As California burns · 3:39am Nov 11th, 2018
Less than fifty miles from my house, the real world is indistinguishable from a postapocalyptic video game.
[images: Noah Berger/Associated Press; @onscene911; @onscene911]
Terrified residents are posting videos to Twitter of driving through flames as they evacuate.
They are the lucky ones.
"Nine people have been found dead," a typical news report says. "Entire neighborhoods [of Paradise, CA] are leveled. The business district is destroyed. In one day, this Sierra Nevada foothill town of 27,000 founded in the 1800s was largely incinerated by flames that moved so fast there was nothing firefighters could do."
Meanwhile, half a state away, an entirely unrelated fire looks less like an inferno and more like Dante's Inferno.
[images: Getty Images; @brokemogul; @elenach]
I'm personally unharmed -- although I just got a National Weather Service alert that visibility as low as 1/4 mile, due to thick smoke, will be causing road hazards tonight. I wish I could say that I was even more shocked. But at this point I'm just numb. Three of the ten largest wildfires in California history ignited within the last 12 months. Seven of California's 20 most destructive fires ever have started since October 2017. And every time I turn around, a new one makes the list.
This is not to say I'm unaffected. Despite the fact that fire response is handled through the California Office of Emergency Services rather than law enforcement, our Search & Rescue team started training this year to help with evacuations in the event of a local incident. I've already been called out to one local fire, which fortunately was quelled at less than five acres.
So I might have taken it a little bit personally when I woke up this morning to find my president commenting on the scenes of horror unfolding around me:
There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!
. . .
... I have to talk about this.
This is a My Little Pony fanfiction site. And while my political leanings are no secret, I'm not in the habit of running off my mouth about politics. But I am fucking pissed right now, and I know that I have greater than zero readers who have unironically used the phrase "Trump Derangement Syndrome," so I need to channel this rage right now into something I can point to when the phrase next comes up.
Compare and contrast.
My governor has been working tirelessly with CalOES, and has been retweeting both fire information and information on how to help fire victims. The governor-elect did the same, as well as expressing the state's shock and pain. My senators offered thoughts, prayers, pain, safety tips, ways to help, and promises to rebuild. These are all things victims need: when you've lost everything, it's crucial to have community and government at your back. Even sympathy, while it doesn't fix problems, is a necessary and basic lifeline: knowing that someone out there, with the power to make things better, cares.
My local representative is a Republican in a deeply gerrymandered district, who has marched in lockstep with Trump's agenda for the past two years. However, my local representative is still human. Over the past 48 hours, he's been helping arrange federal disaster relief; meeting with the Red Cross and leaders of local communities; tweeting out information about evacuations and shelters; and giving a speech on the floor of the House praising the work of emergency responders. I thanked him for it. Again, this isn't remotely partisan: this is a person whose community was devastated, working to set things right.
Trump threatened to take away even more money from the state's fire response efforts.
Trump's first response (aside from signing the declaration of emergency) was a threat to cripple future fire response efforts.
Compare him to the reaction of literally everyone else with a political stake in the situation, of either party. My state is on fire, a town just vanished off the map overnight, and there is exactly one person with power who can't even be bothered to pretend to care. Until half the country piled onto his original tweet and some thought and prayers went out a few hours later, his only comment on the matter was a threat.
And that horror is massively compounded by a simple, verifiable fact: he threatened to cripple future fire response efforts for completely bullshit reasons.
"There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor":
The Woolsey fire isn't a forest fire. Coastal Southern California doesn't have forests. It's chaparral scrubland, and no amount of logging is gonna tame that.
And the Camp fire?
It apparently started near the Poe Dam -- which is in the Plumas National Forest, under federal control.
This is not an aberration. As the president of the California Professional Firefighters points out, "nearly 60 percent of California forests are under federal management, and another two-thirds [of the remainder] under private control." California state and local agencies only control 3 percent of the state's forests.
Meanwhile, Trump has been cutting the budget of fire agencies, as well as reducing funding for tree clearing programs. If he's right that it's mismanagement at fault, he's literally threatening to punish future wildfire victims -- by reducing disaster relief even further -- for his own choices.
