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GELFAND’S WORLD - For the past dozen years or so, I have been writing warnings about the lack of emergency preparedness here in Los Angeles. A lot of that goes to our failure to create an adequate communication system. I don’t mean communications among the city agencies. I believe that the police and fire departments can talk to each other.
No. I’m talking about the way that city agencies don’t talk to us, the public, sufficiently.
Over the past weekend, we had an example of that sort of toxic problem with an equally serious lesson on how the public were not kept informed.
The issue I used to raise repeatedly went like this: Suppose some ship or petroleum terminal or chemical pipeline in the harbor were to begin leaking. Several questions would be crucial:
Where is the source of the leak?
What neighborhoods or business districts are endangered by the leak (or fire or explosions)?
What is the plan -- Evacuate the people or tell them to stay where they are?
How will the authorities tell the people about the plan?
What are the important, relevant facts that need to be told?
Here is a statement of fact: At 3 PM on Friday, I, your loyal scribe, was sitting in a San Pedro diner on Gaffey, just north of the Vincent Thomas Bridge, on the west side of the main channel. (For those of you who don’t live in the port area, the Main Channel is the wide water channel that goes from the outer harbor up to the Vincent Thomas Bridge, and divides into two channels just north of the bridge.)
Then, at about half-past-six PM, (just those few hours after I left), a container ship caught fire nearby. The port responded properly, by sending fire boats to fight the fire and by communicating the existence of the fire to other agencies. You can read about the outcome here.
So who didn’t know about the fire?
Me.
My neighbors.
Businesses in central San Pedro.
Oh, there were obviously going to be some people who heard, but for the most part it was a big secret. But those of us who turned on the 5 o’clock news saw video of a ship being soaked by spray from the fire boats and by land-borne equipment.
We learned from the news – but no other way – that we were being urged to shelter in place. Let me offer a couple of critiques of that message:
1) Not everybody knows or understands what it means to “shelter in place.” It is a pretty commonplace term to the Fire Department and to people who have taken CERT training, but it is vague to everyone else. Like, what sort of shelter do you need to find? Is this something you were supposed to build, the way that people built bomb shelters in the 1950s? Does it mean going into the basement (which most of us do not have)? Does this refer to some sort of government building such as the ones designated as refuges from heat emergencies?
It turns out that the term “shelter in place” refers to none of the above.
2) The news media did not tell us where that burning ship was located. This is a pretty important bit of data, and it did not come out in the news stories we were hearing. Or if it did, it was buried in all the other irrelevant talk, and maybe existed somewhere near the end.
So why is it important to know where the ship was docked? That’s easy – The people near the ship and those directly downwind of the fumes were the one who needed most to shelter in place. Going outside or even opening a window would subject you to toxic fumes.
Well, they did tell us it was the port, right? Let’s parse that briefly. The port is spread out over 7500 acres, which translates to more than 11 square miles. It goes a long way from north to south and it also spreads a long way from west to east. It might turn out that you were living right next to the burning ship and, depending on which direction it was, you might be right in the path of the fumes.
Suppose an announcement had been made through a known communication channel, going something like this: “All those west of the main channel in the area from 1st St to 6th St, and in the area from harbor up to Western Ave are advised to Shelter in Place. To Shelter in Place means to stay in your home with the doors and windows closed, and do not go outside. Going outside may subject you to irritating fumes which can set off breathing problems such as asthma or may enhance heart conditions.
See how easy that was?
Except that in practice, it wasn’t. I managed to locate (I think) the location of the ship, but I had to do some serious looking to find the shipping company that owns the ship and then look up its terminal in the port. From that, I inferred that the ship was on the east side of the channel and north of the Vincent Thomas Bridge. At the time that the fire was in its early hours and was getting lots of attention from the news, we were not told that fact. This would have been of importance to people living in the vicinity as well as to dock workers in the area.
An old issue: How to get out of Pedro, and how it reflects the current fiscal insanity in Los Angeles.
San Pedro is effectively a peninsula. It’s true that it connects on the west to the Palos Verdes peninsula, but there are not a lot of roads, and there is a pretty high hillside to get past. To be precise, 25th in San Pedro connects to the coastal road, but one of the two approaches was closed by a landslide. The city could fix the problem, but is unwilling to spend the money.
To the North and East, there are Western, Gaffey, and Pacific, with a possible exit along the edge of the harbor. Considering the position of the burning ship, the road alongside the channel would not have been a wise choice. Meanwhile, 70,000 people are going to have a slow time of it trying to get out on the two roads to the North or the three roads to the West.
Let me raise one more little item. If this were wartime and the possibility of an attack on the harbor and/or a required evacuation were in the cards, then the authorities would have communicated the issues to the public and presumably carried out a drill to educate us in what we would be expected to do if the time came. My understanding is that the Fire Department and the Harbor Police do their own drills and training, but bringing the public into the discussion is just not a part of their philosophy.
So there we were, sheltering in place as best we knew how to do, ignorant of where the burning ship was docked, and limited to the information provided by the news media, which was itself limited to the kind of information that might be of interest to people in other parts of the county. In other words, the precise information that would have been important to people close to the fire was missing.
There really ought to be a reappraisal by our civic leaders regarding getting information to the public.
There is one other issue when it comes to a public evacuation which actually happens. If you want a hundred thousand people to get out of the Pacific Palisades, what do you tell them, how do they respond, and how do you assist in the evacuation?
Here’s what not to do: Tell everybody to get out, and then do nothing about traffic.
Here’s a thought about how to do things right: Get traffic officers in place along Sunset Blvd and Pacific Coast Highway, and control the intersections that feed into these roads. A long line of cars coming down one of the canyons can be held for a few minutes while traffic moves unimpeded (and quickly) along Sunset. Then, after five or ten minutes, hold traffic along Sunset and get everyone off the canyon road and onto Sunset. The idea is to turn that intersection into something different from a four-way stop.
I’m not claiming expertise in traffic engineering. I’m just suggesting that the authorities think about these things in advance, and in particular think about the technical details of evacuating large numbers of people. Then create preliminary evacuation plans and explain to the people that there may come a time when they will have to get out of town quickly. People who live in brushy hillside locations are already familiar, having evacuated at one time or another in the past. But the idea is legitimate for other places, in particular any place that fronts on an industrial zone, a refinery, the harbor, or the airport.
Addendum: This administration is losing it
The president’s latest rant about sentencing all of his critics to death signals another step in the Trump weirdness. How far that weirdness is going to go, and when, are critical questions. But you have to admit that something is going on. Meanwhile, the Trump enablers in his immediate employ are getting into the act. The latest is the suggestion that the Pentagon will call Senator Mark Kelly to active duty so they can punish him for his remarks. You can read about it here. This is right out of the fascist playbook.
Over the years, people who noticed and remarked about Trump’s weird behavior (not to mention cruelty and corruption) have been accused of something called “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” May I suggest that what we are accused of is merely the ability to observe honestly. That term is now, more and more, a term that describes the president himself.
So here is the punchline. As happened in Trump’s first term, people who have served him loyally are leaving. Many of them have bad things to say about the president and his enablers as they exit. MTG is just the latest, but won’t be the last. And as people discover that they can stand up to the Trump tantrums and Just Say No, it becomes more of a fact. This doesn’t mean that the president will be impeached and removed from office (at least anytime soon) but it does mean that more and more, he assumes lame-duck status. And as that happens, particularly if the House returns to Democratic control, it will be more and more difficult for the fascist revolution to take place.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
