No one I hear is saying that except you.
Ya see this has happened many times in the past. It goes with the territory my friend.
Feel free to tell me how to get right of several thousand square miles of burn material that grows every year, much of which is hard to access with few roads etc.
None of this has happened since the 2003 fire: No dead lay fuel timber cutting, no firebreak widening, no limit on developers carving master plan communities into brush fire country just so that some guy who doesn't even live in the home six months out of the year can see the smoggy valley below. Those beetle-killed 'Golden Pine' trees in the San Bernardino forest aren't allowed to be felled, mulched, or chemically disintegrated. They just stand there in the forst like tanker trucks full of gasoline waiting for the first Santa Ana winds, lit cigarette butt, arsonist, or illegal alien letting their kids shoot off roman candles in the forest for Cinco de Mayo. In fact, the CA envirokooks have even gotten legislation passed since 2003 to allow firebreaks to become overgrown in the interests of 'returning the landscape to nature'. All that hard work done with Federal dollars since the 1940s wasted. They should have been widened.
This is the second time in four years that my brother's family has had mandatory evacuation from his place in Lake Arrowhead. They came closer this time to losing their home than in 2003, and slowly but surely Lake Arrowhead is turning into a burnt out moonscape. Have you even been up there recently? Right now there's a quarter million people in SoCal that fled for their lives who are now living like itinerant refugees in a Bosnian squatter's camp.
Really now. CA isn't the only state with lots of timber, so the issue of forest management isn't yours alone. It's just that after every catastrophic fire there, nothing gets done there. Two weeks after 1500+ homes are lost in southland communities and Channel 7 'KABC Action News Fire Center 2007' has gone back to regular mundane programming, everyone in the state except those directly affected forgets all about what just happened. Nothing is resolved.
Believe me, after the 2003 fires in San Bernardino County, my brother took his family to the largest scheduled public appreciation event for the heroic firefighters of San Diego and San Bernardino counties and they were just about the only people that showed up. The event drew maybe 150 people. No lawmakers from Sacramento attended, but some forty fire stations sent trucks and firefighters who just sat milling around getting no thanks for saving entire cities. They had burgers, hot dogs, packed up and left.
You know what? You're so off-base with your defensive posturing, I'll prove something to you: When the fires finally die out in SoCal, watch and see how much gets done for the people burnt out and those who may suffer the same fate in the near future. See how much is done to upgrade firefighting equipment and hiring more personnel. What sort of proposals there will be to reverse the envirowacko's mandates on firebreaks and forest management. Let's just watch and see.
You'll be lucky to see a Sparkletts bottle filled an inch deep with pennies and dimes at your local supermarket, and maybe your local elementary school will hold a miserable little canned food drive. Meanwhile, everyone else in CA will be right back to talking about how dumb that Lindsey Lohan chick is for getting popped for DUI three times in a year and who they like best on this season's 'Survivor'.
Bet me? Two weeks and this will all be a forgotten memory until maybe 2009 when once again you'll snap on the TV and hear "It's being called the worst wildfire in California's history! Good evening, I'm Jim Lampley in the Fire Watch 2009 Action News Center!".
... Then you and I will talk about how a whole lot of exactly nothing has been done since 2007, won't we?
See you then!