We drove back to her house, near the beach, in the city of Santa Cruz, and Stasiewicz mused on the contrast between our settled way of life and the habits of Indigenous tribes. Native Americans had once moved around seasonally while stewarding their forests by means of controlled burns. Today, perhaps, wildfires and their evacuations are forcing people to return to a semi-nomadic existence. Stasiewicz has friends with respiratory ailments who can’t tolerate the wildfire smoke that now routinely blankets the West Coast; their new seasonal routine is to move to the East Coast during the hottest months.

Some people would say it’s a younger generational mind-set, she said, parking the car. But, she went on, “it’s a way of being resilient. You’re highly adaptable during fire season.” In her trunk, she has an emergency kit with a hand axe, a hard hat, and a seven-day supply of contact lenses. She plans to purchase a chainsaw. “I’m always thinking worst-case scenario,” she said.

In April of 1991, Indigenous people living on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines, noticed a sulfurous smell in the air. It was emerging, along with gusts of steam, from a giant crack that had opened in the mountainside. Scientists set up a monitoring system and concluded that an eruption was likely. Around a million people lived near the mountain, and most of them didn’t know it was a volcano; the government rushed out a public-awareness campaign and created evacuation maps and a five-level system of volcanic-activity alerts. On June 15th, the volcano erupted, unleashing a seventeen-mile-high mushroom-like cloud that sparked lightning. A typhoon happened to be moving through, and pounding rains mixed with fiery, superheated avalanches of gas, ash, and molten rock. The decision-making had been fraught and full of uncertainties; the death toll should have been huge. And yet, by the time of eruption, more than sixty thousand people had departed from the zones of greatest peril, many transported by government-arranged buses and trucks. The main eruptions killed around three hundred and fifty people. The evacuation is now a classic study in the field of disaster-response management.

Ideally, as in the case of Pinatubo, evacuations follow a script. Emergency responders recognize a threat, identify at-risk areas, and call for evacuations using warning systems that function well; residents are notified zone by zone and, after making mental and logistical preparations, escape. But, especially in the case of catastrophic wildfires, the script may be easier described than executed. The problem isn’t mass panic of the sort featured in Hollywood movies—research has shown that such panic at moments of disaster is a myth. Instead, systems can stumble for lack of coördination or testing. Even well-laid plans can’t anticipate how a raging fire will interact with the specifics of landscape, weather, and human behavior. In California and the West, many county emergency managers have therefore opted not to create robust wildfire-evacuation plans, arguing that they can’t address the particulars of a blaze until it’s unfolding before them; they don’t want to be locked into designating certain evacuation routes, for example, in case those get breached by flames. But Cova and other evacuation experts argue that doing as much detailed groundwork as possible in advance is worth it, because the process can reveal problems that weren’t otherwise obvious. There is a tao of evacuation planning: you must spend time developing a detailed plan while acknowledging its limitations, so that you can be better poised to improvise as circumstances demand.

To look at any single wildfire catastrophe is to grasp the huge number of factors that planners and residents must confront both beforehand and in the moment. A prime example is what happened in the town of Paradise, California, in 2018. The town’s managers had had the foresight to craft a wildfire-evacuation plan, identifying egress routes and conducting, in 2016, a community drill. But participation was low, and a few years prior the town had unwisely decided to narrow part of the primary evacuation thoroughfare from four lanes to two. No one anticipated an apocalypse that would overpower all their systems. In November of 2018, state fire officials learned of a fire ignition near the town; within ninety minutes, they’d told the county sheriff to issue evacuation orders for a limited number of areas. But the fire, driven by howling winds, spread at a speed beyond their experience, and they were slow to issue further orders.

As the journalist Lizzie Johnson has reported, in “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire,” a wider evacuation commenced only after an emergency dispatcher for Cal Fire, alarmed by calls from residents, jumped the chain of command to have the sheriff evacuate the entire town. By then, it was too late. Flames engulfed most of the main escape roads, and gridlock ensued as thousands of cars jammed the primary evacuation route, surrounded by flames. Eighty-five people, many elderly and trapped at home, died in what has become known as the Camp Fire—the deadliest inferno in California history.

