Best laid plans for inevitable fire

You’ve heard the expression, “preaching to the choir.” In the case of fire preparedness, it’s more like preaching to those who want to be saved.

The City of Laguna Beach held a fire preparedness town hall on Tuesday, and officials were impressed by the turnout, about 40 souls who would rather not die in a fire.

The inevitable fire, the not-if-but-when fire, the fire in wind-swept October or inexplicably dry February.

The officials stoically painted grim, yet unequivocal facts:

• It will take nearly 4½ hours to evacuate Laguna, nearly twice that if either North or South Coast Highway is blocked. If both are blocked, forget about it.
• There are only 13 firefighters on duty each day.
• Chances are the power lines will start it all.

Good fire preparedness obviously helps, but at some point, Mother Nature decides the outcome.

“The city of Paradise had beautiful evacuation plans,” said Police Chief Jeff Calvert, adding that the fire moved too fast. Calvert and other officials visited the disaster in 2019 to try and learn some lessons.

One was that many Paradise residents didn’t receive emergency alerts.

Now, Laguna has five ways to get broadcasts: Nixle, AlertOC, Outdoor Warning System, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and Emergency Alert System.

Coming up on the 30^th anniversary of the devastating 1993 fire, Fire Chief Niko King flatly stated from the outset of the meeting that Laguna is always at risk.

“The number of fires we’ve had are significant,” he said. “It is not possible to reduce the risk of wildfires in the city to the point of insignificance.”

Every official who spoke emphasized the severity of the risk.

“There’s not a fire season anymore. It’s year-round,” said Brendon Manning, emergency operations coordinator.

Mayor Bob Whalen, long a staunch advocate for undergrounding, opened the meeting with the reminder that our friends in Maui could be us.

“A lot of the parallels between Maui and here are striking: the high winds, the dry grasses, the limited ingress and egress, the older community,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of factors that are similar.”

So what’s the good news? There really isn’t any, other than the city has gotten better at preparedness.

It’s going to come down to whether people listen and how fast we can underground the power lines.

Then we can save the preaching for another day.