And it's not like this doesn't follow a pattern. His response to the Pulse nightclub shooting was to gloat about being "right" about Islamic terrorism. (He remained silent about most of the 62 mass shootings since then.) He blamed a mayor of a Puerto Rico city for the island's 3,000 hurricane-related deaths, ignored them for eleven months as American citizens waited for power to be restored, and called the chaos an "incredible success". I'm not even going to open the can of worms of his immigration policies, other than to note that his campaign ad last week about scary Mexican killers was so over-the-line that even Fox News yanked the ad from TV. And those are just off the top of my head.
The point is:
This is a man who has repeatedly, egregiously, callously crossed the line in ways that leave his fellow Republicans in the dust.
The people who have been saying so for two years have pointed at the many ways that he has extended presidential fuck-yous to the vulnerable at seemingly every possible turn.
If you refuse to believe them, that's on you. Now I'm here to let you know that I woke up this morning to one aimed at me.
And I hope to the gods we can impeach the bastard before you're put in the position of being vulnerable around him, because this is not a pattern that's ever going to change.
Stay safe. I don’t want to even acknowledge Trump being in a blog, for many of the reasons you’ve listed here and more. Thank you for spreading the word about this.
Damn, all of these fires are reminding me of the fires that came near my home twenty years ago exactly. And even that was mostly just open forest land, not towns and cities like these fires.
Good luck to you and everybody else down there, and I hope the authorities can get it under control soon.
Yeah, the situation is horrible and The ‘President’ is golfing while Rome burns. There’s a reason the latest Percy Jackson books focus on insane emperors and have the apocalyptic California fires as a plot point.
I’m really glad you’re safe.
Merciful emperor....
My prayers are with you and the people of California as they pull through this...
I've said before, I am fine with conservatives and even Republicans. I used to be one, weird as that might sound to people who know me now. (Never party lock-step, but still.) But I have no tolerance for Trump and almost no respect for Trump voters. Nobody could have been in ignorance of what he is when they voted for him. He was on his third marriage, vocally bigoted and racist, loudly in favor of "grabbing them by the pussy" (which made national news for weeks) and that was all before the election. They knew what he was when they chose him, and although I'm not sure I believe in Hell, they can roast with him there as far as I'm concerned. In Trump's world people like me wouldn't be permitted to even exist. So I've got no care left for him or anybody who voted for him, and this latest thing isn't the last straw for me, it's just more the exact same we've been seeing from Trump since the fucking 80s.
Ahem.
Yeah. Kinda hate the guy. Maybe I shouldn't, but fuck it, and fuck him.
I live maybe an hour or two away from the fires, and my sympathies are with everyone who is suffering and nothing but wishes that the firefighters continue to do their amazing jobs.
I hope everything goes okay and I too, hope we can impeach the bugger before he does even more reckless things. It amazes me how his party turns a blind eye to all this.
I thought we were all humans and even when tragedies happen, we came together to help, regardless of party.
FIREFIGHTERS RESPOND TO PRESIDENT TRUMP'S TWEET THREATENING TO WITHHOLD DISASTER AID
I think the president of the California Professional Firefighters organization was quite restrained, actually.
He's a narcissistic psychopath and pathological liar with delusions of adequacy. He's been accused of numerous crimes, stretching back nearly 40 years. I don't even know how many lawsuits have been filed against him. Even knowing how the Electoral College works, I don't understand how Trump was able to get anywhere near the White House, let alone stay there for nearly two years.
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Thank you for the good wishes. (And a note to other people praying for my safety or expressing relief I'm okay: Thank you in advance. I'm not going to respond repeatedly in the thread just to say that.)
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You stay safe too. We're all in this together.
If anyone is concerned about the fire victims, here are some ways to donate on the NorCal side, and there are donation links in the post for SoCal.
I hope Trump is still alive when the revolution comes just so we can splatter his brains against the wall.
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It will be far more satisfying to see him disgraced and imprisoned.