The Camp Fire was a shocking lesson in threat evaluation. It showed fire officials that they needed to call for evacuations far sooner in extreme wildfires rather than waiting for a more complete picture of the threat. At the same time, it underscored the limits of alerting technology. Officials in Paradise had relied upon an opt-in emergency-messaging system called CodeRED, but only a small proportion of residents register for such systems. Many evacuation experts recommend using a federal Amber Alert-style system, which automatically pings every cell phone in a disaster area, but significant cell-phone infrastructure was soon overloaded or destroyed during the disaster.

Even if people get orders to evacuate, not everyone will quickly follow through. McCaffrey, the U.S. Forest Service researcher, has studied people’s wildfire-evacuation preferences. She and her colleagues have found that in communities in South Carolina, Texas, and Washington State that have experienced wildfires, only one in four people is inclined to leave immediately upon receiving an official evacuation order; two-thirds favor a wait-and-see approach—it’s common, research finds, for people to scan outside for smoke or flames, or check with neighbors or other trusted sources—and roughly one in ten figures that he will stay and fight. Some homeowners, McCaffrey noted, simply feel that they can’t afford to lose their abodes. An intention to leave promptly may founder on last-minute complexities. What if an evacuation order comes when families are scattered at work and school? Does an elderly aunt have to be picked up along the way?

First responders in the C.Z.U. Fire knew about Paradise, and were able to avert a catastrophic loss of lives. Still, on the night the conflagration blew up in Santa Cruz County, they were caught off guard, and some orders were issued too late. “That fire was growing so rapidly, we didn’t know exactly where it was,” Nate Armstrong, who at the time of the disaster was a deputy chief in Cal Fire’s C.Z.U. unit, told me. Heavy smoke made it impossible to get fire-location intel from fire-mapping aircraft. Other factors—poor cell signals, overloaded telecommunications networks, power outages, burned infrastructure—created some alert-system failures. In the off-the-grid community of Last Chance, some people received reverse-911 landline calls after dark—but by then houses were aflame, and one man perished. Other residents, such as the Firebaughs, didn’t see or receive alerts disseminated via social media, CodeRed, or the Amber Alert system in time.

Amid the communications chaos, some people decided to clear out without waiting for word from the authorities. Meanwhile, roughly two dozen sheriff’s deputies started driving around, knocking on doors to tell people to get out; the cops moved systematically from north to south along the San Lorenzo Valley so as to avoid unleashing a simultaneous emptying of the entire area. (By the next day, two hundred officers were engaged in the effort.) Residents also consulted a new online map from a San Francisco-based tech startup called Zonehaven, which allowed the public to track evacuation warnings and orders in real time, without waiting for notifications. Zonehaven’s software is targeted primarily at fire, police, and emergency-services departments, which have traditionally used paper maps to decide on evacuation zones even as fires spread (a process that can take hours); its algorithm analyzes data on geography, population, and housing density, among other factors, and looks at traffic flow, to suggest pre-planned evacuation zones. In the C.Z.U. fire, its début, the Zonehaven platform provided the emergency agencies with what’s known as a common operating picture, helping them manage the evacuation of seventy-seven thousand people over five days. Some thirty counties in California now use Zonehaven, and it was deployed last year in thirty-seven wildfires.

Other new technology tools, such as sensors for detecting fires early, promise to optimize the emergency response and evacuation process further. And yet there are limits to how much a wildfire evacuation can be standardized or perfected. Aggressive, rapidly spreading conflagrations leave little margin for hesitation or error, and uncertainty on the ground is unavoidable. Every person’s evacuation experience is different. This summer, Jo Romaniello, a therapist who set up a Facebook page during the C.Z.U. fire where people could share their experiences, co-authored “The People Not the Fire: Stories of Resilience,” a book containing thirty diverse narratives of the disaster in Boulder Creek, a town in the northern San Lorenzo Valley. Although many people received alerts and had relatively orderly evacuations, some describe learning of the emergency from helicopters flying overhead, broadcasting orders to get out. Others, in areas that burned first, barely escaped the flames: one couple, finding their driveway blocked by fire, made it out in their cars at midnight with nothing but their dogs, the clothes they wore, a purse, and a violin. Romaniello and her husband weren’t registered for CodeRED, and never received a reverse-911 call; they heard about the danger when a friend called them. Unsure when to leave, they packed and evacuated late, at 2:30 A.M., after a deputy drove through their area with a bullhorn. By then, they could hear the roar of the fire. Nearby propane tanks were exploding, and the night sky was blazing red. They drove out into a blizzard of falling ash.

