More DHS follies. In this case, what we have here is a failure to communicate. From a Californian living near the wildfires (the good folks at skippy don't like capital letters):
we've been out of power here since about 7:00 p.m. this evening. we just finally got back up. 140,000 people were hit by this outage. try as i might, i could not get any information from the radio. all that was on was baseball games, right wing radio bloviating and a replay of larry king live.which does beg the question...if the "terrorists" attack, will you ever know...because our emergency information system sucks the big one. it's all about syndicated shows and sports over the public interest.
very scary. the blood red of the skys and the smoke filling the air tends to make the hair on the back of your neck rise and the natural desire to flee kicks in...big time. i've finally gotten some news on the radio and they are saying that the fire has spread to 300 acres and the huge power outage was due to "smoke" overwhelming their lines. uh..huh.
who needs terrorists to destroy our county. we just need careless folks with matches and no public information to rely upon.
They're not the government's airwaves, they're your airwaves....
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The government response to any situation nowadays is lackadaisical at best, and oftentimes downright criminal. FEMA's response (at the time, and continued) to Hurricane Katrina is a clear signal that FEMA and DHS need to be revamped, if not scrapped entirely.
Putting FEMA under DHS was one of those really stupid choices made by the Bush admin.
However, I wonder if the local *TV* news wasn't all over this "story." The local TV news programs are usually all over any DISASTER they can find or present as such. I think the real problem is that there just are not much in the way of local radio news programs anymore. Most of the news/talk stations put on nationally syndicated programs and don't have the staff to cover anything in the way of local news.
I live near New Orleans, and the things that local TV covered were not mentioned on National News. We were in Pensacola for Hurricane Ivan, and the National Guard was so terrific, what the heck happened with New Orleans? Was the problem just too big? Sorta like your wild fires are becoming. I hope you still have a home.
I am worried that the real cause of bigger storms, dryer deserts and forests is being ignored, the increased ultra-violet radiation is speeding up evaporation. All the emphasis has been focused on atmospheric CO2 from our insane combustion addiction. But the CO2 oriented atmospheric models are not working, we were still supposed to have plenty of polar ice. I believe that there is an optically active ring structure for ozone (only in the upper atmosphere) that would reflect UV if we had left it at the 3O2/2O3 formation equilibrium. I think that the decreased O3 is giving the bees their version of human 'snow blindness' and decreasing the returning bees to such low levels that the hives die over the winters. Bees navigate by tracking the solar UV. Einstein predicted that humans would survive the death of the bees by only four years, four very nasty years of starvation, dislocation, and chaos.
Two kinds of experiments need to be done, 1.) Measure the evaporation and sublimation rates of H2O under varying UV. and 2.)Compare Hive collapse,in shady and sunny locations. For people in the right fields, these should not be difficult. These are probably the most important experiments in human history.
Both Bill Moyers Journal and NOW on PBS have reported on this problem.
Of course the conservatives and far right want nothing to do with good journalism and the rest of us suffer because of it.