OT - U.S. Disaster du Jour: The Wildfires
- From: mozark <swooning@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 05:14:43 -0000
The California wildfires and the American social crisis
by Patrick Martin
25 October 2007
Once again, the world watches as a natural disaster in the United
States threatens to become a social catastrophe. Once again, a million
Americans are forced from their homes by a long-forecast calamity,
with little planning or preparation by the local, state and federal
governments. Once again, tens of thousands of refugees seek shelter at
a football stadium in a major American city-this time, San Diego.
There are, of course, many differences between the experience of New
Orleans two years ago and San Diego today. The urban core of San Diego
and Los Angeles and their infrastructure remain intact. Utilities and
other essential services are still in place, and the death toll is far
lower. Property losses are estimated at several billion dollars,
mainly from destroyed homes as well as crop damage in San Diego
County; the damage from Hurricane Katrina was at least 50 times as
great.
By all accounts, the response of emergency services, particularly the
fire and rescue units, has been far more effective than during
Hurricane Katrina, reflecting both the lesser scale of the disaster,
the more developed social infrastructure of California (Louisiana
being one of the poorest US states) and the lessons learned from the
dismal response to the inundation of New Orleans. Perhaps the greatest
difference in the response, however, is that the rich as well as the
poor suffered in southern California, and they can call on society's
resources far more easily.
As in Hurricane Katrina, the wildfires in southern California have
laid bare the social crisis of a country riven by class inequality and
imprisoned in an economic system dominated by the profit interests of
a tiny minority of millionaires and billionaires. The richest country
in the world, able to wage two wars simultaneously on the other side
of the world, is incapable of providing adequate resources for so
elementary a public service as firefighting.
Both the response of the Bush administration and the media coverage of
the wildfires reflect the impact of Katrina. The White House seeks to
avoid another public exposure of its indifference to the suffering of
ordinary Americans, and the media is more sensitive to the calamities
of southern California, along with New York City one of the two media
capitals of the United States.
Even here there is a social dimension: far more so than in New
Orleans, where the devastation hit with particular force on the most
impoverished layers, those without cars or otherwise unable to
evacuate, the southern California wildfires have affected the rich as
well as lower-income working people in equal measure. The homes
destroyed include both those of multimillionaires and celebrities,
seeking isolation and privacy, and those of working class families
forced out to the fringes of the metropolitan areas in their search
for affordable housing.
The media coverage, as with Katrina, covers up all essential political
questions. There has been little or no reference to the impact of
military deployment in Iraq on the disaster-response capabilities of
the California National Guard, although National Guard officials
warned of the problem less than six months ago.
According to a report in the May 11 issue of the San Francisco
Chronicle, "the California National Guard says equipment shortages
could hinder the guard's response to a large-scale disaster. A dearth
of equipment such as trucks and radios-caused in part by the war in
Iraq-has state military officials worried they would be slow in
providing help in the event of a major fire, earthquake or terrorist
attack."
This report was published only days after a tornado destroyed a west
Kansas town, and Governor Kathleen Sibelius complained that so much
Kansas National Guard equipment was in Iraq that the disaster response
efforts were being undermined. Lt. Col. John Siepmann of the
California National Guard told the Chronicle that similar issues would
arise in a major disaster there. "Our concern is a catastrophic
event," he said. "You would see a less effective response."
Among the equipment shortages were diesel generators (zero instead of
39 required), GPS devices (zero instead of 1,410), and 209 vehicles of
all types, including 110 humvees and 63 military trucks. All this
equipment was in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and thus unavailable for
use in California.
The draw-down of National Guard equipment exacerbates the already
depleted state of emergency response and firefighting services in the
southern California area, long one of the most rapidly growing urban
areas in the world.
In San Diego, for instance, the epicenter of the fires with an
estimated 1,300 homes and 150 other buildings destroyed, $1 billion in
property damage and five people dead, there are only 975 firefighters.
They must cover 330 square miles and protect 1.3 million residents,
while in San Francisco, 1,600 firefighters protect 850,000 residents
living in only 60 square miles.
University of California San Diego professor Steve Erie told the Los
Angeles Times that the anti-tax, pro-business policy of local
governments in the area had contributed to the disaster. "Developers
own most of the city councils," he said. "In Poway, in Escondido, what
they do is put homeowners in harm's way. They're able to control
zoning processes, and they're frequently behind initiatives that say
no new taxes, no new fire services. It's insanity."
The federal government has also failed to meet its responsibilities,
despite the lessons of the 2003 wildfires that devastated much of San
Diego County. Congress authorized up to $760 million a year for
efforts at "fuel reduction"-clearing and removing dead trees and
underbrush that in drought conditions catch fire explosively. The Bush
administration has chosen to seek appropriations for only about two
thirds of that, $500 million a year.
One major factor contributing to the fire disaster is global warming,
which underlies the cycle of drought and high temperatures that have
made the latest round of wildfires so much more challenging to the
firefighters. According to federal statistics, seven of the ten
busiest fire seasons in US history have been in the eight years since
1999. Even before the current outbreak, the total number of acres
burned by US forest fires in 2007 stood at 8 million, compared to a
ten-year average of 5.8 million acres. The 2007 total now seems likely
to surpass the record 9 million acres burned last year.
One chilling media report, on CBS television, included an interview
with a forest fire expert who cited the growing number of "mega-
fires," those of 100,000 acres or more, which used to be relatively
rare, but are now commonplace. The current fire has already burned
over 500,000 acres. This official estimated that more than half the
forest land in the western United States could be burned out within a
few decades because of the growing intensity and frequency of big
fires.
The ecological Know-Nothings in the Bush administration, of course,
suppressed any discussion of global warming at the federal level for
years, and continue to reject any organized international effort to
deal with or diminish the impact of the crisis.
What underlies all these factors, however, and is the fundamental
cause of the social crisis, is the anarchic and unplanned character of
the capitalist system. Housing tracts are built throughout southern
California on the basis of the profit considerations of home builders,
property developers and Wall Street speculators, not the needs of
people for homes or the suitability of the development given the
constraints of the natural environment.
A powerful element in this anarchy is the sheer greed of the dominant
economic actors-the multi-billion-dollar investment banks and hedge
funds that pushed the building boom beyond any rational limit. It is
likely that a contributing factor in the outbreak of the fires was the
ongoing collapse in the mortgage market, which left many companies
holding mortgages on properties whose occupants were unable to make
their payments and were forced into foreclosure. Some may have taken
advantage of the fire season in southern California to torch one or
more properties that now are more valuable as insurance claims.
The insurance companies, as always in an American disaster, operate in
the most ruthless and socially destructive way. After Katrina, they
frequently refused to pay for storm damage unless threatened with
lawsuits or actually taken to court. There are already reports that
the current fires will be used as a pretext for canceling policies or
dramatically raising premiums.
The response of a rationally organized, i.e., socialist society to
such a disaster would be a serious, well-financed, carefully planned
reconstruction, that would take into account the common need for
decent housing, as well as natural circumstances and the burden on
social infrastructure such as water, sewage and electrical systems.
Under the capitalist system, nothing more can be expected than a
repetition of the profit-gouging and reckless plundering of nature and
human labor that produced the disaster in the first place.
.
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