What A Surprise
The Shrubbery was out there praising the great job Arnold was doing, so this is a bit surprising: Bureaucracy hampered initial Calif. fire efforts
LOS ANGELES – 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.
You mean that Arnold wasn’t running a well-oiled machine?
I guess not everyone was pleased with the “Terminator”: Local Officials: California Was Unprepared
(AP) Unable to slow, much less stop, many of the wildfires that have charred Southern California, some local officials lashed out Tuesday at what they described as state authorities who offered inadequate help and seemed unprepared for a foreseeable disaster.
Most blistering in his critique was the head of Orange County’s fire authority, who said a quick deployment of aircraft could have corralled the massive blaze his crews were fighting near heavily populated Irvine.
“It is an absolute fact, had we had more air resources we would have been able to control this fire,” Chief Chip Prather told reporters.
His remarks came shortly before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger praised the rapid deployment of fire crews and equipment across a region where 16 wind-stoked fires were scattered over an area larger than some states. The blazes destroyed nearly 1,500 homes and forced the largest mass evacuation in California history.
Prather said that a dozen firefighters’ lives were threatened at one point because too few crews were on the ground. It was not an isolated problem, he suggested, saying the bigger issue was the lack of an overarching scheme to attack several large fires at once.
Wow, he sounds like he’s saying that things weren’t coordinated at the state level and no one was in charge, but that can’t be right because the Shrubbery said everything was wonderful, unlike “other states”, because the Governator took charge.
2 comments
Oh my. “Heckuva job Arnie”. Shades of “Heckuva job Brownie” indeed.
However, to be fair, there is a bit of blame-shifting going on with the locals here. The local fire departments are supposed to be part of a regional fire district. The regional fire district is supposed to coordinate multi-agency response to fires too big to handle with a single agency, as well as coordinate with the state. That did not happen here because the locals have all set up their own empires and don’t want to play nice with each other. What little coordination did happen at the regional fire district level was haphazard at best. That said, as with Governor Blanco’s response to the bus situation in New Orleans, the reaction of the state government was delayed far beyond the point it should have been — and unlike Blanco, Arnie didn’t have FEMA lying to him about imaginary resources that would be there Real Soon Now.
Arnie also didn’t have people blocking the few remaining roads making it impossible to reach the people in need as happened around New Orleans.
Arnie is directly responsible for blocking the funding for the tanks for the C-130s and for not implementing all of the recommendations from the Cedar fire task force.
Part of the problem was the number of units still down from the Santa Barbara fire and the shift in units for the Malibu fire.
When the Orange County fire hit, everyone had already shifted north to cover for the units used in LA County.
You’re right though, the individual chiefs have a definite tendency not to share.