MountainWings       A MountainWings Moment
#3320              Wings Over The Mountains of Life



Another Perspective of the Wildfires
============================

Friday's issue of MountainWings, "The Smell of Realization,"
http://www.mountainwings.com/past/3318.htm
struck something inside of me to write this.

Friday's issue of Mountain Wings talked about the California
Wildfires.  Friday's issue made them wonder what it must be like
in San Diego.  Well, I live in San Diego, and have most of my
life. And when it comes to what the fires meant to San Diego,
they meant a lot of things both positive and negative.

I also agree that the national media leaves out quite a bit of
information when covering such a story, while the local media
talked about nothing but the fires 24/7 for days on end.

What was it like to be in the middle of San Diego when the
entire county seemed to be burning?

This is what it was like in my perspective.

The city was in a sense of chaos before the calm began.
People were forced to leave their homes and all of their
belongings behind, any of them not even having a moment to grab
photographs and other precious moments, some did not even have
the time to grab their pets.

Once they left their homes, they were faced with another
problem...where to go.  San Diego is a warm weather climate,
because of this; we do not have shelters for the homeless or the
displaced except for when the winter gets really really cold and
the local government decide to open them.

We have a half of a handful of shelters open year round, but
thousands of people were evacuated and there was no way that the
shelters we had could hold all of the people.

When people had nowhere to go, we looked for an emergency plan.
We live in a city that has dealt with brush fires in the past,
dealt with earth quakes, dealt with flooding, dealt with
mudslides, and is built on an earthquake fault

...we had no emergency plan.  The worse time to discover that
you don't have an emergency plan is during an emergency.

So now we had thousands of people evacuated from their homes
with no place to go and no plan to put in place that would tell
them where to go.

Qualcomm Stadium, the place where the San Diego Chargers and San
Diego Padres have played for so many years is in the city of San
Diego.  They told everyone to go to Qualcomm Stadium.

People started driving to Qualcomm Stadium, they figured if
Qualcomm went up in smoke the whole city would explode by then
as the gas fuelling pumps for the large tanker trucks are
right under the bridge from the stadium.  So, now we had
thousands of people parked in the parking lot of Qualcomm
Stadium...now what?

Qualcomm Stadium is an outdoor stadium...it is not, nor could it
ever be used as an emergency shelter because there is no place
to go inside as an emergency.  Yet, when they evacuated, they
evacuated to Qualcomm Stadium.  The worst time to realize that
you do not have an emergency plan is during an emergency.

The Red Cross and other local organizations like Father Joe
Carol came to the rescue; they brought clothes and food to
Qualcomm.  Since most of the city had been evacuated, businesses
were closing up for the day as well, and many of the restaurants
donated food, water, and other supplies.

The people of San Diego who had not been evacuated also donated
supplies and volunteered.  Someone (not working for the city)
quickly realized that the city had forgotten to set up medical
care at Qualcomm Stadium.  Like I said, you don't know the
importance of an emergency plan until an actual emergency.

A few local Corpsman from the military set up a medical booth.
They were not told to do so, no one gave them permission to do
so, no one said it was okay to do so, they just did it.

They did it because they have emergency and crisis training for
combat...sometimes it seems like we all need that training.
Sometimes we should realize the value of an emergency plan
before an emergency.

As the fires burned all around them, people gathered in the
parking lot at Qualcomm, most of them standing around the media
vans watching tiny monitors, hoping that their streets would be
shown and their homes were still standing.

Some media stations covered this news better than others,
some posted the information on their websites...now, if you have
evacuated your home and are in the parking lot of a stadium how
you are going to check for information on a website is beyond my
means of thinking.

You might want to consider developing an emergency plan before
an emergency.

Even in the places not burning across the county, the smoke was
thick and heavy.  The sky in San Diego is usually one of two
colors: light blue during the day or black at night.  The sky in
the middle of the day during the fires was yellow in places and
dark gray in others.

The sky at night was dark gray with yellow fog...at least to the
eyes it looked like fog.  The smoke from the fires was just
about as bad as the fires.

Surgical masks...you know the kind doctors wear, were being worn
by people all over the county for almost a week after the fire.
Two days into wearing the masks...which the city handed out to
just about everyone at Qualcomm, the city tells us that the
masks that we are wearing won't help.  Why did they pass them
out in the beginning then? You don't know the importance of an
emergency plan until an actual emergency.

The media was our only line to the county.  The media kept us
updated, they said get N95 masks.  N95 masks are not something
you can go to Kmart and buy.  Our family had N95 masks already,
my dad works for a medical clinic, so we were blessed in that
respect.  Three days later the media said that if you get an N95
mask you need the kind with the filter on the front or you can
die from inhaling too much Carbon Dioxide.

