Has Trump said a single word about the fact that most of the West Coast of the country is in flames?— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 10, 2020
Which I find extremely curious.
— Michael Kimmelman (@kimmelman) September 10, 2020
That article mentions Colorado:
Colorado is dealing with infernos like the Cameron Peak Fire west of Fort Collins, with more than 100,000 acres burned. Washington State has seen more than 300,000 acres burn, including 80 percent of the town of Malden. California, with a record 2.5 million acres burned so far, has 14,000 firefighters working to contain 25 major wildfires even though “this year’s fire season has another four months to go,” according to the state’s fire agency, Cal Fire.
But that's it: one sentence. Everything else is west coast states. If I read the National Forest Service map correctly, there are fires in Idaho, Montana, Utah, Arizona, and Alaska, as well as California, Oregon, and Washington. Can't tell how large any of them are, but I know the first in Colorado are smogging the skies of Denver just as the fires in California are affecting San Francisco. But one is a coastal state, and the other is....not. And I get why California (especially) and the coast gets the attention:
Millions of Americans are moving into wildfire-prone areas outside of cities, and communities often resist restrictions on development. A century of federal policy to aggressively extinguish all wildfires rather than letting some burn at low levels, an approach now seen as misguided, has left forests with plenty of fuel for especially destructive blazes. This is all in an era when global warming is creating a hotter, drier environment, loading the dice for more extensive fires.
Well, that and the attention is coming from the east coast. The "third coast" (the Gulf coast) doesn't burn; it just gets flooded and blown apart. Clean up and recover is boring, and besides, it's not the west coast, is it? People on one coast kind of feel an affinity for the other coast, right? Well, at least media companies in NYC feel some connection (mostly monetary) to media companies in El "A". And that's in California, so eventually.....
It's just curious with all the information the internet was supposed to bring, it's still the same information we had before, but now you don't have to get off the couch to get it. Progress, I guess.
Or the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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