Knowing that Cal Fire was short-staffed and underequipped, a small cadre of people in the Santa Cruz mountains, some with firefighting experience, decided that their best bet was to stay and fight for their homes themselves. (A few had already evacuated with their spouses, children, and animals, but then chose to go back, alone, to their homes.) They used chainsaws, tractors, bulldozers, and other equipment to remove trees and understory, clearing fuel breaks around their property. On Westdale Drive, a private road with thirty-seven houses just south of the Firebaughs’ in Bonny Doon, seven households used makeshift water trucks and fire hoses to extinguish spot fires created by falling embers. The neighborhood later credited the crew with saving it: had the ignitions escalated, flames could have overrun many homes.

Inexperienced wildfire-fighting attempts by civilians can put them in grave danger, and first responders sometimes end up diverted from firefighting as they try to persuade residents to leave. Armstrong, from Cal Fire, told me that fire crews got several property owners out at the last minute, “with the fire right on their heels.” But Stasiewicz believes that people should be provided with guidance on surviving, as a last resort, in their homes or at refuge points, such as local baseball fields or store parking lots. Some ranching communities in the intermountain West have organized their own volunteer firefighting services, in coöperation with state and federal agencies that provide training and radios.

LizAnne Jensen, a former treasurer of the Fire Safe Council of Santa Cruz County, a nonprofit group that helps homeowners with wildfire protection, lives with her husband, Ken, on Westdale Drive, in a beige stucco house next to a studio where they craft and sell copper weathervanes. They have invested more than sixty thousand dollars in home-hardening and fuel-reduction improvements, going so far as to pay for work on neighboring property. On a bright summer day, LizAnne gave me a tour of their home. Wooden gates and fences, she said, can “carry fire right up to your house”; they’d replaced the timber gates leading to their back patio with ones made of polished corrugated steel. Their woodshed had been shielded with metal screen panels to keep out embers, and their doormats were made of metal grating. Their roof, which was covered in brown fire-resistant shingles and trimmed with green-painted metal flashing, was also rigged with sprinklers; a homemade misting system hidden under the eaves was capable of soaking the surrounding ground in minutes. Multiple fire hoses snaked across the small, parched meadow that separated their house and studio from the nearby woods, ready to draw from two tanks holding more than ten thousand gallons of water, or from their fourteen-thousand-gallon swimming pool.

As part of her work with the Fire Safe Council, LizAnne had helped draw up fire-readiness checklists. Whenever it’s red-flag-warning fire weather, she and her husband start working through a four-page series of tasks: agree on a meeting place if they get separated, secure the cats, charge and wear their walkie-talkies, move patio-furniture cushions indoors, sweep the roof and gutters, fuel the generator, and so on. The C.Z.U. fire, she said, had been their third evacuation in a dozen years. She had packed for thirteen hours, then left the house in her S.U.V. at 3:30 A.M. The Jensens hadn’t received an evacuation alert, but it was smoky, and burning embers were falling around them. Ken planned to follow, but first went to pick up an out-of-town neighbor’s cat and bird; at the last minute, he decided to hunker down at home, and teamed up with the other Westdale homeowners to defend their turf.

The post The Terrifying Decisions Created by Wildfires appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the city’s 10th cultural district on Tuesday, a move that will recognize Pacific Islanders in Visitacion Valley and provide resources to support the dwindling community’s growth.

“People will be able to go somewhere they belong, somewhere people understand them, somewhere where they have all the same access to resources as every other community,” said Gaynor Siataga, the director of San Francisco’s Pacific Islander Community Hub and a leading advocate for the cultural district. “This will give them a sense of identity and belonging here in this wonderful city.”

