http://wildfiretoday.com/2009/05/28/policy-of-prepare-stay-defend-or-leave-early-is-under-fire/ News and commentary about wildland fire Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:49:19 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 http://wildfiretoday.com/2009/05/28/policy-of-prepare-stay-defend-or-leave-early-is-under-fire/comment-page-1/#comment-328 Dal90 Fri, 29 May 2009 01:02:09 +0000 http://wildfiretoday.fireemsblogs.com/2009/05/28/policy-of-prepare-stay-defend-or-leave-early-is-under-fire/#comment-328 If California's budget keeps going they way it's going, it may not matter if you've prepared your property -- there won't be the firefighters to defend it.It's a wonderfully complex problem that involves many facets from who much the public spends on fire protection, to engineering problems like home, subdivision, and water supply designs, to modeling and predicting fire behavior in order to generate useful forecasts (is this going to be the equivelant of a tropical storm or are we looking at Category 5 hurricane developing?) to the expectations we place on citizens to be able to look after themselves.As some of the Australian stuff is pointing towards, I have to think part of the puzzle with stay/go is good forecasting. Look at how coastal areas phase in their evacuations in response to the severity of hurricanes -- starting earlier and going further inland the worse the storm is. I suspect even with stay/go you have places like Key West were even a minor storm needs to be evacuated from early on due to the vulnerability and logistics, while other folks are in places that could be prepared and ride out the storm well. If California’s budget keeps going they way it’s going, it may not matter if you’ve prepared your property — there won’t be the firefighters to defend it.It’s a wonderfully complex problem that involves many facets from who much the public spends on fire protection, to engineering problems like home, subdivision, and water supply designs, to modeling and predicting fire behavior in order to generate useful forecasts (is this going to be the equivelant of a tropical storm or are we looking at Category 5 hurricane developing?) to the expectations we place on citizens to be able to look after themselves.As some of the Australian stuff is pointing towards, I have to think part of the puzzle with stay/go is good forecasting. Look at how coastal areas phase in their evacuations in response to the severity of hurricanes — starting earlier and going further inland the worse the storm is. I suspect even with stay/go you have places like Key West were even a minor storm needs to be evacuated from early on due to the vulnerability and logistics, while other folks are in places that could be prepared and ride out the storm well.

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