More thoughts on the CO wildfires

For Coloradoans, what we saw last night on TV matched what we felt during the Columbine shootings. This was truly saddening and frightening that this was happening. TV announcers compared it to the fires of Hades--it was truly that bad.

A reporter (or maybe he was just a citizen) became a little nasty with our Democratic governor and the governor said he wouldn't engage in finger pointing. The man being upset was certainly understandable and the governor handled it well. The fire somehow jumped the containment line and all hell broke loose yesterday.

Could this have been stopped? The issue is that we have a zillion miles where homes border the dangers of nature. Certainly the residents of CO Springs had 30 years to make a fire line to protect from what happened last night. It's not really fair to blame the victims because no one ever knows where the disaster will occur--the law of averages would say that with a zillion miles, you're ok. The overall issue of fire mitigation will probably be discussed in the next few weeks.

These twenty-first century fires are really bad. It's not like we didn't have them in California last century. Clearly we need to be more heavy-handed in fighting these fires to avoid what happened last night. We have the capabilities, but so far we aren't making the leap to do what is necessary. This is where we can criticize our penny-wise right wingers. Big government isn't the problem; but, pound-foolish right wingers certainly are.