Pacific Islanders’ roots in San Francisco date back to when it was still a settlement. But the community has steadily decreased in size — from more than 8,600 residents in 1990 to about 2,150 last year, or roughly 0.4% of the city’s population. Strong socioeconomic challenges, including high levels of poverty, unemployment and chronic health conditions, contributed to the community’s decline and intensified during the pandemic.

Around the same time that several Pacific Islander community-based organizations teamed up to respond to the population’s high rates of COVID-19 illness and death, planning for the cultural district started in earnest.

Tuesday’s 11-0 vote was seen as a culmination of those years-long efforts, but not an end point to them.

“We have folks who really want to come back to the city,” said Tino Felise, the neighborhood program coordinator at the Samoan Community Development Center and one of those behind the effort to create the cultural district. “Hopefully, establishing this cultural district will help us re-establish our population, and make sure this is a place Pacific Islanders can continue to call home.”

In coming months, the office of Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents the area where the new district will be established, will work with Pacific Islander community leaders to cement the exact geographic boundaries of the district and solidify plans to protect and support the Pacific Islander community . This begins with the creation of a three-year strategic plan, according to the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, and the hiring of a cultural district staff.

Once finalized, the area will be awarded the annual funding provided to each district: $230,000 of hotel tax funds to plan for the services, resources and programs, all of which will be designed by a new cultural district advisory board and the city.

“I think the cultural district will really begin to allow everyone to see the specific needs of the Pacific Islander community, and focus on strengthening the solutions to supporting them,” Walton said.

Julia Sabory, who manages community planning and cultural districts at the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, said cultural districts can elevate a community’s voice at the policymaking table while promoting programs that are created with and for the populations they serve.

“It’s not so much about the numbers and the masses of residents,” Sabory said. “It’s about addressing the systemic exclusion of groups, and trying to include them into processes and opportunities to improve that community’s quality of life.”

“Getting the cultural district approved is just the beginning,” said Siataga. “The work — the deep-rooted work — starts after.”

Elissa Miolene is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco. Twitter: @elissamio

The post San Francisco simply created its tenth cultural district. Can it cease Pacific Islanders from leaving town? appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

We drove back to her house, near the beach, in the city of Santa Cruz, and Stasiewicz mused on the contrast between our settled way of life and the habits of Indigenous tribes. Native Americans had once moved around seasonally while stewarding their forests by means of controlled burns. Today, perhaps, wildfires and their evacuations are forcing people to return to a semi-nomadic existence. Stasiewicz has friends with respiratory ailments who can’t tolerate the wildfire smoke that now routinely blankets the West Coast; their new seasonal routine is to move to the East Coast during the hottest months.

Some people would say it’s a younger generational mind-set, she said, parking the car. But, she went on, “it’s a way of being resilient. You’re highly adaptable during fire season.” In her trunk, she has an emergency kit with a hand axe, a hard hat, and a seven-day supply of contact lenses. She plans to purchase a chainsaw. “I’m always thinking worst-case scenario,” she said.

In April of 1991, Indigenous people living on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines, noticed a sulfurous smell in the air. It was emerging, along with gusts of steam, from a giant crack that had opened in the mountainside. Scientists set up a monitoring system and concluded that an eruption was likely. Around a million people lived near the mountain, and most of them didn’t know it was a volcano; the government rushed out a public-awareness campaign and created evacuation maps and a five-level system of volcanic-activity alerts. On June 15th, the volcano erupted, unleashing a seventeen-mile-high mushroom-like cloud that sparked lightning. A typhoon happened to be moving through, and pounding rains mixed with fiery, superheated avalanches of gas, ash, and molten rock. The decision-making had been fraught and full of uncertainties; the death toll should have been huge. And yet, by the time of eruption, more than sixty thousand people had departed from the zones of greatest peril, many transported by government-arranged buses and trucks. The main eruptions killed around three hundred and fifty people. The evacuation is now a classic study in the field of disaster-response management.

