trend, they add. First is climate change marked by a 1-degree F. rise in average yearly temperature across the West. Second is a fire season that on average is 78 days longer than in the late 1980s. Third is increased building of homes and other structures in wooded areas.

“We are increasingly building our homes … in fire-prone ecosystems,” says Dominik Kulakowski, adjunct professor of biology at Clark University Graduate School of Geography in Worcester, Mass. Doing that “in many of the forests of the Western US … is like building homes on the side of an active volcano.”
In California, where population growth has averaged more than 600,000 a year for at least a decade, housing has pushed into such areas.

“What once was open space is now residential homes providing fuel to make fires burn with greater intensity,” says Terry McHale of the California Department of Forestry firefighters union. “With so much dryness, so many communities to catch fire, so many fronts to fight, it becomes an almost incredible job.”

CSM gives Schwarzenegger way too much credit for improvements to the emergency response system, but they got the core story right.

Again: The ONLY thing “dangerous” about the situation is the reckless disregard for real-world conditions in choosing where to locate one’s residence. It is a naive, impractical, and even delusional attitude that defies common-sense, not to mention any real, workable solution.

Oh—it also raises your taxes.

But didja catch the kicker there? It’s worth repeating:

“… building our homes in fire-prone ecosystems”… “in many of the forests of the Western US … is like building homes on the side of an active volcano.”

thank yuo for sharing your mastery of this subject.

I’m scared that the usual suspects will use the chaparral fires to justify logging ancient forests…

(just as was done in Oregon some years back after teh B&B arson fires….started two days before Shrub’s scheduled visit…)

cinnamonape @ 106

Speaking of Grover Norquist…and how his Republican tax-cutters would deal with things…I think Brian Eno was prophetic “Baby’s on fire, why don’t we throw her in the water.

Republicans are already starting the meme that these firestorms were worse in Clintons Administration when he allowed the “Greens” and environmentalists to ake over the Forest Service.

Except that’s simply not true. Of the 12 worst fires in California in terms of area destroyed TEN have occurred while Bush has been President. And all of these were well into his term of office. These were not simply policy carry-overs. And that fact is underlined by the evidence that the worst fire disasters elsewhere in the US have also occurred while he was in office.

Here are the 12 most severe fires in California

#1 – Cedar Fire (>280,278 acres (1,134 km²)~ Oct 2003
#2 Zaca Fire ~ Los Padres NF (240,207 acres)~ July-Aug. 2007
#3 – Witch Fire (197,990 acres (>801 km²)~Oct. 2007
#4 – Laguna Fire (175,425 acres (710 km²)~ Sept. 1970
#5 – Marble-Cone Fire (~178,000 acres (720 km²) ~ Aug 1977
#6 – Day Fire (162,700 acres (658 km²) ~ Sept. 2006
#7 – McNally Fire (150,670 acres (610 km²) ~July-Aug. 2002
#8 – Old Fire (91,281 acres (369 km²) ~ Oct. 2003
#9 – Harris Fire (81,100 acres (328 km²) ~Oct. 2007
#10 – Moonlight Fire (65,000 acres (263 km²) ~ Sept. 2007
#11 – Sawtooth Complex fire (61,700 acres (250 km²) ~ July 2006
#12 – Ranch Fire (55,756 acres (226 km²) ~ Oct. 2007

The Milford Flat Fire which burned in 2007 in Utah is statistically the largest fire burning in American history. This fire burned 363,052 acres before it was fully contained.

The Yellowstone National Park Fire of 1988 during George H.W. Bush’s tenure burned well over 793,880 acres (321,271 ha) before the winter snows put out the flames. (See: Yellowstone fires of 1988)

In the Reagan era the “Siege of 1987″ was a complex of”independent” fires in northern California and southern Oregon that burned a total of about 650,000 acres. These fires were started by a large lightning storm in late August. The storm started roughly 1600 new fires, most caused by dry lightning. Firefighting efforts continued into October, before the majority of the fires were controlled.

Not a Clinton-era Fire within the clutch of top California fires. But Bush during his Presidential run, ignoring the fact that the worst US fires occurred in Republican Presidential tenures (including Daddy’s) , used the high-profile Cerro-Grande fire near the Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico (2000- 45,000 acres) as a centerpiece of his attacks on Clinton-Gore National Forest policies.

But it’s clear that this Administration is far worse than Clinton’s by orders of magnitude when you look at the actual consequences.

The fires are increasing in frequency, in intensity, and in their destruction. Much of this destruction is due to extended drought and increasing differentials of high-low pressure zones over the Continental. These are climatic changes…never recorded in historic periods. Anti-Global warming proponents like to argue that a single “event” doesn’t indicate a pattern. But look at the pattern. Then throw in a negligent fire-suppression policy that places harvesting of forest cover above the need to establish fire-control policies that are concordant with the distinctive ecologies and changing climatic conditions in the region…the result is a recipe for an inferno.

And there are more disasters that can be laid on his doorstep…both because of his failure to deal with Climate Policy…but also his failure to make available the funds for preventative fire-control measures, and quick strike response when fires initiate in tinderbox conditions…this despite the availability of modern technology such as High Resolution Satellite Imagery, Drone Aircraft, and rapid deployment capability of (unavailable) firefighters and suppression aircraft.

I remember pre Prop. 13 California. We had the best schools – music, art, and the rest. We had the best parks. We had . . . . the best, most of the time.

We also had a very bad system of property taxation – people were losing their lifelong homes because the property taxes were reassesed every year. No one could plan for inflation and market vagaries.

…

We had a bad system of dispursing property taxes to schools, one that was maintained after Prop. 13. In places where kids went mainly to private schools, the public teachers were paid badly, …

It sounds like you need a Progressive Democrat to push for some pretty big changes.

Don’t expect a Repub or DLC Dem to push very hard on something corporations don’t want.