this was a slowly growing evacuation - as opposed to everyone all at once.

i think the dense smoke in front of the fires prodded and made believers out of the non-believers.

as did the news flow - which is now fading fast.

katrina memory played a part.

here in socal you need a car - but not everyone drives a late model escalade, no matter what tv says. it's minimum specs in our far flung area of the country to have wheels. and people could travel at will.

as mentioned above, you could retreat close by the area and still have services of daily living.

I live hear and would like everyone to know that at the largest evacuation center (Qualcom Stadium) there are nearly 1 volunteer to 1 evacuee, that is a pretty good ratio. Also there are bands playing and it looks like if I can talk my parents in to driving me (unlikely) that I may volunteer, but the only other thing hindering me is that they have to turn volunteers away.

-Jace

Like Blast said, excellent advice. Thanks, Susan!

Just so happens I'll be in Anaheim for a conference next month. Try and have everything cleaned up by then, okay?

-Blast, who goes to California fairly often but prefers freedom

I'm not sure why everyone thinks these fires are merely inconveniencing rich people. I'm out here and I'm pretty darned familiar with the area. I own a horse ranch in Riverside County a stone's throw from the San Diego County border. I'm not a rich hobbyist. This is what I do for a living. If you've heard of the Rosa or Rice Canyon fires, we can see the flames. The 2003 fires burned our place. I have friends with smaller ranches and horses in the evacuation zones that I haven't heard from since the fires started. I have no idea whether they or their animals are OK, let alone their ranches. We're keeping some evacuated horses at our ranch.

Sure, a few expensive neighborhoods got burned out - Malibu, Poway, Rancho Bernardo. But remember how huge California is, and 7 counties are affected. San Diego County itself is huge, bigger than a lot of states, and it's mostly working class. So are LA, San Bernardino, Ventura, Orange, etc., on the average.

Things have gone moderately well, though I still don't know why those air tankers weren't sitting on the runways fueled, loaded and engines running Sunday morning. It's Wednesday evening and some of them are just showing up. The state was warning of a huge fire danger a week ahead of time.

But it's not like Katrina was a complete surprise, either. Nor the fact that the levees were going to collapse. I think the lesson is, you don't wait until the storm surge hits or your house is on fire before you decide to evacuate. It's just stuff. Grab your family and get the heck out of Dodge.

Kevin B.

Navy/Marine Corps had helo's ready to go early on but they weren't used due to unavailable observers. Who's fault is that? The aircrew's are trained. We went through the same thing in the 2003 Cedar Fire, helo's and crews weren't used effectively there either.

Billion $ Disaster

First I saw them this year was at Pendleton today, looked fairly effective to me. Still, this was supposed to have been a lesson learned from the Cedar Fire and yet it wasn't really learned, lip service.

The planning is one of the two key parts. The second is, rather than asking what does hit SoCal, it might be easier to ask what doesn't. California and it's people have had a lot of practice at dealing with disasters and crisis, so they know what parts of their plans didn't work last time.

There is another thing that I think is being overlooked. If you say it fast enough, a million people sounds huge. Normally, a crowd of a million IS huge. But what percentage of the effected counties is that?

Oh, I like that, thanks Susan!

And no, not all the money is given by the govt as low interest loans. Some of it is grant money, some of it is free services provided, or free rent, or free food, water, clothing, sundries, etc.

In the big picture of things, it makes sense that the local, state, and federal governments would invest some funding towards community support to mitigate the social chaos and subsequent costs of restraining/controlling the inevitable anarchist fallout. By keeping order through providing for people's basics during and after a major disaster, they headoff a much more expensive outcome. It seems, though that our leaders go too far when there are other mechanisms in place that aren't being utilized fully.

Well said, but unfortunately this is rarely if ever a political priority at any level. Some of this might be mitigated by spreading the message of ETS at the local and community level. Apart from economic and demographic factors (i.e. the effects of poverty and a high crime rate), one of the major lessons that the NO/Katrina fiasco provided was that local and state governments can be extremely inept in handling large scale disasters. Citizens must look out for themselves and each other in order to not simply survive, but also overcome these events.

"Citizens must look out for themselves and each other in order to not simply survive, but also overcome these events."

That was a recognized fact during the Overland Migration to Calif and OR back in the middle of the 1800s.

The pioneers consisted of people from every walk of life in America. Some didn't have enough horses or oxen for the trip, so they tried to cut down on weight (like food). Some didn't have the experience, and had to learn the hard way or die.

But overall, most recognized that they had to take care of themselves. They would work together to get something done, such as getting wagons across the rivers, and pulling stuck wagons out of sloughs, but they really were dependent on themselves and their immediate families.

There were mentions in diaries of one 12-year-old girl who found a baby amid a family dead of cholera. She picked it up and carried it the rest of the way (OR, I think). At every stop, she would go through the people, find a nursing mother, and ask if she would please nurse the baby. NOT ONCE, they say, was she refused.

Sue