Ideally, as in the case of Pinatubo, evacuations follow a script. Emergency responders recognize a threat, identify at-risk areas, and call for evacuations using warning systems that function well; residents are notified zone by zone and, after making mental and logistical preparations, escape. But, especially in the case of catastrophic wildfires, the script may be easier described than executed. The problem isn’t mass panic of the sort featured in Hollywood movies—research has shown that such panic at moments of disaster is a myth. Instead, systems can stumble for lack of coördination or testing. Even well-laid plans can’t anticipate how a raging fire will interact with the specifics of landscape, weather, and human behavior. In California and the West, many county emergency managers have therefore opted not to create robust wildfire-evacuation plans, arguing that they can’t address the particulars of a blaze until it’s unfolding before them; they don’t want to be locked into designating certain evacuation routes, for example, in case those get breached by flames. But Cova and other evacuation experts argue that doing as much detailed groundwork as possible in advance is worth it, because the process can reveal problems that weren’t otherwise obvious. There is a tao of evacuation planning: you must spend time developing a detailed plan while acknowledging its limitations, so that you can be better poised to improvise as circumstances demand.

To look at any single wildfire catastrophe is to grasp the huge number of factors that planners and residents must confront both beforehand and in the moment. A prime example is what happened in the town of Paradise, California, in 2018. The town’s managers had had the foresight to craft a wildfire-evacuation plan, identifying egress routes and conducting, in 2016, a community drill. But participation was low, and a few years prior the town had unwisely decided to narrow part of the primary evacuation thoroughfare from four lanes to two. No one anticipated an apocalypse that would overpower all their systems. In November of 2018, state fire officials learned of a fire ignition near the town; within ninety minutes, they’d told the county sheriff to issue evacuation orders for a limited number of areas. But the fire, driven by howling winds, spread at a speed beyond their experience, and they were slow to issue further orders.

As the journalist Lizzie Johnson has reported, in “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire,” a wider evacuation commenced only after an emergency dispatcher for Cal Fire, alarmed by calls from residents, jumped the chain of command to have the sheriff evacuate the entire town. By then, it was too late. Flames engulfed most of the main escape roads, and gridlock ensued as thousands of cars jammed the primary evacuation route, surrounded by flames. Eighty-five people, many elderly and trapped at home, died in what has become known as the Camp Fire—the deadliest inferno in California history.

The Camp Fire was a shocking lesson in threat evaluation. It showed fire officials that they needed to call for evacuations far sooner in extreme wildfires rather than waiting for a more complete picture of the threat. At the same time, it underscored the limits of alerting technology. Officials in Paradise had relied upon an opt-in emergency-messaging system called CodeRED, but only a small proportion of residents register for such systems. Many evacuation experts recommend using a federal Amber Alert-style system, which automatically pings every cell phone in a disaster area, but significant cell-phone infrastructure was soon overloaded or destroyed during the disaster.

Even if people get orders to evacuate, not everyone will quickly follow through. McCaffrey, the U.S. Forest Service researcher, has studied people’s wildfire-evacuation preferences. She and her colleagues have found that in communities in South Carolina, Texas, and Washington State that have experienced wildfires, only one in four people is inclined to leave immediately upon receiving an official evacuation order; two-thirds favor a wait-and-see approach—it’s common, research finds, for people to scan outside for smoke or flames, or check with neighbors or other trusted sources—and roughly one in ten figures that he will stay and fight. Some homeowners, McCaffrey noted, simply feel that they can’t afford to lose their abodes. An intention to leave promptly may founder on last-minute complexities. What if an evacuation order comes when families are scattered at work and school? Does an elderly aunt have to be picked up along the way?

First responders in the C.Z.U. Fire knew about Paradise, and were able to avert a catastrophic loss of lives. Still, on the night the conflagration blew up in Santa Cruz County, they were caught off guard, and some orders were issued too late. “That fire was growing so rapidly, we didn’t know exactly where it was,” Nate Armstrong, who at the time of the disaster was a deputy chief in Cal Fire’s C.Z.U. unit, told me. Heavy smoke made it impossible to get fire-location intel from fire-mapping aircraft. Other factors—poor cell signals, overloaded telecommunications networks, power outages, burned infrastructure—created some alert-system failures. In the off-the-grid community of Last Chance, some people received reverse-911 landline calls after dark—but by then houses were aflame, and one man perished. Other residents, such as the Firebaughs, didn’t see or receive alerts disseminated via social media, CodeRed, or the Amber Alert system in time.

