Improvements in case of emergency
EDITOR: I was very happy to see this week our council, town staff, fire district and school district rethink our emergency preparedness for fire, earthquake and the like.
Learning from our previous experience and watching what the county system went through, we would be wise to make improvements wherever possible, in configuring our Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and in our system of alerting residents of Windsor. We are still a small town and not too bureaucratic. That allows us to take steps bigger communities may not be able to.
We need to consider a range and a variety of notification types, such as sirens and instituting neighborhood coordination captains. We must look at preventative measures also, like vegetation control along our borders with county properties. Now is the time to evaluate what is best and doable, and to make vital adjustments.
Mark Millan, councilmember
Windsor
Dishonest pretext
EDITOR: The White House and the Department of Interior are using the fires in California as a dishonest pretext to give the timber industry the green light to loot our public lands. The claim is that the fires are the result of too many trees.
Their solution is to “thin” our forests, by which they mean to clear cut them. By this logic, turning forests into deserts is the ideal way to prevent forest fires. Their plan is to actually pay timber companies to take our valuable resources; talk about adding insult to injury.
The reality, though, is that none of the fires that have been so devastating to California have started in forests. They have started in brush lands where there is indeed too much dry fuel. Some thinning or prescribed burning of dense understory can certainly help in reducing the risk of fire, but any such work must preserve the integrity of the forests.
The most important factor in this is to leave the oldest and largest trees; they function as shelter and seed stock for younger trees; they are the most valuable to a healthy forest ecosystem, as well as absorbing the most carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, they are also the most valuable to the timber companies.
At a time when climate change is demonstrably increasing the severity and frequency of wild land fires, it would be sheer folly to reduce California forests’ ability to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Larry Robinson
Sebastopol
