On the money.

And the bigger picture is that we Southern Californians have known for 200 years that our hills burn with great regularity.

The weeping over our “Katrina” and the fingerpointing at the government cover up a willful and selfish pattern of building in fire zones. The 28,000 square foot McMansions miles deep in the San Diego County hills are the epitome of a society that expects everything, with no consequences.

SUV commuters: get out of the hills. Join us in town, and take responsibility for your urban lifestyles.

It will take decades to assess and learn from the hydra headed disaster of the Bush administration. We don’t need extraneous data to muddy the story.

i agree with just about everything said thus far, in the comments and reaction. i also think any “terrorist” or “global warming” finger-pointing is absolutely ridiculous.

san diego is a chaparral ecosystem and fire is a natural part of that ecosystem, especially in the shrublands where people insist on building gigantic homes.

the only similarity to katrina is the failure of government to intervene appropriately by a) allowing smaller fires in intermediary years (these giant fires are 4 years apart) b) preventing people from building homes in hazardous areas and, in doing so, c) actually preventing catastrophic fires proactively instead of reacting to them when they become behemoths.

scientists need to recommend measures for these natural disasters… not political advisors. that’s the lesson we can learn from katrina and the socal fires.

very well said…sometimes the humanitarian cost is lost amid all of the partisan bickering

but i would like to add, that like Katrina, part of this could have been averted with proper management of the land and proper brush clearing techniques. good luck to all of those in the fire zone

You do realize that the people running this government(as well as some in media) are fundamentalist religious nuts who are trying to bring about the ‘end times’ yea? Plagues, war, floods and catastrophes are kinda their bag. They like to hype it any way they can.

Oh, and DON’T BLAME THE VICTIMS for Christsake!
There are problems that everyone knows about no matter where they live (fire, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados, blizzards, WAR…) but they’re always gonna live their. With 6.whatever billion people in the world, would you rather have 300-story apartments in the handfull of “safe” cities?
Please. Be more heartless why don’t you.

How about a little props for The Governator on this one? Everyone was very well organized and responsive to the needs of the victims. Alas, you can really stop such a juggernaut of a natural distater.

Tim
Although I highly respect this post, please take a look in the mirror when talking about using non-partisan issues as a launching pad for political agendas.

Damn Tim I actually agree with you for once. I am really suprised.

Geez, Tim, whats wrong with you? Can’t you see the fires are God’s just retribution on California for the homos? What’s so ridiculous about that?

Yea folks, forget Katrina and the shame and mishandling by Bush, blame the California fire victims, forget the inept handling of any crisis that comes along.

Developers should be Regulated-money trumps safety and wisely planned communities.

But, people do need places to live. Over-development is going on all over the country and, safety and accessability issues for communities seem to be overlooked by real estate developers, hmmm.

Let’s not get lost in whose to blame-are the victims being helped, do federal agencies work in crisis times?

Want more of those tax cuts-than figure on dwindled fire depts., police depts., emergency teams, hospitals, trauma centers, FEMAS and their other Federal Safety Net Agencies. They are becoming more inefficent the more Republican-dominated our Nation becomes.