By: Martin Merritt, esq.
Past President, Texas Health Lawyers Association
Past Chair, DBA Health Law Section
martin@martinmerritt.com
“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Clients Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
As you can tell, I love talking about health law & litigation issues, and general wellbeing, if you have any health law questions or better yet, need to refer a case, just call or drop me an email and I will happily talk.
I don’t post blogs with any deliberate political intention. I feel more like a kid caught in the middle when mommy and daddy start talking politics at the dinner table. Seems to me the biggest problem is that each side is reinforced by the television news which they “hate watch.”
The idea of TV news is to convince you your side is the “good guys” and anyone disagreeing you must be literally, “Hitler.” Which is just “bait concealing the hook.” (If you haven’t figured out, during the commercial breaks both Fox News and MSNBC play the same ad for the same big pharma product.)
But even as a little kid, I knew it was a big problem, when you turn on the faucet and there was no water. I can’t imagine how much worse it would feel, if your neighbor’s house is on fire and yours is catching and the fire hydrant doesn’t have any water. But that probably would never happen.
Why is Los Angeles on fire? Southern California has long had a problem, in that much of it is dry desert, with the San Gabriel Mountains standing in between the desert high plains to the east, with the Pacific coast to the west. Here the San Andreas fault and shifting tectonic plates cause the landscape to rise almost 10,000 feet, then drop quickly as it levels out to the sea. Hot air from the desert blows toward the sea, as it descends quickly down the mountains. This air mass lands on the coastal plane, which compresses the accelerating air, heating it up and drying it even further. The result is a big giant thermal leaf blower, with wind speeds up to 100 mph, known as the “Santa Ana winds.”
This effect is so predictable, that Californians have come to refer to this time of year as “fire season.” Arguing about what causes this is a little like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck arguing whether this is “duck season” or “rabbit season,” when the fire is literally coming down the hill. Its a bit too late.
Let’s say that climate change plays a big role in the danger from the Santa Ana winds. The question is, what do you do when you when you know Santa Ana winds are coming?
California’s stack of problems. California still has electrical wires above ground on 100-year-old poles, which rise only a few feet from dense underbrush that grows naturally in the hills. You can see where this might be a problem in 100 mile-an-hour winds.
Los Angeles county is the most densely populated in the country. They need water, lots of it. Because it is in a desert, that means no rain clouds. The brush in “them thar hills,” gets really dry. As a result, Los Angeles must pipe water in, which makes corrupt people rich, like John Huston in Chinatown.
California’s cloudless climate also attracts huge numbers of homeless people. Some are addicts and some are mentally ill. They can live on the streets in daylight, but deserts get cold at night, due to the lack of cloud cover, because clouds keep heat from dissipating. That’s where the dry brush is a godsend to the homeless. They make campfires in the hills out of dry brush at night stay warm. Which isn’t so much a problem, unless you live where there are 100 mile-an-hour winds.
California never buried the power lines underground, nor addressed the homeless. Instead they used to build zig-zagging fire breaks in the brush to stop these fires from spreading. California also used to build reservoirs to hold water, but like the Bugs Bunny episode, “Wet Hare,” environmentalists got the government to blow up their own dams because of wildlife concerns. I didn’t catch this when I was a kid, but Bugs Bunny, a wildlife creature, actually asks the industrialist, “what gives you the right to dam up the water?,” before tricking the bad guy into blowing them up himself. (Bugs, the environmentalist is so annoying, the industrialist will do anything to shut him up, including blowing up his own livelihood.)
Sometimes I think everything I needed to know, I learned in kindergarten. I am not sure on all of the problems in California, because instead of cartoons, we now get news from Fox News or MSNBC, who are really just trying to sell erectile function drugs for the sex that no one is having these days because of the stress.
“Great idea with the best of intentions, what could possibly go wrong?” So, instead, I watch YouTube channels, one of my favorite being, “Great Moments in Unintended Consequences,” which are three- or four-minute videos about moments in history when the government had a problem and their solution backfired.
In Episode 12, for example, in Texas “poopy” birds were congregating in the oak trees above the heads of doctors at a Texas Medical Center campus. So, administrators put up nets to make the birds go elsewhere. The narrator intones, “Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions, what could possibly go wrong?” It turns out, birds eat caterpillars, including North America’s most venomous, megalopyge opercularis, which grew in numbers by 7,300 percent. They can kill you. Unless the birds kill them first.
The moral of the story. If there is anything good to take away from the LA fires, it is this. Probably, we need to have a hierarchy of concerns. First, make sure that there is water in the tap, food on the shelves, electricity in our homes, doctors when we call for one, and fire departments with people who can carry a firehose up a flight of stairs. Everything else is important, but probably not a question of life or death. We are all just a few missed meals from total anarchy at all times.