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can you just like
not for maybe five minutes
just don't
that'd be swell
Trump is like a reverse-Midas: Everything he touches turns to shit. And while Republicans might not all be as bad as he is, the overwhelming majority of them are at least willing to tolerate him and turn a blind eye as long as it means they get to keep power. Not to mention their willful ignorance with regards to climate change, which is almost certainly a contributing factor to these fires. They would (literally, I guess) watch this country burn if they can be kings of the ashes.
All that aside, good luck and stay safe.
Amen, buddy. Thanks for all that you do to make the world a better place, and stay safe out there!
Goddamn. Stay safe. Also, you should send this to a national newspaper or something. It makes its points with force.
Glad to hear you're safe. Those photos are pretty terrifying.
And thanks so much for posting the political side of this. It's great to see not only some actual sanity, but critical thinking and actual valuable information that thoroughly contradicts and destroys our idiot leader's selfish, mindless rant. I understand that some folks are upset with the political left, but it astounds me that anyone so vile as a human being (if I can class him so) could be defended with so much blind intensity as he is.
stay safe out there. i wish my Ex the same- she lives near the Malibu fire.
and yeah... Trump is a pure asshat. there are three major fires ransacking California right now- one of which wiped Paradise off the face of the earth- and he's threatening to destroy funding? REALLY!?! the fucking retardedness--- no, that would give retards a bad name. at least they have enough smarts to know "fire is bad". hopefully.
anyway, we need to get the orange monkey out of the office. he is a major threat to everybody in the world and everybody knows it, but nobody wants to throw the first punch because they are too scared, mostly because of his insurance- the even worse Mike Pence. if Trump is gone, he takes control, and we don't want him in control. Trump, at least, is a predictable evil. Pence, not so much.
hopefully, somebody in the new House will be able to get his entire cabinet gone, because if not... we're Nazi Germany 2.0. Kids in cages are just the start.
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I want to say I'm disappointed in him, but this is par for the course for the Trumpster Fire in the White House.
Hope stuff stays relatively safe for you and your friends over there, and that the fires get under control soon.
Oh, don't make me defend him. I'll defend the US Forest Service instead. In summary, what CA wants (according to its Senators) is for hundreds of millions of Federal dollars used for fire management to be diverted to State funds instead, and increased by a huge number to boot. The US Forest Service management of fire prevention is poor but improving over the last decade, the State management is nearly paper-thin with graft and mismanagement chewing up a vast percentage of any funding. In short, what the CA legislature wants to do is spend more money on failed fire policy (which you see in action now), and have the feds pay the bill without questions. This is a long-term problem that will take long-term solutions in timber country such as allowing fire roads, clearing insect-killed areas, and promoting controlled regular burns. In CA non-timber country it will take firebreaks (which environmentalists block), legal liability shields for controlled burns (which trial lawyers block), and more restrictive building codes (which communities object), all of which can only *slow* but not stop major wildfires like these.
Trump's tweet was abusive and rude. It also was a slap upside the face to the CA Senators who were trying to take advantage of the current disaster to get permanent Federal funding increases to a failing state program, which is also abusive and rude. The Feds are doing all the Feds can do to help during the disaster. It's up to the State to fund and construct the plan to discourage this kind of disaster in the future. I have little faith in their ability to do such. I hope I'm wrong.
I'm happy to see many familiar faces here but I sure wish it were under better circumstances, you all stay safe and happy now over there in America alright? I wish you all the best.
My thoughts are with you in California.
Your man Trump is in France for Armistice Day at the moment, it would seem that he is cancelling visits to memorials because its raining and his helicopter cant fly.
Spare a thought for the fallen of all nations to day 11th hour(GMT) of the 11th day of the 11th month and 100 years since the end of WW1.
It's funny, how after the Thomas fire last year, which got within a mile of my home, staying in T.O. between the Woolsey and Hill fires on Thursday (traffic was so bad I stayed overnight, rather than go home) didn't really seem like such a huge deal...
Plus I got to be a Big Damn Hero, helping with some of the early evacuation efforts.
I won't comment on politics, though. I've seen enough flames these past few days to last me a year.
