Southern California is Not New Orleans

Remember that the fires had some warning and evacuations could be done in stages, by community, as could the responses. Not like having everything underwater in a flash.

It's sad to see that people such as yourself have such a distorted view on the world.

ahmed,

I am from Louisiana and could not agree more!!

Open your eyes! LEADERSHIP is the answer; not RACE. While New Orleans and the State of Louisiana were asking "why did this happen to us", the State of California and it's affected communities were taking action.

You are blind to the facts.

Well, a lot of poor people of color are basically kept poor and ignorant by things like terrible school systems, a tv- and video game-based culture, etc.

or , as i say, ''racism'' isnt just calling someone a name, its NOT listening to what african indian and other earth races have to say about life ''environment''.

The San Diego Police Dept. didn't abandon their jobs en masse. The people fleeing the fires didn't shoot at the fire dept helicopters. There has been no reports of looting in san diego. Looters are not coming into san diego to loot it. I am in San diego right now and there is a real feeling of people doing anything they can for their neighbors. Almost all the food at Qualcomm is donated from local businesses. People have been renting backhoes and plowing firebreaks around homes of people they never met. There are people driving around giving away pet food. Yeah there is a lot of differencce between san diego and new orleans and the government has little to do with it.

they wont have o wait. they got white mans ''insurance'' for their whole lives. monetary and socially. america is racist period...

There is no comparison. People in San Diego have pockets of tragedy, the entire region is not under water and abandoned.

There are several factors that indicate the people who lost their homes in SoCal's canyon fires are treated better than the people who lost their homes in NOLA's Katrina flooding. Two primary factors are CLASS and RACE, with economic status most likely the greatest common denominator that seperates the SoCal fire victims from the NOLA flooding victims..

The people in the SoCal foothills most effected by the fires were NOT from lower income backgrounds as were the people in NOLA flooding. The evacuation procedures in SoCal were also more effective because of the economic status of the residents. There was also resistance by certain SoCal residents who refused evacuation to remain home and spray their house with water. This creates additional problem for the firefighters who place their lives and health at risk to save property and economic status of SoCal canyon homeowners..

This is not to be resentful of the wealthy middle to upper class homeowners who are now without housing followig the fire, though again there are common sense factors that developers and home construction corporations ignored when choosing to build thousands of homes in the fire prone SoCal canyon ecosystem..

This is not Republicans, anarchists or libertarians celebrating tragedy, though after many people with ecological awareness have repeatedly warned about building housing in regions where fire is nearly as regular an occurence as sunshine, we don't get off saying "told you so", though it is frustrating to watch as developers set the same traps and people continue to fall for them..

Since i am not an avowed populist, occasionally i will say things that do not appeal to the "masses" of the region (including some imc editors, who see fit to censor anything that may not be said "nice" enough). In this situation both the capitalist ruling class and the socialist urbanites (imc editors) have dropped the ball when it comes to providing coverage. The spin from the right is that the evacuation was successful simply because of having a Republican governor in CA as oppossed to a Democrat in Lousiana without an examination of how fire evacuations are handled different from flooding, and that the economic status of the fire victims is higher, many possess their own vehicles and are thus less likely to become stranded as the lower income people in NOLA who lacked any transport options..

The spin from the left is that global warming bears sole responsibilty for SoCal fires without looking into fire ecology systems of chapparel canyons where a great many of the effected houses were located. In their attempts to remain populist people pleasers, the socialist contingent has ignored that fact that prior to sprawl of suburbanization and resulting fire suppression, fires of lower intensity swept the canyons on a regular basis.

Global warming is a contributing (NOT contradictory) factor in the severeness of the fires, though by itself is not solely responsible. Fires have been a regular part of the SoCal ecosystem before Cristobal Colon (Columbus) sailed over here in 1492 and the internal combustion engine was invented..

background on SoCal fire ecology;

"Firebugs: Build it in California's foothills, and it will burn."

Mike Davis


"Following last autumn's disastrous wildfires in Southern California, Governor Pete Wilson warned of "an army of arsonists lurking in our foothills." The governor was right. The arsonists are the developers and homeowners who built in a tinderbox, and the policymakers who allowed them to do so.

Southern California is a fire ecology in exactly the same sense that it is a land of sunshine. Its natural ecosystems — coastal sage, oak savanna, and chaparral — have coevolved with wildfire. Periodic burning is necessary to recycle nutrients and germinate seeds.

The indigenous Californians were skilled fire-farmers. They used the firestick to hunt rabbits, cultivate edible grasses, increase browse for deer, thin mistletoe from oaks, and produce better stalks for basketry. Their careful annual burnings usually prevented fire catastrophe by limiting the accumulation of fuel.

But aboriginal ecologists also understood that some areas are spectacularly prone to regular conflagration. What is now Los Angeles, for example, they called "Valley of the Smokes." Malibu Canyon is a huge bellows that seasonally fans hot, dry Santa Ana winds to near-hurricane velocities. Major fires here are frequent (five since 1930) and, as the board of inquiry into the disastrous 1970 Malibu blaze acknowledged, "impossible to control."

Modern Southern California, however, built on the belief that even the most elemental forces can be mastered, refuses to concede anything to the laws of nature. Yet as Stephen Pyne emphasizes in his magisterial pyrohistory, Fire in America (1982), Southern California's deadly foothill firestorms of the 20th century are, in fact, the ironic consequence of massive expenditure on fire suppression."


