Now He Tells Us

BOSTON--Sunday's NYT runs a piece on California officials mulling changes in development strategies in the wake of this week's fires. Two nuggets: the comparison of fire policy in ecologically similar Baja California (smaller fires, little damage) with that of SoCal, and this pair of grafs:

More often than not, the human response after fire is to restore, not relocate, said Thomas J. Campanella, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-editor of the 2004 book "The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster."

"After disaster, people are not in any mood to change further," said Professor Campanella. "They already had their lives turned upside down, they want to get back to they way it was yesterday -- turns out to be a very bad time to have vision."

Ray Nagin may want the whole quote printed on a T-shirt.