Who the hell actually cares about the letter next to your name if you’re a decent human being you’re good in my book. And then there’s Trump… I have no idea how anyone can willfully follow him. I am surprised that there haven’t been any real rebellions in the works (that I know of) or assasination attempts. This man has proven time and time again that he is not mentally well enough to be in that position.
Echoing the stay-safe wishes.
Be careful. My thoughts are with you and everyone else near the blazes.
Those pictures do bring the reality of what is happening in California home to those of us on the other side of the planet, not following every detail of the drama. Thanks for sharing. Good to know you are safe. It doesn't seem all that long ago that we could trust a president, or other leader, to say something reassuring after such a disaster. The question was just whether they would follow it up with long term support. Trump is failing at the most basic of duties for a head of state. And sadly, with climate change, we can only expect more such disasters in the future.
Stay safe, horizon. The California fires look scary enough in the evening news here across the Atlantic.
And yes, 100% agreement with you on the Orange Occupant of Oval Office. The man is utterly unfit for his position, not only because of his thorough incompetence, but also because of his glaring character flaws.
You're goddamn right.
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I grew up in southern California and was briefly a rural homeowner there, so yeah, everything Georg said.
Have we mentioned that chaparral has a fire ecology? It needs to burn to survive, and it will burn, sooner or later. But people have been building homes in the chaparral for decades, so of course people have suppressed its periodic fires. Which only makes those fires bigger when they do happen (more dead branches and leaves) and causes greater loss of property and life (more homes and humans).
And it's hard to do a controlled burn of chaparral for a number of reasons, not least the hilly remote land on which it grows. But there's another reason as well: the chaparral itself. Plants of the chaparral have a tightly-woven canopy of branches to keep sunlight from drying up groundwater. They also secrete a layer of oil on their leaves and branches to keep water from evaporating from those leaves and branches. But that oil is volatile--that is, it evaporates: it turns into vapor. Especially on hot, dry days. And the vapor gets trapped under that tightly-woven canopy of branches I mentioned earlier. So you know what you get in chaparral, around late Summer and early Fall?
You get an explosive air-fuel mixture.
Which is why all these pictures of California wildfires look like a giant bomb going off. Technically it's not an explosion, as there's no containment of the blast and so it goes WHOOSH rather than BOOM, but you do have tremendous amounts of heat appearing almost instantaneously.
Finally, here's a good analysis of the sociology and history of the fires by the Los Angeles Times, a longstanding local paper which knows the subject well.
(Not relevant but fun: I've also read that the chaparral is a dwarf forest, and it has pretty much the entire ecological structure of a full-sized climax forest, only it's acted out with smaller species. The apex predators are songbirds, rodents and the larger reptiles. Most other niches are filled by insects)
Okay, that sounds like a really crap set of events (scary, really), and It sounds like I would have to agree with the evidence presented. That said, I have no context for the wider reasons behind that, aside from the fact that Twitter is a really bad place to try to find them.
Still, the job of a president is not to personally comment on every disaster, but to get things done. It's the latter we should be looking into. (Though I have to say it's gotta be nice to hear the chief executive has noticed you and feels bad)
I saw this post and came on just to make a comment about Trump being the world's foremost forestry expert, then before posting scrolled up to read and saw you beat me to it.
As many others have said, I'm glad you're safe and hope you stay that way.
You covered a lot of very important points about Trump and what he is donig, and people have addressed most of them here, but I do want to talk about one that hasn't been brought up directly: Trump Derangement Syndrome. I hadn't actually come across the term until this blog, but I instantly understood what you meant by it regardless, and a quick Google search confirmed my gut instinct.
As a non-American, watching the politics of America play out if often bizarre, but it's rarely quite as tragic as this. The fact that people genuinely believe that the liberals are just overeacting or somethig, that all of Trump's frankly absurd behaviour is being slowly normalised, it just boggles the mind.
I can definitively say as an outsider looking in that, no, it's not normal. Not for America, not for the rest of the world. No, people are not overeacting - he really is that bad. At worst, some people might be focusing on some of his 'flashier' upsets, but I can hardly blame people for getting angry about a man who seems so determined to trample over everything his office is supposed to stand for.
