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.

Comments

[campaignman]

09:33 PM on 10/28/2007

Harry,

Has the government made any attempt to do an after-disaster report on Katrina to identify all those who were displaced by the disaster in order to determine who they were treated, how their lives are now, how many would like to return, etc...?

Such a report, in my mind, should be required but given who is running our country, I'm guessing they want no part of such a report.

[CarmanK]

02:58 PM on 10/28/2007

It is so pathetic. The governing agencies in CA knew there were hazards to building in areas close to fire lanes and developers were allowed to build on "unbuildable" land. Even though there is such a thing as "buyer beware", one expects that if a developer has approval to build-it is safe to buy. There is no excuse to ignore scientific information when it comes to the environment. It is malfeasance for government to put commerce ahead of People's safety. Government is supposed to be the balance between the greed of commerce to control all and the need of the people to be served well by all sectors of the economy.

[Bienville]

03:00 PM on 11/01/2007

The fires seems to have completely displaced all news of the LaJolla hillside landslide, which seems to involve the same concern.
http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/14260836/detail.html

[dgee]

11:43 AM on 10/28/2007

"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.'
Exactly right. Maybe send one to Bush too?