The Wildfire Holocaust in Paradise Was Perfectly Avoidable
Let’s admit up front this was preventable. Set aside the fiction.
Old power-lines again in the wind. To save money Paradise only had a private opt in evacuation system despite a history of failed evacuations in the past fires, where the fire stopped short. The roads out burned on both sides and jammed. The road to the original small fire could not support a fire truck. Climate change drove the moisture down and the winds up. Humans burned alive, some to be identified only by replacement titanium knees or hips.
The very next thing we suffered was the contempt of our President. Then a visit and yet more contempt.
Mike Davis said it best or arguably, worst in his prescient book Ecology Of Fear. “Let Malibu burn.” IOW don’t build dense vulnerable residential areas in the bullseye path of unstoppable natural monsters. Not fires, not floods.
Now what? Hold everyone accountable. Fire after fire has been traced to old electrical infrastructures. The lawsuits might just bankrupt Edison. They in turn will demand we pay. We have all this technology, science and the weight of a massive economy to leverage here. We have to re think our wild-lands as something other than real estate.
10:02 a.m.: “Woman in active labor … she will be honking her horn.”
Jolly was back at the hospital when she heard an alert that a woman trapped on Skyway was in labor.
Though parts of it were burning, a makeshift clinic sprang up in the ER parking lot. Fire refugees stumbled in, including elderly women carrying Chihuahuas and Pomeranians.
The prospect of a woman in labor was more problematic. Fire officials radioed that she had complications requiring a caesarean section. With a flashlight, Jolly crept back into the hospital for surgical supplies — sutures, sterile dressings, a bassinet.
The patient never arrived. Jolly could find no one who knew her fate.