Reactionaries live in a world of perverted aesthetics and do not care about the realities beyond their own skulls.
One Californian to another, all my hugs. I flew back in from out of state yesterday and it was... shocking. Coming down into SFO, it was surreal, even though that area wasn't anywhere CLOSE to the Camp Fire. Those aren't clouds, folks. And they were brown.
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I know how frustrated and hurt you must feel, because I feel so similarly. My state is on fire, and sometimes it actually feels like a physical wound. Especially when there's nothing you can do to stop it. My cousin is a firefighter, and I am admittedly afraid for him. I have friends, very very close ones, who were waiting touch and go on whether they had to be evaced. They still might be for all I know. In a time where you might feel helpless to do much, and rightfully angry at the responses by those in power, I can't do much but offer you my solidarity. And Internet hugs.
4966391 I work in Silicon Valley, and Friday was a seriously bad air quality day. It was almost as thick as fog. Not complaining—I knew that the air quality was far better for me than the life outcome was for so many people near the blazes that caused it.
When I drove home late in the afternoon, the sun was still very high above the horizon, and it was a gorgeous red-orange ball in the sky that made the air around it glow with the same color. I could look directly at it without blinking, and would have stared at it for the whole drive home if I hadn't been driving.
To all our Californian friends, I extend my sympathy and support. Be safe, and hang in there.
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I'm told that one shouldn't stare at the sun even if it appears to be safe to do so, because the radiation that you can't see might still damage your eyes. I don't know what the science is behind that, but it seems to be a general recommendation.
Also, Trump is a malodorous butt-trumpet.
4966474 Oh, I only meant that the visible light didn't force me to blink or look away. Anyway, driving is too important for me to be staring at the sun. But you might be thinking of the effects of UV light, as opposed to visible light.
Here are a couple of interesting articles I found:
What happens when you look at the sun
How bushfire smoke can affect UV levels
Huh. Where I am, the air has been pretty normal today, but the wind picked up and now I can smell fire smoke again...
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aaaaaaaaaaaah I did not need this image
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I DO NOT AND I DO SO!
(I mean, I still didn't vote for Trump. Us reactionaries are supposed to have standards!)
Dude, stay safe man. That shit is terrifying.
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if you have actual standards then you aren't a real reactionary, friend.
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Wait. Hang on, wait. I need to stop you right there, because you proceed to go off on a long rant about Democrats and Californians based on what appears to be an impossible premise.
Did you even read my post, much less click through to any of its numerous citations? Let's repeat something, using a different source for emphasis:
The Forest Service budget is to manage national forests which are owned by the federal government. Which, let's be clear, outnumber state-owned forests 20 to 1. California has no legal authority to manage those forests. They couldn't do anything with those funds if they got them. The idea that there is some sort of state power grab for Forest Service funds literally makes no sense.
The most charitable explanation I can come up with for your assertion is that you're misremembering Feinstein and Harris' call for a fire response funding overhaul as a cash grab. And, in fact, it would result in significantly more money being spent on wildfires overall. But there are a number of problems if that's the angle you're going with. (If you're not, citation f*king needed, as the kids say.)
One, this has nothing to do with California — the root of the problem is:
Two, there is broad bipartisan agreement that this fix is needed. Risch's HR 2862 had 57 Democratic and 37 Republican co-sponsors, including Doug LaMalfa (my district's bright-red, full-throated Trump backing, representative mentioned in the post) and every Sacramento-area deep-blue Democratic rep. There's a Senate version too, which Harris and Feinstein backed so that's probably the one you're thinking of; and there's some inside baseball about collisions between the two versions — but this is already getting way off into the weeds and I have better things to do than let this conversation derail that far.
Three, you seem to be asserting that prevention is the only long-term fix — which is exactly what those bills are designed to do. Establishing a separate disaster response fund for firefighting allows the Forest Service to use its budget for fire prevention, as it was originally supposed to do in the first place. The fact is that there are just more, and more expensive, fires now than there used to be (... and I'm going to deliberately not derail this into a discussion of climate change, but here's another area where nobody who has to actually deal with the problem denies that it's a factor). Responding to fires has been eating the Forest Service budget for decades: either you want to not spend more money, or you want prevention. Choose one.
