I’m still going to raise more questions from Fennessy’s interview, but first I wanted to post some about Tim’s interview with Senator Sheehy. Again, I think it’s important to listen to public figures in their own voice, not as interpreted by others, including me. In the next few posts, we’ll get more into the (fire?)weeds, but here I wanted to set the stage by laying out why his vision appears to be so different from our common understanding of the past (although perhaps not all that different from the Wildfire Commission). Sure, the devil is in the details and we will get to those, but first let’s listen.
What struck me most about the way that Sheehy laid out the wildfire problem was that he frames it as “another destructive problem with people risking their lives to resolve, and as the feds, we need to do better” and so his background in the military (and SEAL teams) shows through. Now to be sure, wildland fire has always had some kind of resonance with the military. Think acronyms, “the militia” and so on. Even when I went to Guard School on the Fremont in 1980, our Forest Supe John Chambers told us that we were striving to be like the Marines (clearly this stuck with me). And of course military folks often help with fire ops.
Taken on its own, this vision could easily be held by Ds, Rs or by Is. It is transformative though, maybe even (dare I say) progressive. Let’s listen to his words- wildfires are a form of natural disaster, and we can do better:
You hit the nail on the head, Tim, when you said we’ve come to accept this as normal. And that’s just, to me, unacceptable. I refuse to accept that we are supposed to accept this as normal. And that makes me unpopular in a lot of circles, certainly with some of our traditionalists who are telling us this is just the way it’s going to be. And I refuse to accept that. And when you look at every other disaster that I’ll just talk about the United States for the time being, but the U.S. is subject to, We don’t accept natural disasters to wipe out cities and towns and ways of life in any other scenario.
I mean, think about hurricanes. You know, hurricanes, an act of God, Mother Nature, whatever. I mean, there’s nothing you can do to stop a hurricane or to slow it down or to contain it or to suppress it. That hurricane’s coming, whether you like it or not. And because of its inevitability, I feel…It’s why we respond so incredibly aggressively beforehand. I mean, if there’s even a whisper that a tropical storm is going to turn into a hurricane in the Gulf of America as it careens towards our Gulf Coast, there’s no expense spared, no authority spared. There is no question that all brands of government, state, local, county, federal, regardless of party, red or blue, everybody mobilizes for their neighbor, for the community. We evacuate, plywood goes up, 18 wheels full of water, airplanes flying. Nobody asks about the bill. Nobody questions whether we’re spending too much. Nobody questions… The authority of bureaucracies or whether or not, you know, we’re stepping on the toes of this agency or that agency. It is a singular whole of government approach to save lives and protect our community. And of course, with the exception of a handful of absolutely terrible ones like Katrina, for the most part, we are very successful in making sure that our communities are as hardened as possible. And it’s amazing how fast they recover. I mean, you go to these communities in Florida, the Gulf Coast that have been devastated by these hurricanes over the years. And for the most part, You can’t tell a year or two later. You go through and like, wow, this is amazing how fast this place bounced back.And that’s because there’s no questions asked. It’s not hidebound tradition. They mobilize and they get it done. Tornadoes hit the Midwest, same thing. Volcano erupts, same. Yet wildfires, everything. And these disasters, these big hurricanes, I mean, it’s not – A thousand times a year they happen, Tim, as you know. This is generally – there’s one really bad one every couple of years or every few years. With fires, we’re talking thousands of them a year. We’re talking every single year we have at least a handful of these conflagrations that result in dozens or hundreds of people dead, thousands of structures burned,entire cities shut down, economies collapsed, and – Literally mass, mass damage. And we just accept that like, well, you know, one school of thoughts as well as climate change. And therefore, you know, because of climate change, it is what it is. Just get used to this.I mean, how many headlines you see in August of every year of, you know, the classic stock photo in The New York Times, The Atlantic or wherever, where it’s a city skyline, it’s red and orange. And they say, is this our new normal or something to that effect? And basically the assumption is it is.
We’ve got to accept this. And I refuse to accept that because this is the one of all those natural disasters, volcanoes and earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes that we actually can stop. You can put a fire out. If you put water on a fire, Tim, it goes out. If you prepare for it, you harden your community.
Brave men and women out there putting their lives on the line to protect these communities. They are underpaid. They are under-resourced. They don’t even get the decency of the benefits provided should something catastrophic happen to them, serious injury or death. We have some amazing nonprofits, one of which I founded and used to run myself, that step into the gap. But we shouldn’t have to beg charities for money to take care of these families when they’ve lost a loved one. We lost another air crew this past week, as you know. And the fact that we don’t even have basic government benefits like SGLI like you have as a veteran, if you’re killed and the military is severely injured, the immediate medical and family support network is activated, and they take all those other worries off the table. You don’t have to worry about transporting the remains.
You don’t have to worry about paying for fuel. You don’t have to worry about paying for flights to go out and receive those remains. You don’t have to worry about life insurance and benefits. And unfortunately, we have mistreated our first responders for far too long in this regard. And quite frankly, I’m obsessed with fixing that problem because we’re asking these young men and women to go out there. Most of them are making bottom dollar. They don’t get the same support of technology and equipment our military does, but we’re asking them to do a job just as dangerous.
So it’s about time we fix that problem and support them the way they should be supported.