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Local News & Opinion
01.26 Local Democrats Invited to Brainstorming Session on Sun., Jan. 31 Ref. : Local Newsbriefs Travel
Books, Films, Arts & Education
02.04 'The Power of Nightmares': Underwear vs. Reason Letters
Ref. : Letters to the editor Open Letters:
Health & Environment
Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries 02.03 States Face Worsening Recession with Health Care Funds on the Chopping Block 01.18 Drugmaker Got Kickbacks for Nursing Home Patients Media Watching
02.04 Err-America 02.03 The Right Gets Itself 'Wired' Ref. : The Daily Howler Legal Matters
01.25 Thinking About Fictions 01.24 US Democracy's End of the Road 01.22 Editorial: U.S. Supreme Court Nails Down the Coffin of Democracy 01.22 Security Fools US Politics, Policy & Culture
02.09 Palin, Psy-Ops & 'Condescending' Libs 02.09 Growing Hunger in America 02.08 The US Government has Lost its Reason for Being 02.08 Thinking About Oracles 02.06 No Direction Home: Pakistan and the Imperial Principle 02.04 Howard Zinn and the State of the Union 02.04 The US Supreme Court: Vanguard of Friendly American Fascism? 02.04 The New War Against Money 02.04 David Brooks Goes After Greedy Geezers 02.02 Obama's Budget Ducks Pentagon Cuts 02.02 Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite 02.01 Thinking About Definitives 02.01 Remembering Howard Zinn (1922 - 2010) 01.29 American History 101: We Are Devo 01.29 Obama's Outreach to Americans: Empty Rhetoric, Business As Usual 01.28 The Supreme Court's Partisanship 01.27 Freeze Frame: Flopsweat and Farce in the Hollow Halls of Power 01.25 Granny D on Campaign Finance Reform 01.25 S.C. Republican’s Plan: Starve the Poor So They’ll Stop “Breeding” 01.23 It's Time for Kucinich, Conyers, Feingold and Other `Progressives' in Congress to Take a Stand 01.21 Massachusetts' Message of Stupid 01.21 Terrorism Defined: Bill Clinton Lights Our Way to Truth 01.21 How Obama Lost His Way 01.21 Political Earthquake Rocks Massachusetts 01.20 Obama Cuts Deal that Will Reduce Social Security, Medicare and all Entitlements 01.20 Critical Mass: Dem Agenda Opens Right-Wing Doors 01.19 Outsourcing War: The Rise of Private Military Contractors High Crimes?
01.25 The Silence and the Shield: Depraved Indifference to the Atrocities of Power 01.19 Dark as a Dungeon: A Brutal System Stripped Bare Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance
02.07 AIG-Gate: The World's Greatest Insurance Heist 02.06 The Free Market Fetish 02.04 The Crisis is Not Over 02.03 States Face Worsening Recession with Health Care Funds on the Chopping Block 02.02 Rule by the Rich 01.29 The Battle of the Titans: JPMorgan vs. Goldman Sachs 01.27 State of the Union: Obama’s “Automatic IRA” Plan Could Make Bush’s Wildest Dreams Come True 01.26 Obama, Read Your Reagan on Capital Gains Taxation 01.24 Funding Public Health Care with a Publicly-Owned Bank: How Canada Did It 01.18 Thinking About Accelerants International
02.08 Aafia Siddiqui: Victimized by American Injustic 02.07 Annals of Liberation: Obama Surge Driving Thousands From Their Homes 02.05 Human Rights Abuses in Israel and Occupied Palestine 02.03 Child Slavery in Haiti 01.30 Blood is His Argument: Tony Blair's Gentle Cuddling at Iraq "Inquiry" 01.28 Obama Ignores Key Afghan Warning 01.27 Haiti's Earthquake: Natural or Engineered 01.26 Helping Haiti’s Elders 01.26 Focus on Israel: Harvesting Haitian Organs 01.25 Focus on Haiti: Washington's Militarized Takeover 01.22 The Lessons of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions 01.18 Disaster Capitalism Headed to Haiti We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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OPINION:About Those Destroyed Houses in CaliforniaI think it's a scandal that fire fighters have to risk life and limb rescuing people and property when much of the risk to those people and homes has been self-inflicted.
Check out the page one photo on the Thursday, Oct. 25 front page of the New York Times. It shows two rows of completely destroyed homes in San Diego, and two virtually untouched homes right in the midst of them.
The caption makes no mention of it, and indeed in news story after news story, reporters talk about the seemingly whimsical way the fire destroys some houses while bypassing others, but what the two homes in that photo that are seemingly unscathed have in common is red tile roofs.
When I worked as a reporter in Los Angeles back in the 1970s, it was common knowledge--and was verified every time there was a wildfire--that if your house had a tile roof, and stucco walls, it pretty much was immune to fires. Yet developers and home buyers, to keep their costs down, continue to put shake (wood) or asphalt shingles on houses in places like Southern California, where grass and forest fires are predictable annual events. It's the western equivalent of homeowners and developers in the eastern US who persist in building homes on flood plains or along the coast at sea level. You have to feel sorry for a family that loses their home, but really, how stupid can people be? How stupid can insurance companies be, when it comes to that? I'm reading that there are complaints about lack of adequate fire-fighting equipment and personnel in San Diego, where there is no county fire department, but I have yet to see one article looking at how many of those houses that were lost had flammable roof materials. In suburban Southern California, you don't have deep forests, where burning trees will fall down on houses and spread fires. Basically, fires spread there in two ways: grass fires bring flames up to a house, which if it is constructed of flammable wood, will then succumb to the flames, or else, burning cinders, sent aloft by a firestorm, will drop on rooftops and ignite the roofing material, burning down the house. A house that has stucco on its walls and red tile shingles on its roof is not very vulnerable to either of those things. Unless a car is left in the driveway and blows up, igniting the garage, or a tree falls on the house, it will sit there and the fire will sweep right by it. So you have to wonder, why don't all Californians all use tile roofing? Granted it's more expensive, but over the life of a house, the difference in materials cost isn't that much. Besides, tile lasts virtually forever, so you don't have to replace it after 15 years the way you have to do with shingles. The other thing, of course, is that we're seeing a much more concerned Bush administration when the victims of a disaster live in a heavily Republican (and white) area like San Diego, than we saw when the disaster was in a heavily Democratic (and black) area like New Orleans. This is true even though the black and poor victims of Katrina were living as best they could in a largely segregated city that kept most of them living below sea level, while many of the victims of the Southern California fires are wealthy people who made some bad choices in the design and construction of their homes. I think it's a scandal that fire fighters have to risk life and limb rescuing people and property when much of the risk to those people and homes has been self-inflicted. About the author: Philadelphia journalist Dave Lindorff is co-author, with
Barbara Olshansky, of The Case for ImpeachmentCopyright © 2007 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. This story was published on October 25, 2007. |
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