Fourth, all of this is from 2017 and a funding overhaul was passed in March. So the idea that Trump has a legitimate beef is six months out of date, even if he and you weren't ignoring all the other facts here.
Citations needed.
Every source I've found agrees that USFS has been increasingly drowning in firefighting costs — basically the exact opposite of what you're saying, since every dollar spent being reactive can't be put toward prevention and management.
California allocated $256 million for fire prevention this year, and passed a bill in September adding another billion dollars over five years for forest thinning and brush clearing.
Remember that California national forest lands outnumber California state forest lands 20 to 1.. A USFS December 2017 press release notes: "The USDA Forest Service has treated over 55,000 acres and CAL FIRE has completed over 33,000 acres in fuel treatment projects." Proportionally, the state is doing over 10x more preventative work than the feds.
"Graft and mismanagement chewing up a vast percentage of funding" is an exceptional claim and the burden is on you to show that the state waste and fraud are exceptional. The only source I could find making that claim rips both CAL FIRE and USFS equally — and mostly over sending that money toward suppression rather than prevention, which is exactly what all of the above addresses.
This is complete nonsense, as repeatedly covered.
This is probably the only part of your post which I don't take exception to. There are details to quibble over, but that would neither be topical nor productive. I'll just note that many of these things are conventional wisdom among experts, and already being brought to bear.
You know what I find abusive and rude? Making false equivalencies based on misinformation. Let's reiterate:
The senators aren't asking to transfer any funds from feds to state, and it would make no sense given that the overwhelming majority of CA forests are federally managed.
There's strong bipartisan support for readjusting the USFS budget. Which was already done.
Your assertion that Federal funding increases are bad flies in the face of your assertion that more prevention is needed.
It's this sort of nonsense that Trump and his supporters have been poisoning the well of modern discourse with. I've always been willing to engage with reasonable conservatives. I've voted for them. But the modern Republican party has an allergy to experts and a fetish for bold ideological assertion, and Trump has removed the fetters which at least once upon a time chained them to the truth.
IF Trump had framed the issue as: "This is horrible, but instead of sinking money into a giant fire pit we need to talk about how to save cities and lives at reasonable cost," then at least we could have that conversation.
But he led with a threat and a lie. And the people feeding you the outrage which led to your post are leading with lies. You can't follow them and still have reasonable conversations, because the process of interrogating every single conservative claim to make sure it's not this kind of bullshit starts every discussion off on adversarial grounds.
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Chaparral is indeed ugly, ugly stuff. The Sierra Nevada foothills are lousy with it. I will take blackberries and poison oak over a manzanita-choked hillside. I've lost pairs of pants to it on searches, and I've been on searches where I literally had to belly-crawl through it to make progress.
And there's really no good way to deal with it, from a fire suppression POV, other than to clear it way the hell away from anything you care about. There's not really any such thing as "thinning" manzanita. It grows back too fast and too thick.
The LAT article is good, and overlaps a lot with what insurance companies and firefighters and forestry experts have been trying to hammer into our head for years: keeping yourself safe starts and ends with defensible space (with some other things in the middle). Forests are a problem but in no way are the problem; the entire state is a tinderbox after drought in 10 of the last 12 years, and most of the most damaging fires were nowhere near trees. We're already screwed and now we're just triaging.
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His threats based on misinformation did neither.
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. . .
... As a leftist, I'm going to remember that quote next time someone asks me to consider Marxist solutions, and not in the way that you hope.
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What's wrong with it?
I came down to California for the first time in my life this wekend. I didn't even know about the fires until the air quality suddenly got really bad near the border to Oregon. Made me feel kind of ignorant. But I don't think I would have understood the scale of this anyway. I still don't really, but when visibility in San Francisco is bad because of the smoke when the fires are much too far away to even see them you at least start to understand that it's big.
Those photos really look like something straight out of a game. Not the last one though. It looks too unreal.
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It's a reminder that the socialists are the only people who killed more civilians than the Nazis during the 20th century, and they see nothing wrong with it.