Tag Archives: wildfires

Wildfires: Obamalot’s Katrina

The recent wildfire-fighting in Central Texas has been an almost-exclusively ground operation. Thanks to Obamalot, too few water-carrying planes are available.

“The U.S. Forest Service terminated the contract with Aero Union five weeks ago to operate seven P-3 Orions that are critical to the agency’s firefighting mission, leaving the federal government with 11 tankers under contract to help battle more than 50 large uncontained wildfires now burning nationwide.

“That’s down from 40 tankers used by the Forest Service just a decade ago, according to Rep. Dan Lungren (R.-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Administration, who is challenging the decision to dismiss the largest provider of heavy air-tanker support to the federal government.”

Of course, Katrina impacted a largely-black New Orleans when a dastardly Republican was in charge of FEMA. The fires are a Western phenom, largely in states that are white and do not vote Democrat—so there’s no big media whoop-de-do about the missing tankers. Tough luck for us.

Via Drudge Report

Those San Diego fires

Getting a little worried here about an OC-504 buddy who lives in Poway, in north San Diego county, which started evacuating residents this morning as the wildfires worsened, whipped by 100 mph winds. Put out a message for him on the group email list, but haven’t heard back yet. He recently retired and has been fixing up his house for sale before moving to South Dakota.

UPDATE: Classmates say our buddy, retired San Diego assistant district attorney Bob Phillips, and his wife are out of town this week. Hope they don’t have to come home to destruction and loss.