Amid the communications chaos, some people decided to clear out without waiting for word from the authorities. Meanwhile, roughly two dozen sheriff’s deputies started driving around, knocking on doors to tell people to get out; the cops moved systematically from north to south along the San Lorenzo Valley so as to avoid unleashing a simultaneous emptying of the entire area. (By the next day, two hundred officers were engaged in the effort.) Residents also consulted a new online map from a San Francisco-based tech startup called Zonehaven, which allowed the public to track evacuation warnings and orders in real time, without waiting for notifications. Zonehaven’s software is targeted primarily at fire, police, and emergency-services departments, which have traditionally used paper maps to decide on evacuation zones even as fires spread (a process that can take hours); its algorithm analyzes data on geography, population, and housing density, among other factors, and looks at traffic flow, to suggest pre-planned evacuation zones. In the C.Z.U. fire, its début, the Zonehaven platform provided the emergency agencies with what’s known as a common operating picture, helping them manage the evacuation of seventy-seven thousand people over five days. Some thirty counties in California now use Zonehaven, and it was deployed last year in thirty-seven wildfires.

Other new technology tools, such as sensors for detecting fires early, promise to optimize the emergency response and evacuation process further. And yet there are limits to how much a wildfire evacuation can be standardized or perfected. Aggressive, rapidly spreading conflagrations leave little margin for hesitation or error, and uncertainty on the ground is unavoidable. Every person’s evacuation experience is different. This summer, Jo Romaniello, a therapist who set up a Facebook page during the C.Z.U. fire where people could share their experiences, co-authored “The People Not the Fire: Stories of Resilience,” a book containing thirty diverse narratives of the disaster in Boulder Creek, a town in the northern San Lorenzo Valley. Although many people received alerts and had relatively orderly evacuations, some describe learning of the emergency from helicopters flying overhead, broadcasting orders to get out. Others, in areas that burned first, barely escaped the flames: one couple, finding their driveway blocked by fire, made it out in their cars at midnight with nothing but their dogs, the clothes they wore, a purse, and a violin. Romaniello and her husband weren’t registered for CodeRED, and never received a reverse-911 call; they heard about the danger when a friend called them. Unsure when to leave, they packed and evacuated late, at 2:30 A.M., after a deputy drove through their area with a bullhorn. By then, they could hear the roar of the fire. Nearby propane tanks were exploding, and the night sky was blazing red. They drove out into a blizzard of falling ash.

Knowing that Cal Fire was short-staffed and underequipped, a small cadre of people in the Santa Cruz mountains, some with firefighting experience, decided that their best bet was to stay and fight for their homes themselves. (A few had already evacuated with their spouses, children, and animals, but then chose to go back, alone, to their homes.) They used chainsaws, tractors, bulldozers, and other equipment to remove trees and understory, clearing fuel breaks around their property. On Westdale Drive, a private road with thirty-seven houses just south of the Firebaughs’ in Bonny Doon, seven households used makeshift water trucks and fire hoses to extinguish spot fires created by falling embers. The neighborhood later credited the crew with saving it: had the ignitions escalated, flames could have overrun many homes.

Inexperienced wildfire-fighting attempts by civilians can put them in grave danger, and first responders sometimes end up diverted from firefighting as they try to persuade residents to leave. Armstrong, from Cal Fire, told me that fire crews got several property owners out at the last minute, “with the fire right on their heels.” But Stasiewicz believes that people should be provided with guidance on surviving, as a last resort, in their homes or at refuge points, such as local baseball fields or store parking lots. Some ranching communities in the intermountain West have organized their own volunteer firefighting services, in coöperation with state and federal agencies that provide training and radios.

