The
California Wildfires
And The American Social Crisis
By Patrick Martin
25 October, 2007
WSWS.org
Once
again, the world watches as a natural disaster in the United States
threatens to become a social catastrophe. Once again, a million Americans
are forced from their homes by a long-forecast calamity, with little
planning or preparation by the local, state and federal governments.
Once again, tens of thousands of refugees seek shelter at a football
stadium in a major American city—this time, San Diego.
There are, of course, many
differences between the experience of New Orleans two years ago and
San Diego today. The urban core of San Diego and Los Angeles and their
infrastructure remain intact. Utilities and other essential services
are still in place, and the death toll is far lower. Property losses
are estimated at several billion dollars, mainly from destroyed homes
as well as crop damage in San Diego County; the damage from Hurricane
Katrina was at least 50 times as great.
By all accounts, the response
of emergency services, particularly the fire and rescue units, has been
far more effective than during Hurricane Katrina, reflecting both the
lesser scale of the disaster, the more developed social infrastructure
of California (Louisiana being one of the poorest US states) and the
lessons learned from the dismal response to the inundation of New Orleans.
Perhaps the greatest difference in the response, however, is that the
rich as well as the poor suffered in southern California, and they can
call on society’s resources far more easily.
As in Hurricane Katrina,
the wildfires in southern California have laid bare the social crisis
of a country riven by class inequality and imprisoned in an economic
system dominated by the profit interests of a tiny minority of millionaires
and billionaires. The richest country in the world, able to wage two
wars simultaneously on the other side of the world, is incapable of
providing adequate resources for so elementary a public service as firefighting.
Both the response of the
Bush administration and the media coverage of the wildfires reflect
the impact of Katrina. The White House seeks to avoid another public
exposure of its indifference to the suffering of ordinary Americans,
and the media is more sensitive to the calamities of southern California,
along with New York City one of the two media capitals of the United
States.
Even here there is a social
dimension: far more so than in New Orleans, where the devastation hit
with particular force on the most impoverished layers, those without
cars or otherwise unable to evacuate, the southern California wildfires
have affected the rich as well as lower-income working people in equal
measure. The homes destroyed include both those of multimillionaires
and celebrities, seeking isolation and privacy, and those of working
class families forced out to the fringes of the metropolitan areas in
their search for affordable housing.
The media coverage, as with
Katrina, covers up all essential political questions. There has been
little or no reference to the impact of military deployment in Iraq
on the disaster-response capabilities of the California National Guard,
although National Guard officials warned of the problem less than six
months ago.
According to a report in
the May 11 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, “the California
National Guard says equipment shortages could hinder the guard’s
response to a large-scale disaster. A dearth of equipment such as trucks
and radios—caused in part by the war in Iraq—has state military
officials worried they would be slow in providing help in the event
of a major fire, earthquake or terrorist attack.”
This report was published
only days after a tornado destroyed a west Kansas town, and Governor
Kathleen Sibelius complained that so much Kansas National Guard equipment
was in Iraq that the disaster response efforts were being undermined.
Lt. Col. John Siepmann of the California National Guard told the Chronicle
that similar issues would arise in a major disaster there. “Our
concern is a catastrophic event,” he said. “You would see
a less effective response.”
Among the equipment shortages
were diesel generators (zero instead of 39 required), GPS devices (zero
instead of 1,410), and 209 vehicles of all types, including 110 humvees
and 63 military trucks. All this equipment was in either Iraq or Afghanistan,
and thus unavailable for use in California.
The draw-down of National
Guard equipment exacerbates the already depleted state of emergency
response and firefighting services in the southern California area,
long one of the most rapidly growing urban areas in the world.
In San Diego, for instance,
the epicenter of the fires with an estimated 1,300 homes and 150 other
buildings destroyed, $1 billion in property damage and five people dead,
there are only 975 firefighters. They must cover 330 square miles and
protect 1.3 million residents, while in San Francisco, 1,600 firefighters
protect 850,000 residents living in only 60 square miles.
University of California
San Diego professor Steve Erie told the Los Angeles Times that the anti-tax,
pro-business policy of local governments in the area had contributed
to the disaster. “Developers own most of the city councils,”
he said. “In Poway, in Escondido, what they do is put homeowners
in harm’s way. They’re able to control zoning processes,
and they’re frequently behind initiatives that say no new taxes,
no new fire services. It’s insanity.”
The federal government has
also failed to meet its responsibilities, despite the lessons of the
2003 wildfires that devastated much of San Diego County. Congress authorized
up to $760 million a year for efforts at “fuel reduction”—clearing
and removing dead trees and underbrush that in drought conditions catch
fire explosively. The Bush administration has chosen to seek appropriations
for only about two thirds of that, $500 million a year.
One major factor contributing
to the fire disaster is global warming, which underlies the cycle of
drought and high temperatures that have made the latest round of wildfires
so much more challenging to the firefighters. According to federal statistics,
seven of the ten busiest fire seasons in US history have been in the
eight years since 1999. Even before the current outbreak, the total
number of acres burned by US forest fires in 2007 stood at 8 million,
compared to a ten-year average of 5.8 million acres. The 2007 total
now seems likely to surpass the record 9 million acres burned last year.
One chilling media report,
on CBS television, included an interview with a forest fire expert who
cited the growing number of “mega-fires,” those of 100,000
acres or more, which used to be relatively rare, but are now commonplace.
The current fire has already burned over 500,000 acres. This official
estimated that more than half the forest land in the western United
States could be burned out within a few decades because of the growing
intensity and frequency of big fires.
The ecological Know-Nothings
in the Bush administration, of course, suppressed any discussion of
global warming at the federal level for years, and continue to reject
any organized international effort to deal with or diminish the impact
of the crisis.
What underlies all these
factors, however, and is the fundamental cause of the social crisis,
is the anarchic and unplanned character of the capitalist system. Housing
tracts are built throughout southern California on the basis of the
profit considerations of home builders, property developers and Wall
Street speculators, not the needs of people for homes or the suitability
of the development given the constraints of the natural environment.
The insurance companies,
as always in an American disaster, operate in the most ruthless and
socially destructive way. After Katrina, they frequently refused to
pay for storm damage unless threatened with lawsuits or actually taken
to court. There are already reports that the current fires will be used
as a pretext for canceling policies or dramatically raising premiums.
The response of a rationally
organized, i.e., socialist society to such a disaster would be a serious,
well-financed, carefully planned reconstruction, that would take into
account the common need for decent housing, as well as natural circumstances
and the burden on social infrastructure such as water, sewage and electrical
systems. Under the capitalist system, nothing more can be expected than
a repetition of the profit-gouging and reckless plundering of nature
and human labor that produced the disaster in the first place.
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