rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2018-11-14 12:29 pm
rachelmanija) wrote2018-11-14 12:29 pm
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Help CA Wildfire Survivors
The small town of Paradise was completely destroyed. Many of the survivors are senior citizens with disabilities or illnesses, and didn't have much money to begin with. Here are some links for helping them.
I'm only linking to local efforts, not large national organizations. I used to do disaster relief for the American Red Cross and while they did a lot of genuinely good work, there was also a lot of financial mismanagement, waste, and poor use of resources. I find that local organizations, while they may have the same problems, tend to have a better sense of what's actually needed and get it to people faster.
North Valley Evacuation Relief Fund.
Butte Humane Society Amazon Wishlist. People in Paradise mostly had only minutes to flee, and some either couldn't catch their pets in time or weren't home. People have been going around and catching loose animals, which are then taken to various animal rescues and held to be released to their owners. There's a number of places doing this; warning if you search for it, there are often photos of injured pets.
The current death toll for the wildfires is 50 and climbing. A third body was discovered at the Woolsey fire, but the rest are from Paradise. There are about 100 people still missing from Paradise, and given what happened there, most of them are probably dead. That fire was moving at a pace of one football field per second.
I've lived in Southern California for almost thirty years and I've seen lots of fires. The light turns an eerie, over-saturated orange, and ash falls from the sky. I've been caught on the freeway when the hills were burning on either side of me, and I've watched the blackened hills turn green again the next spring. My parents have been evacuated repeatedly, and I've sat at the table listening to the radio or poring over a paper map to see where I need to go if I have to go.
I once was driving in the country, alone on a two-lane road, when I saw a wildfire that had just caught on the side of the road. It was very small. I pulled over, called 911, got my fire extinguisher from the trunk, and ran to put it out. In the minute that took, it had grown too big for my extinguisher; I put out a little patch of it, no more. I ran back to my car, grabbed my water jugs and a sheet, doused myself and the sheet, and ran back to try to beat it out with the sheet. The water on my skin dried instantly. I tried for maybe another minute. Then the heat drove me back. I was drenched in sweat from head to toe. My hair was soaking wet.
I stepped back to take in the larger view. The entire hillside was on fire, a nearby tree was a pillar of flame, and sparks were drifting across the road and setting hundreds of fires on the hillside on the other side, beside my car. I dropped my stuff, bolted back to my car, and peeled out just as a fire truck arrived. I know they put out that fire, or I would have heard. But it gave me a visceral understanding of just how fast a fire can blow up. If I'd arrived thirty seconds earlier, I might have had a chance.
We live in a fire ecology. But what's been happening over the last couple years is completely unprecedented. It's not normal.
There are a lot of things that could be done to abate the fires and their damage. The Paradise warning system was a disaster; people had to individually opt in for it, and these were largely very elderly people who were independent and didn't like being bothered, and also were not all very tech savvy. Additionally, it didn't even work for all the people who did opt in. I think CA needs a statewide system of fire alerts that can be sent to everyone, with no opting in or out, and blast an alarm even if your phone is silenced. (Or turned off, if this is possible.)
Possibly the most significant fire reduction action would be burying power lines rather than having them overhead. Controlled burns are obviously very risky but it's looking like they're better than the alternative. That being said, all this is happening because of global warming. Vote.
I'm only linking to local efforts, not large national organizations. I used to do disaster relief for the American Red Cross and while they did a lot of genuinely good work, there was also a lot of financial mismanagement, waste, and poor use of resources. I find that local organizations, while they may have the same problems, tend to have a better sense of what's actually needed and get it to people faster.
North Valley Evacuation Relief Fund.
Butte Humane Society Amazon Wishlist. People in Paradise mostly had only minutes to flee, and some either couldn't catch their pets in time or weren't home. People have been going around and catching loose animals, which are then taken to various animal rescues and held to be released to their owners. There's a number of places doing this; warning if you search for it, there are often photos of injured pets.
The current death toll for the wildfires is 50 and climbing. A third body was discovered at the Woolsey fire, but the rest are from Paradise. There are about 100 people still missing from Paradise, and given what happened there, most of them are probably dead. That fire was moving at a pace of one football field per second.
I've lived in Southern California for almost thirty years and I've seen lots of fires. The light turns an eerie, over-saturated orange, and ash falls from the sky. I've been caught on the freeway when the hills were burning on either side of me, and I've watched the blackened hills turn green again the next spring. My parents have been evacuated repeatedly, and I've sat at the table listening to the radio or poring over a paper map to see where I need to go if I have to go.
