Politics of a Firestorm: San Diego, CA

By: Steve Yuhas

Let’s begin with this very simple fact: politicians do not put out fires.  You wouldn’t know that by watching or listening to the news in southern California.  Since last week just about every politicians from Washington DC to dog catchers all over southern California have taken credit for the great response to the Firestorm of 2007.

Mother Nature unleashed, primarily on San Diego County, a set of fires that rivaled any in the history of the state.  Areas that were overgrown with dry brush (dry partly because of idiotic environmental laws and regulations) caught fire.  Those fires spread to the point that the evacuations that followed ended up the largest evacuations during peacetime in the United States.

Thanks to the bravery of firefighters, law enforcement and members of the military the 2007 fires are now history and more than one thousand people who lost their homes, four years almost to the day when more than 2,000 others lost theirs, can begin to rebuild. 

The problem today is that nobody is holding politicians accountable for the many things that went wrong.

People wanted information, the ratings from KOGO and the website prove that out, and I am proud to have been part of the team that helped bring information to our listeners.  My role was a simple one – gather the best and most timely information and pass it to people over the air.  I did not have to wear any fireman gear, there was no risk involved and the only headache I got was from listening to the tiring speeches of politicians that were dated and went on forever.

Outside of the fact that FEMA decided to fake a news conference there has been very little by way of criticism of government during this fire – allow me to amend this problem.

Journalists have not been asking tough questions of many politicians who have been taking credit for what firefighters in San Diego did.  Instead many in the journalistic community are comparing, wrongly, the evacuations of Hurricane Katrina to those from a fire in San Diego.  Katrina was a once in a lifetime storm that had a complete breakdown of government on top of stupid people who said, “Nah, I’ll ride it out.”  The fires we just had gave warnings as little as ten minutes and in my case I was not at home when I was told to evacuate so I stayed where I was.

Not a single journalist San Diego elected leaders about why Qualcomm Stadium, the only city run shelter in the entire disaster, had no stockpile of supplies on hand to help sustain the number of people that would ultimately show up.  It was as if someone threw the keys to stranger and said, “Go ahead and use the stadium for a shelter.”  We tried for five days to get the person in charge on the air, but nobody knew who it was!

That alone should wipe the smiles off of the faces of the many political figures who are taking credit for what firefighters, military folks and volunteers did to keep the people of San Diego safe.  Politicians being what they are simply ignore the fact that if it rained or had there been an earthquake that the region would have been cut off from society for a couple of days more and there were thousands of people laying around on concrete who could not do so much as brush their teeth.

Add to that the fact that cutting away dry dead brush from around your home has become more of a hassle and more costly and you have the perfect conditions for a fire when Santa Ana winds blew.

According to some people everything went smashingly well during the fires of October 2007 and in many ways that is true.  But they certainly did not go well because a politician threw on a yellow coat, visited the fire line, shook President Bush’s hand or had endless numbers of news conferences that information we released on the air an hour before was being treated as new by people talking to the public. 

The real heroes of Firestorm 2007 were the people who put the fire out and the many thousands of people who showed up to fill in the voids left by a local government that doesn’t believe it necessary to stockpile meals, hygiene gear or blankets for people who are evacuated to an open stadium who also happen to live in an earthquake zone along with a city ripe for a terrorist attack. 

Read the various national security and readiness documents that were adopted after September 11, 2001 and look at who owns the responsibility to care for their citizens for the first 72 hours of an emergency.

That did not happen in San Diego because politicians decided to turn the finest hour for firefighters and the military into the finest hour for themselves.  Not only did they claim that everything done right was because of them – they deflected all questions dealing with what went wrong until “after the emergency.”  They also pulled the “let’s not politicize this” card out more times than I care to think about – meanwhile 10 to 1 they will all use this emergency in their campaign ads. 

After an emergency it is natural for journalists to start asking questions of elected leaders.  The problem is that FEMA handed the media a great story in the form of a fake press conference and now that seems to be the thing that is talked and written about instead of the failures of local government.  In truth, what was the bigger problem: an idiotic idea by an outgoing FEMA employee to fake a news conference with all soft questions being posed or the colossal failure of local government to be ready for a disaster: man-made or otherwise? 

One would think it would be the latter and I’d bet that the old people without blankets, pillows, toothpaste or deodorant would think so too, but I’m just a talk show host.

Southern California will see more fires and some of them will be more catastrophic thank this one and truthfully the only reason that the fire did not drive itself to the sea was because the wind died down.  What will happen next time if fire is not the problem?  If the next disaster is an earthquake or an equally large evacuation with roads closed heading north and east (we can’t drive west – no land until Hawaii and south takes us to Mexico) – what then?  A fire closed down San Diego for a week – imagine what a dirty bomb or major earthquake would do.

What politicians should do right now is thank the firefighters one last time.  They should then take off the silly little fireman outfits they’ve been wearing around town and get to work buying and stockpiling supplies for another disaster.  Next time hundreds of thousands of people are forced to leave their homes there may not be anyone able to provide supplies when volunteers call a radio network to beg for them.

This time the public came through – the next time we may not be able to and it will be up to politicians to deliver on their boasts of being prepared.  The problem is that they’re not – we just don’t know it because so many of us privately are.

Steve Yuhas is a radio talk show host on AM 600 KOGO in southern California and may be reached at steve@steveyuhas.com or www.steveyuhas.com