The million-plus Californians affected by power outages and wildfire evacuations can surely rest easy knowing that their governor has just formed a new working group to focus on getting “messaging” to ”de-energization areas.”
California has long been what the rest of the world imagines the US looks like. The movie and TV version of California, that is. The real-life Golden State is literally a hot mess these days, with massive wildfires – Kincade in the north, Tick and Getty in the south – displacing close to 200,000 people.
The fires add insult to injury for nearly three million people whose power has been turned off by the PG&E utility. Officially, this was done as part of an effort to prevent wildfires, as damaged or sparking transmission cables can ignite the undergrowth.
Indeed, PG&E equipment was blamed for 19 major wildfires in the past two years, most notably the 2018 Camp Fire that killed more than 80 people and destroyed the town of Paradise. The company is now saying blackouts could go on for a decade, as it struggles to repair the transmission lines.
Instead of focusing on keeping the lights on, however, Governor Gavin Newsom announced over the weekend that he was creating a special interagency working group to “coordinate messaging and outreach to individuals who are dependent on life-saving medications and medical devices.”
As part of the project, California’s Health and Human Services Agency (CHHS) will partner with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and United Domestic Workers (UDW), to provide in-home caretakers with “information.” This will no doubt involve lots of meetings, paperwork, teleconferences, websites, more meetings, and then meetings on how to have fewer meetings – all at the expense of California’s long-suffering taxpayers, of course.
The crowning achievement of the entire effort is a “resource” website for those in what the governor euphemistically termed “de-energization areas.” How are these people going to access the internet without electricity? No doubt that will require another interagency working group and millions of dollars more to figure out.
Meanwhile, the fires will be blamed on “climate change,” or maybe even US President Donald Trump, depending on the “coordinated messaging.”
OTOH “de-energization” perfectly describes California’s dystopian strategy for dealing with the environment, housing, homeless, schools, infrastructure, etc so there’s that going for it https://t.co/bgLwAF2oil
Providing basic utilities to Californians is literally less of a priority for Newsom than setting up a training program to prevent inadvertent insensitivity towards transgender voters (no, really). Besides, actually providing power would require effort, and wouldn’t line the pockets of either state bureaucrats or the union machine on which they depend on for re-election.
Instead, the long-suffering Californians get to pay for the privilege of being on the receiving end of “messaging” by the state that has failed them.
On TV and movie screens, California is still the land of eternal sun and surf, where dreams come true. Actual Californians are abandoning the state in droves, if they can afford it. Those who stay seek solace in dark humor about problems the government simply refuses to address: an epidemic of homelessness, human waste drowning the streets of major cities, or medieval diseases making a comeback.
There is little they can actually do to hold their politicians accountable. Thanks to a series of tweaks over the years, California is at this point a one-party state, where a glass of water labeled “Democrat” is guaranteed to get elected.
Newsom styles himself a “progressive” and a leader in the fight against inequality, racism, climate change, etc. Yet under his leadership, the state has regressed into a dystopia, self-destructing under the weight of incompetence, corruption and downright lunatic political ideas.
You have to give him credit, though – not even Greta Thunberg could have come up with an expression such as “de-energization” to describe the post-technological world of her hopes and dreams. Or would that be nightmares?
Why does this keep happening to California year after year? As you read this article, enormous wildfires are ravaging large portions of northern California, and Governor Gavin Newsom has already declared a statewide emergency. An extreme wind event that began on Saturday evening is pushing the fires along at a staggering rate, and when the winds are howling this ferociously it is exceedingly difficult for firefighters to keep the fires from spreading. It was being reported that on Sunday morning there were sustained winds exceeding 90 mph in northern California with “gusts that topped 100 mph”. It was the strongest wind event in several years, and it came at an extremely unfortunate time.
These “hurricane-force Diablo winds” will continue into Monday morning, but that doesn’t mean that things will start to get better. As you will see below, another extreme wind event is in the forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday.
The Kincade Fire is the largest of the wildfires, and according to ABC News it has now “grown to 85 square miles”…
California Fire officials say a rapidly moving fire in Northern California wine country has grown to 85 square miles (220 square kilometers) and destroyed 94 buildings.Cal Fire spokesman Jonathan Cox called the conditions throughout California “a tinderbox” Sunday and asked people to continue being vigilant in helping to prevent fires from breaking out.
That is an absolutely massive wildfire, and the extremely strong winds are picking up embers from the Kincade Fire and starting blazes in new areas.
The following is what Cal Fire Captain Robert Foxworthy told reporters on Sunday morning…
“The wind speeds are extreme…The strongest winds I have felt in my career,” Cal Fire Capt. Robert Foxworthy told KPIX 5 Sunday morning. “They (the winds) are throwing embers a considerable distance in front of the main fire, causing spot fires, creating a real challenge for the crews fighting the fire.”
The Kincade Fire was only about 10 percent contained early on Sunday, but thanks to this extreme wind event the level of containment has now fallen to 5 percent.
In other words, this fire is completely and utterly out of control.
Pacific Gas & Electric is telling us that “nearly 2.7 million people lost electricity” on Sunday, and they are expecting more blackouts in northern California during the week.
Could you imagine being in the dark with no electricity and massive wildfires are raging all around you?
This is a terrifying time for those living in northern California, and approximately 200,000 are currently under mandatory evacuation orders.
According to the Sonoma County Sheriff, nobody can remember another time when there was an evacuation order this large…
In the suburbs of Marin County, street lights were out, gas stations were closed and stores were shuttered. People who charged their phones and computers before the outage hit awoke to slow internet connections as they searched for updates.
In Oakland, long stretches of banks, pharmacies, restaurants, shops and markets were dark. Police patrol cars parked at intersections to help navigate vehicles through darkened traffic lights.
PG&E said it would begin inspections in the rest of its blacked-out territory early Monday morning, returning electricity as quickly as possible.
But while executives said they would try to restore power to everyone who lost it before the next blackout began, they warned that they might not have time. Some customers, they said, might stay in the dark for days.
No comments:
Post a Comment