Prof says DHS funding impairs wildfire effort

Just as last week’s wildfires have begun to die down throughout seven counties in Southern… Just as last week’s wildfires have begun to die down throughout seven counties in Southern California, the debate over their cause and prolonged persistence is flaring up.

Pitt professor Louise Comfort has been outspoken about the government response to the fires and has suggested that federal money that is earmarked for counterterrorism impairs the ability of local governments to deal with natural disasters.

Comfort, a professor in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, studies and has written widely on the government’s response to disasters.

Comfort lost her home in the Oakland Hills wildfire 16 years ago this month. But rather than scoff at her luck, she chose to study the government’s response to the fire.

“It made me vividly aware of the critical need for the assessment and monitoring of risk on a continual basis, especially in high-hazard areas,” Comfort said in an e-mail.

Following the fire, she applauded California’s self-initiated Standardized Emergency Management System, which was enacted to enable increased government vigilance and better methodology for dealing with natural disasters.

But since then, Comfort believes that the Department of Homeland Security has hobbled California’s efforts to improve its emergency response.

“Each major metropolitan region receives grants in funding from the Department of Homeland Security as a means of improving their capacity to mange risk,” Comfort said. “The bulk of these grants have been focused on anti-terrorism efforts, surveillance and identification of conditions that might augment terrorism.”

Citing a conversation with director of emergency preparedness for the city of Los Angeles, Ellis Stanley, Comfort said the state has been neglecting common natural emergencies in favor of anti-terrorism preparation.

“[Stanley] informed me that his budget for anti-terrorism had increased significantly, while resources for [disaster] mitigation and home alert programs had been cut,” she said.

Comfort explained that “mitigation” is more important than the federal government’s focus on “prevention.” Pointing out the impossibility of outlawing fires, earthquakes and hurricanes, she said that reducing perilous risks in vulnerable areas was more important.

But in the current situation, Comfort said that the Department of Defense’s decision to deploy National Guard units to Iraq put California at a clear disadvantage with managing the fire.

Because of its National Guard drain, California had to call in Guard troops stationed in Arizona and Nevada to assist their own thin ranks.

Additionally, The Los Angeles Times reported that most of the fire engines at the Orange County Fire Authority were spread too thin. Manned by three-man crews, the engines were one man short of the guidelines established by fire safety watchdog the National Fire Protection Association, although this is partly because many were sent to fight fires in other areas rather than in their own backyard. Because the Orange County brush and grassfires were not put out immediately, they overpowered the low number of fire fighters and became a serious blaze.

“A major investment in information infrastructure [and] training of emergency personnel to assess and monitor risks,” are two of the many policy changes Comfort hopes the government will enact following the recent fires.

But regardless of how much the government’s neglect of natural disaster response prolonged the fire, another scholar in an entirely different field from Comfort’s agrees with her findings.

According to Pitt paleoclimatologist Michael Rosenmeier, California and the rest of the country should prepare for a greater frequency of natural disasters.

Because of rising climate temperatures, Rosenmeier sees reason to believe that with increased temperatures come the perfect conditions for more wildfires. Corresponding to the rise in world temperature has been an increase in droughts, which California has felt since an unusually dry spring.

“We always thought of drought conditions as anomalous,” Rosenmeier said.

Although Rosenmeier said he is uncertain of global warming’s causal role in the recent California fires, he estimated that its role in contemporary droughts is steadily coming to light.

As a climate historian, Rosenmeier pointed out that a similar dry time period existed between 1180 and 1300 A.D. in the U.S. Southwest.

“If we use this warmer period as an analogy to today, higher drought frequency, and the rising intensity of these droughts will likely occur,” Rosenmeier said.

“You’ve got drought conditions, you’ve got people living in places where they shouldn’t be living, and then you’ve got those Santa Anna winds. Just the right ingredients [for a large-scale natural disaster].”