I once was driving in the country, alone on a two-lane road, when I saw a wildfire that had just caught on the side of the road. It was very small. I pulled over, called 911, got my fire extinguisher from the trunk, and ran to put it out. In the minute that took, it had grown too big for my extinguisher; I put out a little patch of it, no more. I ran back to my car, grabbed my water jugs and a sheet, doused myself and the sheet, and ran back to try to beat it out with the sheet. The water on my skin dried instantly. I tried for maybe another minute. Then the heat drove me back. I was drenched in sweat from head to toe. My hair was soaking wet.
I stepped back to take in the larger view. The entire hillside was on fire, a nearby tree was a pillar of flame, and sparks were drifting across the road and setting hundreds of fires on the hillside on the other side, beside my car. I dropped my stuff, bolted back to my car, and peeled out just as a fire truck arrived. I know they put out that fire, or I would have heard. But it gave me a visceral understanding of just how fast a fire can blow up. If I'd arrived thirty seconds earlier, I might have had a chance.
We live in a fire ecology. But what's been happening over the last couple years is completely unprecedented. It's not normal.
There are a lot of things that could be done to abate the fires and their damage. The Paradise warning system was a disaster; people had to individually opt in for it, and these were largely very elderly people who were independent and didn't like being bothered, and also were not all very tech savvy. Additionally, it didn't even work for all the people who did opt in. I think CA needs a statewide system of fire alerts that can be sent to everyone, with no opting in or out, and blast an alarm even if your phone is silenced. (Or turned off, if this is possible.)
Possibly the most significant fire reduction action would be burying power lines rather than having them overhead. Controlled burns are obviously very risky but it's looking like they're better than the alternative. That being said, all this is happening because of global warming. Vote.
no subject
- the fastest the Beast moved was around a meter-and-a-half per second, which it maintained for about a day and a bit, due to taking external winds and then generating the height of its own weather. (I remember the point where it started generating its own weather. Everyone kind of went " . . . well fuck." Because it was likely - and did - to generate more lightning strikes, which would restart fires in controlled areas, or start new ones that could join up.)
- they figure it was probably started by human activity but not deliberately - potential causes include sparks from an ATV motor or wheel carriage (due to rocks hitting it as people drive), because it was Just That Dry.
- so the strict divisions for government are "federal", "provincial" and "municipal", but especially in Western Canada we also tend to have a slightly more ephemeral but still significant level of "regional", which tends to be "economic development" focused, but also tends to be where a certain level of disaster management happens, because our economic concerns are often so geographically based. The Province of Alberta is ultimately in charge of disaster management (the feds funnel money and respond to requests for stuff like military involvement but don't run things), which then tends to coordinate through a regional director who is responsible for coordinating local municipal responses and also additional tricky bits like reserve communities and unincorporated communities.
---> On the one hand if you hit up the news you'll see Notley's NDP getting flak for this coordination and communication being "not good enough". On the other, a) Notley is running an NDP government in Alberta she literally gets flak for everything, including when she brushes her hair and also when she doesn't brush her hair, and also b) I am well aware of the Canadian tendency to not. . . understand? what the actual realistic scale of How Good These Things Are Anywhere is, and to bitch whenever things aren't Perfect, even if they're pretty good. Having not fully read the post-fire report myself I can't comment Authoritatively, but I have read a LOT of it and also have experience with the various major fires in the Okanagan and how things worked there, so while I also suspect there are always things that could be Done Better, I'm still also pretty sure that in the scale of somewhat-unexpected massive-fire evacuations and responses that have existed in the world, that one was still pretty damn good. (Beyond the evidence that, well, there was no death.)
---> overall command appears to have been split between the regional disaster response director and Chief Darby who ran the firefighters in FortMac, and they seem to have been in almost constant contact. The regional director's outlook extended through the city, but also to the camps around the city, the unincorporated communities, and the reserve communities; we run more or less the same thing in BC, and so for example last year the regional director was the one making the calls about all the fires in the interior, in coordination with the fire chiefs. The mayors of the communities were one tier DOWN from that regional director and were basically executing decisions, not making them; the provincal government was basically just waiting for updates from the fire in order to activate resources. Which is good incident command structure. (As far as I can tell this . . . just hasn't really happened in the fires around you right now? Which might be an incorrect impression, but.)
- there was also a lot of active coordination/communication with media at every level - local radio stations, local TV, provincial TV, provincial radio, national radio and national TV, all of them with crews on the ground or in place as much as possible, all of them serving primarily as relays for official word (often coming from the Wood Buffalo Municipal twitter) while secondarily serving as "LOOK AT THIS FIRE, THIS IS SCARY, I ACTUALLY WOULD RATHER NOT BE HERE, PLEASE LEAVE."
I will probably stop spamming you now.