Tony Morris Could Save Us
A Topanga man's crusade for big planes could prepare us for next time
When the smoke finally clears out of our lungs and we've cleaned the ash from our expensive cars, we should pay more attention to Tony Morris and his fire-fighting ideas. There's no reason to see people die and flames swallow thousands of homes every few years. We aren't playing Vegas odds here. The chance of wildfires breaking out during the next spate of Santa Anas is about the same as Cardinal Roger Mahony going to hell: It's a near-certainty.
"What country has to evacuate 500,000 people because wildfires are burning?" demands Morris. "There's a failure there of the largest degree. We need to figure out what the hell we're doing and why we're doing it."
The 15 or so fires madly burning in Southern California, and provoking fire officials from San Diego to Santa Clarita to say they were caught unprepared, will portend yet around round of disaster unless we follow Morris's advice. The 65-year-old Yale graduate nearly lost his own home in the Topanga fire in 1993. It turned the former NBC documentary producer and construction guy into a crusader to set up a national fleet of supertankers to bombard flames with water scooped up from the ocean or other body of water.
He and his grassroots group - Aerial Fire Protection Associates - took their spiel on the road and testified before one of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's blue-ribbon panels on fire protection. A few months ago, the governor announced that the state would sign a three-year lease for one of the supertankers - a converted DC-10 that drops 12,000 gallons of water over a half-mile area in eight seconds. "Everybody's amazed that he did it," says Morris, who traveled around the state to get homeowners groups to bombard the governor with letters. "But that's not the end of it. What you're seeing now, the catastrophic fires, is inexcusable. It's unbelievable. It's a combination of all of the elements coming together at the same time. It's the perfect firestorm. Global warming has produced a rise in the intensity and number of fires around the world."
The special DC-10, known as Tanker 910, drops nearly 10 times as much water as the WW II-era turboprops. In the last few days, it has hopscotched the state dousing flames. But one jet tanker isn't enough. The lease runs $5-million per year, plus $5,000-an-hour during fire-fighting. It's a bargain, Morris says, and the company operates at a small profit. "You have to think about what you're saving by putting these fires out." By comparison, L.A. Unified recently got $600 million to build new schools it doesn't need and the city announced a $150 million program to synchronize traffic signals that don't make much of a difference.
On Wednesday morning, Morris was headed out to Lake Elsinore to await the arrival of a Canadian Martins Mars supertanker that will be used to drop 7,200 gallons on the San Diego fires.
Once the fires are out, Morris, who calls himself an iconoclast and a liberal Democrat, will step up the campaign to prepare the region for the next fire. He wants to see a national aerial squadron of several dozen supertankers strategically located across the country. "We plan to ratchet up our involvement in the national dialogue," says Morris. "We need to change the systems we have."
Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, among others, should be expecting his call. Says Morris: "It's the most exciting thing for a 65-year-old guy who's bald and overweight to talk to people in power."
And, if that goes well, Morris is studying satellite technology to see how around-the-clock monitoring might be possible during the hot autumn winds.
Playing hardball with Mayor Ambition
L.A. Sniper's contingent that showed up Monday night at Disney Hall silently cheered on L.A. Times editorial pages honcho Jim Newton during his interview with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
The talented journalist and author of an enlightening biography of Earl Warren asked some tough questions about the mayor's broken marriage, whether voters should consider fidelity when judging a politician and, in a cause held dear to all who want police agencies to be accountable to the public, Newton pressed Mayor Ambition into saying he'd support legislation to open police discipline records in Los Angeles.
We were left with one question after the 90-minute session at the Zocalo event: Why isn't Newton this tough on the mayor in the Times' editorial pages?
The newspaper runs too few hard, critical editorials that illuminate public issues and provoke debate on the mayor's handling of city matters. Readers had to wait three weeks before the first editorial appeared this summer on the mayor's marriage, and that was for a piece that said it's easier for Republicans to get away with cheating on their wives than Democrats.
Last June, we never saw an editorial after Mayor Ambition and Police Chief Bill Bratton went AWOL and failed to testify in favor of State Sen. Gloria Romero's bill that would have merely repaired the damage of a bad state Supreme Court ruling and returned public scrutiny of police matters to the same level it was in the 1970s. Romero's bill passed the State Senate, but went down in flames in an Assembly committee when the mighty police unions told lies about how it would invade officers' privacy and endanger them and their families. It was a crock and Romero was counting on her two boys from L.A. to set the record straight. But they failed to show up. A June 28 editorial let them slide, too.
Now, in front of 250 people at Disney Hall, Mayor Ambition said he would support a new bill and said it should address only Los Angeles. Newton, to his credit, pressed him to commit his support.
The real-life consequences of Bratton's and Mayor Ambition's dropping the ball will become painfully clear when, in the next few months, a couple dozen officers are disciplined for blowing it during the MacArthur Park police riot on May 1. Our two leaders will insist that state law forbids their naming the officers. And, they'll be right, but only because they were cowards in June and wouldn't take down the police unions at the Sacramento hearing.
Let's nail them in an editorial, Jim.
Dorsey High's underground debate
Politicians just aren't as compassionate or patient as they ought to be. Last week, when the community called a hearing to air safety concerns about a planned Expo Line light-rail crossing near Dorsey High School, only City Councilman and Expo Line Authority board member Herb Wesson showed up.
Absent without permission slips were Zev Yaroslavksy, Bernard Parks, and Yvonne Braithwaite Burke. They should have been there to take the heat and defend the street-level crossing.
Now, of course, there will be a visit by the Public Utilities Commission to inspect the site and to review whether the Expo's plans are up to snuff. You can bet the three AWOL officials will be monitoring that visit.
It's ironic that last week Mayor Ambition and Gov. Steroids staged three traffic-related press conferences, but steered clear of Dorsey High. Too bad they couldn't come up with a $25 million check to put the rail line underground as it passes the school.
We reject the complaints that the street-level rail crossing near the busy school is a case of environmental racism. It's strictly a case of cheap-ass transit agency policy. Check out a similarly poorly designed Gold Line crossing on Mission Street in South Pasadena.
The politicians' inaction aside, we do sympathize with Samantha Bricker, Expo Construction Authority's chief operating officer, who said the crossing is the product of working nearly a year with the city Department of Transportation, PUC staff, L.A. Unified, and the principal at Dorsey. "They've all been involved in the planning and design, and we hired a firm that specializes in crowd control and event management to assess the area and figure out where kids are leaving the school, the paths they take," Bricker said. "We did a virtual simulation that looked at all the safety protections they're putting in the area to make sure they accommodate all the children who are crossing. Right now it's just a stop sign, there's no signals, there's no crowd control, there's no way for children to cross the street safely - we've put in additional protections to make sure it's safer - we have signals, flashing lights for pedestrians, pedestrian gates, fencing in the area, we have a lot of protections put in."
All that's missing is the underground tunnels to make for a completely safe passage at the busy school.
Published: 10/25/2007
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