Thursday’s bogus LA county-wide evacuation warning wasn’t the first official miscue this dark, smoky week. I received the same warning on Wednesday morning, and it actually prompted Kathy and me to undertake a pre-need evacuation.I hope officials will redouble their efforts to get it right, as they promised to do after they sent their unwarranted jolt to the cell phones of ten million ASA (already stressed Angelenos). Beyond that, when this devastating crisis has passed, I hope we’ll ask better questions of our public officials so they’ll do a better job for all our sakes. This has nothing to do with Trump’s bizarre, disgraceful lies, which further debase the office that 500 million voters singing in four-part harmony couldn’t convince me he should occupy again. Just good, tough questions — the kind journalists used to ask when they had the resources to cover local government properly.
Our story began Tuesday evening, when raging winds knocked out the power in your episcopal residence’s neighborhood, Chapman Woods, in unincorporated east Pasadena. We decamped to a hotel in Arcadia. Just before midnight, I read a Los Angeles Times report about a new fire that a map revealed had consumed three acres about two miles from the house. I headed home through a dystopian landscape of dysfunctional traffic lights and shattered trees and massive limbs lying across darkened, windblown streets. I couldn’t find the fire, just lineworkers trying to repair our outage. I checked on the house and went back to our hotel.
My own personal evacuation warning came later than morning, on my phone but not Kathy’s, as we arrived back home for another inspection. Smoke and falling ash blanketed the neighborhood, which still had no power. The winds had done their best to make sure our next semiannual pruning will be a lot cheaper. We should’ve checked the maps. But the Eaton fire was bearing down. Choosing to take the warning seriously, we spent two hours packing precious essentials and drove around with them the rest of the day as we made our rounds to check on evacuees and the situation at St. Paul’s Commons, Echo Park.
We returned home Thursday morning after the lights came back on. Packing up had been an emotionally complex although premature experience. We had been nowhere near an evacuation zone. When another warning came later in the day, I ignored it. When ten million phones buzzed Thursday, as far as I was concerned, it lacked all credibility – which is unfortunate, because officials need people to trust these potentially lifesaving alerts.
A second issue at my fantasy press conference is those broken traffic lights. Not that I watch press conferences. Watching TV news can be a poor use of time. It’s like panning for gold. Factual nuggets take too long to differentiate themselves from the dirt and gravel of speculation and opinion. I’m an incurable print hound. So it wasn’t until Thursday afternoon, 48 hours into the wildfire crisis, that I saw an official presser— when I was astonished to hear LA’s respected police chief, Jim McDonnell, announce that police officers from other jurisdictions would arrive as early as that evening to assist with traffic control.
We desperately need reinforcements to fight the fires. My question is why we don’t already have enough police officers and sheriff’s deputies to direct traffic. For as long as I’ve been driving, when signals malfunction at major intersections, from New York to California, an officer arrives to do the honors. Yet driving along Rosemead and crossing Huntington Dr. several times on Wednesday, I experienced four-way stop scenarios that were as complex as Rubiks Cubes — four lanes of north- and south-bound traffic going mano a mano with six east- and west-bound lanes.
Perhaps all our officers were occupied elsewhere. If you have insights about their deployment, leave them in the comments below. My concern is that nobody even asked the sheriff the question.
Low water pressure, which plagued firefighters all week, is my third issue. Officials say they didn’t anticipate the demand. Some experts, including climate change advocates, say officials should have. “Given the known risk of wildfire in these hillsides, it is fair to question whether more water storage should have been added in previous years and months,” ASU’s Kathryn Sorensen told the Times.
I only wish the Times, or someone else, had gotten into it earlier. Water pressure is not a new story. In 2008, when Kathy and I lived in Yorba Linda, low pressure delayed firefighters’ putting down the Freeway Complex fire, which destroyed 118 homes. It was a massive scandal. Residents had been complaining for years, but the water district hadn’t listened — and by then, local journalism had atrophied to the point where no one was probably covering water board meetings and asking pesky questions, in an era of heightening risk, about wildfire preparedness.
As the market for print advertising dried up over the last two decades, newspapers have shed nearly 80% of their jobs. That means no one’s covering thousands of water, sanitation, and fire districts, planning commission meetings, even school boards and city councils. When no one’s watching, there’s less accountability, and at their worst, officials find myriad ways to pad their salaries, benefits, and expense accounts.
Coming from a family of journalists, dependent on print rather than cable for my understanding of events, I may put too much faith in the press. I can’t say for sure that investigative journalists would have helped government do better this week with emergency communications, traffic control, and water pressure. But I suspect there’s middle ground between Trump’s wicked lies and a willful abrogation of skepticism about officials’ performance. Trained, dogged journalists asking tough questions before a crisis couldn’t possibly have hurt.