LizAnne Jensen, a former treasurer of the Fire Safe Council of Santa Cruz County, a nonprofit group that helps homeowners with wildfire protection, lives with her husband, Ken, on Westdale Drive, in a beige stucco house next to a studio where they craft and sell copper weathervanes. They have invested more than sixty thousand dollars in home-hardening and fuel-reduction improvements, going so far as to pay for work on neighboring property. On a bright summer day, LizAnne gave me a tour of their home. Wooden gates and fences, she said, can “carry fire right up to your house”; they’d replaced the timber gates leading to their back patio with ones made of polished corrugated steel. Their woodshed had been shielded with metal screen panels to keep out embers, and their doormats were made of metal grating. Their roof, which was covered in brown fire-resistant shingles and trimmed with green-painted metal flashing, was also rigged with sprinklers; a homemade misting system hidden under the eaves was capable of soaking the surrounding ground in minutes. Multiple fire hoses snaked across the small, parched meadow that separated their house and studio from the nearby woods, ready to draw from two tanks holding more than ten thousand gallons of water, or from their fourteen-thousand-gallon swimming pool.

As part of her work with the Fire Safe Council, LizAnne had helped draw up fire-readiness checklists. Whenever it’s red-flag-warning fire weather, she and her husband start working through a four-page series of tasks: agree on a meeting place if they get separated, secure the cats, charge and wear their walkie-talkies, move patio-furniture cushions indoors, sweep the roof and gutters, fuel the generator, and so on. The C.Z.U. fire, she said, had been their third evacuation in a dozen years. She had packed for thirteen hours, then left the house in her S.U.V. at 3:30 A.M. The Jensens hadn’t received an evacuation alert, but it was smoky, and burning embers were falling around them. Ken planned to follow, but first went to pick up an out-of-town neighbor’s cat and bird; at the last minute, he decided to hunker down at home, and teamed up with the other Westdale homeowners to defend their turf.

The post The Terrifying Selections Created by Wildfires appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

MARTINEZ (CBS SF / BCN) – With the 2020 census in the books, counties like Contra Costa are seeing their political landscape evolve.

The Board of Directors of Contra Costa on Tuesday unanimously approved a reallocation plan moving Diablo, Blackhawk and the Camino Tassajara area from District 3 of Supervisor Diane Burgis to District 2 of District Candace Andersen.

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The new map expands Andersen’s reach to the east, bringing the three Tri-Valley parishes into the same borough as Danville and San Ramon – cities they are already connected to based on geography and demographics.

The new plan brings all of Quill to District 1 of Supervisor John Gioia. Pittsburg’s Tuscany Meadows is moving to District 5 from Supervisor Federal Glover, dividing Antioch on Somersville Road and Auto Center Drive, which is Railroad Avenue between Glover and Burgis.

The Morgan Territory Road area within the Mt. Diablo Unified School District is being moved to District 4. Concord would be split on the former railroad access and highways 4 and 242. District 2 would now extend through Tilden Regional Park almost to Kensington. Walnut Creek would split between Districts 4 and 2 on State Highway 24 and Interstate Highway 680. The Saranap and Castle Hill areas would be in Andersen’s District 2.

Throughout the process, some areas have been pressured to keep the cities intact, which is difficult given the demands.

“It may feel like you’re divided in some ways, but there are actually advantages,” said Burgis. “You don’t have just two overseers running a town; Supervisor Glover and I share Antioch and I don’t say, ‘Well, where is that?’ I say, ‘Oh, it’s Antioch. I will help you. And I’m sure that will happen with Supervisor Glover too. We don’t look at the lines. ”

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Tuesday was the last of five public hearings required before a final plan has to be in place by December 15. District lines are redrawn every 10 years and are based on US census figures.

The 2020 census showed that Contra Costa County has grown by 11.35% since 2010, from 1,049,025 in 2010 to 1,168,064 residents in 2020.

The largest increase in population came in District 3 of Burgis, with an additional 36,560 residents in the area comprising much of Antioch, Oakley, Brentwood, and unregistered East Counties.

The lowest growth was in District 4 owned by Supervisor Karen Mitchoff (population 10,442), an area that includes Concord, much of Walnut Creek, Pleasant Hill, and Clayton.

The goal is to create counties with as similar a population as possible while following all federal and state guidelines, such as:

Burgis said the district maps should be updated on the district website on the district website by early December.