Again you have to wonder why they didn't tell us this before.
You don't know the importance of an emergency plan until an
emergency.

While people were displaced, animals were also displaced.
Many people evacuated their large animals like horses to
temporary fire rings set up in their neighborhoods.  When their
neighborhoods burned so did these fire rings.  There was no
emergency plan for animal evacuation.

The Del Mar Fair Grounds opened it's gates.  They sent the big
horse trailers, the kind that hold multiple horses to the
neighborhood fire rings, and scooped up as many horses, donkeys,
mules, and other large animals as they could. Some of these
animals were tagged, and it would be easy to reunite them with
their owners...some of these animals were not tagged, and it
would be difficult to reunite them with anyone.

All the while, people thought that their animals were safe in
fire rings.  Hundreds of animals had been moved.  Some were
taken to Del Mar, others to Polo Clubs, others to animal
shelters, still others as far north as Lakeside to the Lakeside
rodeo grounds.  None of these animal evacuation places had
emergency plans either, none of them had emergency staff
members.

Pet stores donated supplies, people donated supplies, people
donated horse trailers for use.  Again, the people of San Diego
made their own emergency plan.  You don't know the importance of
an emergency plan until an actual emergency.

Night was falling, temporary shelters were set up at local high
schools.  Temporary shelters were set up by the Red Cross, not
by the city.  The city had no plan.  The people made their own
plan.  In the midst of all of the chaos, the people in San Diego
created their own plan to survive.

We did what we had to do to get the job done.
People were scared, but they remained calm.
People knew they had lost everything, but they remained calm.
People did all they had to do to keep from losing their minds,
but they remained calm.

You don't know the importance of an emergency plan until an
actual emergency.

After the fires began to die down, the reality was realized,
hundreds of homes were lost, over a dozen lives were lost,
animals had been lost, cars had been lost, memories had been
lost.

People were allowed to return to what was left of their
neighborhoods, many cried, many sifted through rubble hoping to
find something still remaining to remind them of their past,
many did not have the courage to sift through the rubble.

Some returned to their homes.  Despite all of the devastation,
many were relieved to have a home to return to and those without
a home to return to were happy to have a family to love.

Some didn't even have that much.

I think the saddest story I remember from the fires was the man
who watched his two kids burn to death in a car on a highway
when the flames literally jumped the highway.  It was a
devastating moment to watch on the news, even more devastating
if you were that dad.  You don't know the importance of an
emergency plan until an actual emergency.

After all was said and done, I knew I had been blessed by God to
have my home, my family, and my neighborhood still intact.
We never did have to evacuate like most...we watched it all on
television, we breathed the air, we wore the masks, we donated
supplies, we donated money, we prayed for all of the people, we
prayed for the firefighters, we prayed for the police officers,
we even prayed for the mayor even though he did not have a plan
when we most needed a plan as a city.

Prayers do help.  Friends and family prayed, everyone around the
world who saw it on the news who had any sort of beliefs prayed.
The fires got under control.  Even once they were under control
the chaos was not over, the city was pretty much shut down, the
schools were shut down for a week, other places of interest that
have been tourist spots for years like Sea World shut down.

The city was like a ghost town.

I remember driving on the freeway with my mom in the middle of
the day, going to visit my dad at work (because we needed just
one more hug that day from him).  Normally the freeways in San
Diego are bumper to bumper around that time of day.  There were
three other cars ahead of us...way ahead of us.

I had never experienced such an eerie yet calming feeling in my
entire life.  When we got to my dad's work we went down by the
beach and ate lunch, lots of people were down by the beach, the
beach had the fresh air, and all though it was not as fresh as
it normally was, it was fresh enough that I could take my mask
off and take the first few breaths of actual air (not fake air)
that I had all week.

You don't know the importance of an emergency plan until an
actual emergency.

The California Wildfires were a MountainWings Moment to remind
all of us that we need an emergency plan.

San Diego is now under investigation...the investigation was
started by San Diego.  Why didn't we have an emergency plan?
Why didn't we have enough firefighters and fire helicopters?
Why didn't we have the resources we needed?

Those are all questions that I feel should have been answered
when the city was built.  They weren't.  I thought about it
later, if a terrorist attack hit San Diego instead of a fire,
what would we have done?  We wouldn't have known what to do.
We don't always know what to do.  We use common sense and good
judgment (or the best judgment we have) to make the best
decisions in the situations we are given.

That's how it works.  That's how life works.
Just because life works that way does not mean that we cannot be
ready with an emergency plan.

Do you have an emergency plan?
For fire?
For terrorists?
For earthquakes?
For hurricanes?
For tornados?

For life?


By A MountainWings subscriber from San Diego, CA



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