Katrina Affects Wildfire Evacuation
Newsweek has a pretty good article about how Hurricane Katrina affected the evacuation effort on the Topanga fire.
A month after Americans watched the terrible images of stranded New Orleans residents struggling for their lives, many Californians who lived in the path of the wildfire chose to get out before they faced a similar fate. Fires in the West are more common than hurricanes in the South, and in the past, plenty of homeowners refused to leave, trying to fend off the flames themselves by dousing their roofs with garden hoses and hoping for the best. But this year cops and firefighters say it's been much easier to persuade people to pick up and leave. "They've been great," Assistant Los Angeles Fire Chief Tony Varela says. "Because of those current events, they knew they stand to lose more if they don't go."
This is probably a short term change. The memory of the Katrina disaster will start to fade, and in a few years the public will not evacuate so easily. I hope that isn't the case, but I bet it will be.
Posted October 3, 2005 08:33 AM · Link
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