The honest truth, and why i will continue to be the most hated writer on imc, is that all those houses in the SoCal canyons should not have been built in the first place, developers are responsible for the damages by tricking people into beleiving that it was ever safe to live in these fire prone canyons..

Here's a question to the left and the right; What is the cost benefit analysis of fire fighters whose lungs suffer from smoke inhalation and other job related health risks so that a yuppie's multi-million dollar mansion is saved from a naturally occurring fire (that will no doubt occurr again?)??

Please reconsider any efforts at censoring this comment. There is nothing here inherently racist other than the possible cold-heartedness of "blaming the victim" and expressing a non-populist viewpoint..

There are no accolades to Schwarzenegger, so don't try to call this writer a Republican or rightwinger. Just because calling out large numbers of people for making mistakes, that doesn't make me a Republican. Remember, censorship is the last resort of cowards..

"Roger" repeats the lie that people shot at rescue helicopters in New Orleans. Not a single case of a helicopter being hit by gunfire has been documented. Some people did fire guns into the air in a vain attempt to make their whereabouts known to potential rescuers. You can be sure that, if this had been done in the fire area, the meaning would not have been distorted by the media and racist Internet trolls.

As for "looting" (by Black people) or "obtaining supplies" (by white people) in New Orleans, none of that has been necessary for the fire evacuees because their needs have been more than met by the government, charitable organizations, businesses and their class brothers and sisters. In New Orleans, FEMA turned away people that came to rescue people and/or bring water and food. (Even a WalMart truck carrying water was turned away!)

Thanks to Richard Mellor for his summary of the situation.

Since i was censored last time, i will take the liberty of double posting this time; here's the continued version of the article by mike Davis;

article found @;
http://www.radicalurbantheory.com/mdavis/firebugs.html

"Despite a season of horrifying firestorms, dozens of new hillside tracts remain under construction. In the foothills above Monrovia, for example, several hundred venerable oak trees have been cut down for the sake of overscaled (and combustible) faux chateaux. In Altadena a favorite glen is being transformed into a "total-security" gated suburb complete with its own private school.

Instead of protecting "significant ecological areas" as required by law, county planning commissions in Southern California have historically been the malleable tools of hillside developers. Furthermore, studies have shown that property taxes on remote foothill homes are seldom sufficient to pay for the ordinary public services they require. Society as a whole is conscripted to carry the enormous costs of defending hillside developments from inevitable natural hazards. Over the last half-century, several billion dollars of general revenue have been expended on flood- control and fire fighting efforts focused specifically on elite foothill society.

There has been no comparable investment in the fire, toxic, or earthquake safety of the inner city. Instead, we tolerate two systems of hazard prevention, separate and unequal. The Los Angeles Times recently exposed the scandal of unenforced fire laws in midtown MacArthur Park neighborhoods where dozens have died in tenement fires — many more, after all, than tragically lost their lives in this fall's firestorms.

But these underlying ecological and social-justice issues seldom surface in public debate about the wildfire problem. Following the lead of Governor Wilson, conservative politicians instead treat fire ecology as a criminal conspiracy of arsonists and environmentalists. Thus Representative David Dreier (R-Calif.) has introduced a bill that would impose the federal death penalty on arsonists, while his colleague Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) wants to radically amend the Endangered Species Act, which he blames for the incineration of several dozen homes in Riverside County.

According to Calvert and his supporters in the powerful Riverside Building Industry Association, federal regulations designed to protect the habitat of the Stephens kangaroo rat prevented homeowners from clearing tall brush. In fact, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service encourages the mowing of grasses surrounding homes for fire safety; the problem is that homeowners find mowing too troublesome, preferring simply to roto-till their ecosystem under.

Similarly, the tiny California gnatcatcher has been indicted for the Laguna Hills firestorm (in which 15 percent of the total remaining gnatcatcher population perished), while environmentalists have been characterized as "arson's fifth column" on Orange County talk radio. Such "green-baiting" is a useful diversion from any consideration of the social costs of hillside development. It is also the opening salvo in a major political offensive to unleash further pyromanic suburbanization. Local governments are now under tremendous pressure from developers to "clear a firebreak through cumbersome environmental regulations." Taxpayers are being asked to finance expensive fleets of water-scooping aircraft — the latest in a long line of supposed "technological fixes" for California wildfire — to protect new and rebuilt hillside homes.

It won't work. Unless the rest of the state is paved (90 percent of California's coastal sage has already been lost try to suppress all fires, the worse the inevitable infernos will be. At a minimum, the latest fire season dramatically demonstrates the need for an immediate moratorium on further hillside development. "Fire zoning" should be established to ensure that foothill homeowners pay a fairer share of the costs of protecting their own homes. Land-use restrictions in defense of endangered ecosystems should be reinforced, not deregulated.

Finally, environmentalists need to forge a more explicit common cause with inner-city residents. We should lobby for equal enforcement of the fire code in every part of the community, with harsh sanctions against criminally negligent landlords. The loss of human life and property to natural disasters is tragic wherever it happens, but our sympathy for the victims should not extend to letting them play with fire."

My sincere apologies for all the people who lost their homes, sorry for not being kinder when critiquing your choices in home building locations..

http://www.radicalurbantheory.com/mdavis/firebugs.html