by Robert M. Traxler
Have we become a nation that lives for today and forgets tomorrow?
The tragedy in Southern California brings back memories of mass disasters in the past like “super storm Sandy.” Large portions of the New Jersey coast were destroyed. People who were interviewed said that they did not have flood insurance. The reason they cited was that when their folks purchased the house in the 1950s, they had to have insurance because the bank demanded it.
When the parents passed away and left the home to the kids, they felt that they never used the insurance, so they did not need it. Folks just did not connect the dots and figure out that there was a reason if you had a mortgage you had to have flood insurance in a flood prone area.
After my father retired from the Army, we settled in Southern California near Fort Ord, about half a mile from the ocean, and in those days, the 1950s, we were the closest home to the ocean. I asked my dad one day why no one built west of us, and he told me it was because a storm flooded the land between us and the ocean.
Indeed, you could find evidence of destroyed homes when we went to the beach to play, so it was not safe to build there. I did a Google search a few years ago of the area today, and it is literally wall-to-wall homes to the ocean, a disaster waiting to happen.
The California fires are a once every few decades event. A smaller fire hit the area in 2014 and many others in past years, so why are we not prepared for disasters that have visited us in the past? Why did local, county and state governments cut funding to fire departments? Why were expensive reservoirs and the dams that made them possible torn down and drained to save the fish?
It is because we cannot and do not look to history. If the fires that were controllable in the past three decades without the backup water supply, why be concerned with the past? Fire and police departments worked with the funding they had, so cutting a few percent would be fine. Priorities were what was currently politically correct, not protecting the people from what disasters would happen in the future, but perhaps not for decades in the future.
A real fight is ahead for the people who lost their homes and possessions, and even their loved ones, in the California fires. New zoning laws may prohibit them from rebuilding in the footprint of the destroyed homes. New zoning laws may dictate that only multi-family homes can be built in the area, and building to the new environmental laws will cost, as will the green space requirements.
Before this tragedy, it typically took about two years to get a permit to build. What do you think it will be now that thousands of homes have been destroyed, assuming they are even allowed to rebuild?
President Joe Biden has stated that the federal government will pay for 100% of the costs of the disaster. Interesting that he did not say the same thing about the storms in Florida and the Carolinas.
The real question is, will we learn from the past? Will local, state and federal government officials look to the past as a prologue? Will the extremely expensive dams and reservoirs be rebuilt to protect the people from future fires, as they were initially built to do? Will you and I pay for repairing the damage the politically correct Southern California state and local governments have done to their citizens? Will common sense trump politically correct environmental laws?
If the State of California wants to do truly stupid things such as cutting the fire, police and disaster control budgets they can; it is their right, but you and I get to pay for the disasters stemming from the truly stupid decisions made in the name of the progressive agenda. Fair? You decide. My opinion.
