Double Crossed
California is burning. Our ability to fight the fires is limited by the focus on the pandemic, the fact that many firefighting crews from prisons are on Covid lockdown or were freed, and the reality that many families being told to evacuate are afraid to go to shelters where the virus risk will go up. And that’s just for starters. The urgency to flatten the corona curve was about saving lives, but it was also about freeing resources to deal with other crises. The failure is compounding. And California’s nightmare is coming to a place near you. The Atlantic: Two Disasters Are Exponentially Worse Than One. “One disaster is bad. Two are worse, but the damage doesn’t just double. This confluence of circumstances can seem like a series of independent misfortunes, when in fact it is a tangle of loose contingencies. A single high-pressure system rolling in from the Southwest initiated the heat wave and the thunderstorms, which together created the conditions for the fires, which will likely both exacerbate and be exacerbated by the pandemic, which has diminished firefighting resources and, along with the heat wave, contributed to the blackouts by keeping people at home with their air-conditioning on full blast. These overlapping disasters compound. ‘It’s more than plus one.'”
+ Coronavirus Limits California’s Efforts to Fight Fires With Prison Labor.
+ The fires burning in California right now are already among the worst in history and the season is just starting.
+ Next up: Extreme weather threatens pandemic response in hard-hit states. “Two tropical storms are expected to strike the Gulf Coast in rapid succession this week.”