The politics of the entire situation can drive you nuts. Just watching the various politicians talk about how they’re going to help get things rebuilt and wondering if they’ll really be all that effective. Then again, as many have noted, many affluent areas were hit, which is far different from who was hit hardest by Katrina.

Things that annoyed me were the lessons not learned from the 2003 Cedar fires. And don’t get me started on the mess in Ramona with their water district. That one directly impacted my sister and a family friend, and we still don’t know when they’ll have drinkable water up there, never mind being able to use it.

What’s unique about wildfire disasters is that urban areas don’t burn. (I suppose they could if it got really, really bad, but they generally don’t.) It takes a lot of dried out grass and stuff to burn like this, and the city just doesn’t have enough tinder. So it’s places in San Diego like Barrio Logan that are safe.

This is good for suburbanites, too, because it means that all the hospitals and central police stations and radio stations and all the emergency services can keep operating out of downtown, which is why Qualcomm looks like a big party.

So Rosemary’s right that the worst consequences are patchy – even in the bad fire zones, it’s random which house will be burned to the ground and which will just be covered in soot. But the distribution of consequences is actually inverted from something like a terrorist attack, which hits the urban core. It’s not like a tornado, either, which usually seems to be worst for the rural poor, people who live in trailers or less sturdy housing.

Fires are actually worst for the people who have lots of empty land. In San Diego County, where land is really, really expensive, there are very few real farmers or ranchers – nearly all the people with big properties, even largish backyards, are rich.

And they didn’t show a whole lot of ability to learn from the fires of 2003. A friend of mine is a ecologist and educates local residents about fire safety, and so few people replanted their properties with better, more fire-safe plants, etc.

Not really. It’s only haphazard in the sense that earthquakes themselves are, and it’s not like we don’t know where the major faultlines are (usually). I mean, yeah, you get one house standing while the one next to it has collapsed, but that happens in every kind of natural disaster.

Which buildings fall depends mostly on how old they are and how retrofitted they are – which, hey, is tied directly to affluence. How well our infrastructure holds up depends largely on how much money we put into it – the freeway collapses in 1989 were rightfully blamed on poor maintenance of public infrastructure. Lack of maintenance that – much like the levees in NO – certain people had been trying to warn the public about. Also, much like how the rapid growth in the San Diego area hasn’t been matched with corresponding growth in public services – like fire stations – the amount of recent development allowed on or near faultlines, or in places that experience liquifaction during earthquakes, will play a major role in the amount of life and property that will be lost during the next major quake.

I did see an interview with the head of fema where the first question asked was “so you must just keep thinking to yourself… katrina?” and he replied “No, I keep thinking about how to keep people safe.”

I thought it was a pretty good answer.

Yeah. It’s a great answer. And a great question to lead to that answer. But, it’s not like FEMA would set up a fake press conference where the “reporters” are actually FEMA staff, so I’m sure he was just being honest.

Can we kill the nonsense world ‘evacuees’ now?

Well, no.

An “evacuee” is someone who had to leave their home, but is able to return to it. It’s a temporary inconvenience.

A “refugee” is someone who had to leave their home and due to the scale of the disaster is not able to return.

Given the vagaries of how fires work, a lot of the people at the Qualcomm center will, fortunately, only be evacuees and will be able to return to their homes and their lives. However, some of them will have lost their homes and will be refugees.

So, yes, many people who survived Katrina ended up as refugees because they were unable to return to their homes. I saw one on “Kitchen: Impossible” the other night cooking in Minneapolis with Robert Irvine. (Hopefully appearing on the show means he’ll get some extra credit at culinary school. ;-)

Can we kill the nonsense world ‘evacuees’ now?

I do agree that using the word ‘refugee’ would bring more attention to the situation, but I kind of think the definition of ‘refugee’ is technically one who is externally displaced, outside of their home country, in another country. So if they had been evacuated to Mexico, then they would be refugees.

At least I think that’s right.

I think Mary’s arguing that, if one says that you can’t compare the two disasters, then you can’t say that Katrina is worse than the fires, because that is a comparison. This is, of course, completely idiotic and an abjectly bad reading of what TRP is actually saying.

I wouldn’t call it completely idiotic. When I first read Zuzu’s title, I also thought, at first, that it was trivializing the damage in California. (It made sense after I read the article.) Mary came to a premature conclusion, yes, but I can see where it came from.

I always think that this sort of thing is projection on a huge scale. Rabid right-wingers don’t much care about the lives of people not like them–witness Katrina, the Iraq war, the destruction of welfare, the vetoing of SCHIP. Their more wacko attack dogs will come out and say things like “I wish a terrorist would blow up the NYT building” (Coulter). So they think that we must be the same.