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© Copyright 2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Bay City News Service. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

The post Contra Costa Supervisors Approve New Voting Boundaries Created By 2020 Census – CBS San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

He had traveled to Jura for rest and isolation so that he could focus on the concept of Big Brother. He succeeded, and this book revolutionized publishing in 1949 with its history of Eternal War, ubiquitous government surveillance, historical negationism, and propaganda.

Many people may well believe that the 1984 fiction was put into practice during the 2020 US presidential election. And some people, like the Chinese government, were so shocked by Orwell’s story that they banned his books from their social media platforms in 2019.

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Those of a certain age will remember that it wasn’t always that way. In fact, New York State Governor Mario Cuomo delivered a speech at the US Democratic Congress in 1984. Almost 80 million people watched the speech on their televisions and Governor Cuomo was interrupted by applause more than 50 times from the live audience. That was the year President Ronald Regan spoke eloquently about the US being “a shining city on a hill.” Cuomo contrasted this image that “the hard truth is that not everyone shares in the splendor and glory of this city”.

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US election: Americans in Scotland fear the result of the vote

Aside from last-minute problems – like a successful legal challenge by Donald Trump – Joe Biden appears to be the elected President of the United States.

He was carried into the White House by a tsumani of people who understood he was talking about them when he said the Covid pandemic was “not over” and added, “Just ask the people at your dining table will look at an empty chair ”. Reaching for a loved one in their bed at Christmas or out of habit, only to find it is empty too.

A voice of integrity, honor and truth

Trump supporters slap the glass and chant slogans outside a room where postal votes were counted in Detroit, Michigan (Image: Jeff Kowalsky / AFP via Getty Images)

Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris held up a highly polished mirror to the American people as if to say, “Is that what you really want?”

As the world has become increasingly dystopian since 1984, it strikes me that even today, amid the stormy seas of electronic mass media, a voice of integrity, honor and, yes, truth can rise above the maddened crowd.

Combining the folklore of Ronald Reagan, the sincerity of Jimmy Carter, and even the sincere wrath of the Founding Fathers of the United States, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were able to overcome all odds by finding their common voice and asking a simple question.

They kept asking: “Is this the America we want for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren?”

It is a simple and at the same time profound question. If you interviewed 300 million US citizens and asked them about their dreams for the future, you would find as many splinters as you can see when you cut a huge tree in the forest.

Another morning

These factions have always been part of the American experiment. However, because of recent poor national leadership, this noble experiment has failed because of the seeds of division rather than the formation of courageous coalitions.

Now President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign slogan, “It’s Tomorrow in America” ​​seems to be true again with the advent of new leadership, albeit from an opposing party.

The challenge now for future President Biden and Vice President Harris is that they must first heal the wounds of the recent past. And while these scars will be visible for many years to come, they will always remind us of the American dream stronger and more enduring than any selfish despot, angry white racist group, or a lewd QAnon conspiracy troll.

Further from dystopia

When Governor Cuomo stood at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco and spoke to thousands of delegates, his voice did not thunder, but rather, quietly and firmly, he reminded all Americans that their country was a “story of two cities” rather than a “brilliant” one City on a hill. “

Then he threw a strong spotlight on the dark side of this hill, using statistical evidence to show how unfair America had become. He concluded with these words, which in both 1984 and 2020 will bring a deep sense of treasure and upward development: “To be successful, we need to give up some small bits of our individual interests in order to build a platform that we all do can endure “. on, immediately and comfortably – proudly – sing along. “

I believe the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris opened a new opportunity to step by step from our dystopian past and present to a new chapter for America and her friends and admirers around the world to stand together and sing again proud that these are our values ​​and that our hopes for the future will be realized with new leadership that values ​​truth, respect, kindness and, yes, love.

Professor Joe Goldblatt is Professor Emeritus of Scheduled Events at Queen Margaret University. He has both Scottish and US citizenship and has been known as an “Honorary Orcadian” because of his many visits. He voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. To learn more about Professor Goldblatt’s views, visit www.joegoldblatt.scot

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The post US election: Donald Trump created an Orwellian nightmare however Joe Biden might help America get better – Professor Joe Goldblatt appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.