Hello Dear bartcop -
I am a fairly faithful reader of your screeds on the notorious scamp at 1600 P Ave.
and share your feelings about Clinton vs. Pigboy et al. Since last November I'm aghast
at what has happened, but felt I had no real contribution to make to your laudable efforts.
Yes, I work with ditto monkeys all the time, this is cowboy country. Since the eighties
better than nine in ten are Repugs.  Just across Hells Canyon from us is White Boy central
on the Nez Perce Indian Reservation, where the only thing worse than the Feds is Tribal.
How smart are they to set up where they are surrounded by Tribal Police and native sovereignty?

But now I do feel something is happening which is germane to my experience and right up my alley
in terms of experience.  I am an old hippie and like many others was one of Uncle Smoky T. Bear's
boys in green.  I fought fires in areas near the 30 Mile Fire.  Although I, thank my blessed lil' hide,
was never in a situation as dangerous as  the kind of blow-up that happened there, I do know how
it goes on the fire line. I still do stuff for my Uncle Smoky, but as a contractor outside the organization.
I'm not just a used to be wandering down Smoky's memory lane. I have current contact with the new
green Smoky and the post Spotted Owl injunction Forest Service. (NO Spotted Owls live within 200
miles of here, but local loggers still talk about how the SOB Owl shut the woods down as part of some
Clinton plot, but 1991 is when it really happened.)

Fox news and its slanted constituents have it ALL WRONG!  Until you experience the kind of events
that occur at any fire, from a two person camp out and wait til daylight nothing piddler to a thousand
person Class One overhead team on the national news Project Fire with T-Shirt stands at the fire camps,
there is no way to know anything about what it is like. Those who experienced both say it is like combat.
Even with all the sophisticated computer models and communications it is full of unexpected events and
surprise.  If you are lucky you get a good story to tell, but if you put your fire shelter on a slope in a bad
scene you get a memorial service.

(PS - It was extremely POOR TASTE for Fox to show what looks like body bags in the news article.
I know the cartion says they were the fire shelters of survivors. I live in a remote area without TV, unless
you buy a big bird bath to talk to the space gods, so I don't know what they show on the medium these days.)

As I read the article, the Hotshots, elite fire crews, were sent off somewhere else for a more urgent task
or perhaps a rest.  It means the fire was OUT, as far as the overhead, fire bosses, were concerned.
A local green crew was sent in to mop-up, this is the boring and arduous work of getting every ember
dead cold.  You roll every log, dig every root and stump hole, feel every stick with bare hands while you
pack the five gallon piss bag on your back. Elite Hotshots hate it, crew bosses regard it as good experience
early in the season to toughen up green ground troops.

Where were the helicopters?  Who knows?  I've been left without air support because they had to bring the
fire boss his lunch or fly a GS 16, big ass bureaucrats,  over a fire they couldn't see through the smoke.
The idea that ESA salmon were an obstacle is pure HORSE SHIT, to borrow one of your fave expressions.
The copter jocks LOVE to mess with crap like the ESA or any other diddly assed thing they think they can
getaway with at a fire.    As in combat, rules get at least bent all the time.

I do know that only a few air miles away at the time a HIGHLY VISIBLE and rapidly moving fire was only
a mile away from the Grand Coulee Dam.  Every one should recognize that name. There are a few thousand
people and many mega watts of Federal electric generation capacity sitting there. I'd not be surprised to hear
the air support had other targets, like this national level energy asset.  A delay of hours, even from committed
resources, is not unusual at a fire.  I'll bet anything the call to Grand Coulee was stronger than the need for
water at a nothing little fire in the back of beyond.

What's more likely THE MAJOR contributing factor is the lack of experience among this fire crew.
Remember Dubya's speeches about how forest  fires last year were Al's fault? To avoid a 'failure' similar
to Clinton's Forest Plan the number of young crews hired this summer is immense.  (Don't' get me going about
the Clinton Forest Plan and USFS management in general, this is already too long.)  I don't believe any 18 year old
can make good choices when shit flies and the world explodes into flame.  Most fire fighters, like +99%, never
open a fire shelter unless it is practice or to qualify. The media makes a big deal about the experienced crew boss
staying in the same area with the young people who died. This is more obfuscation, any really good crew boss stays
with the more inexperienced crew people to help them, not because they made some perfectly good choice in a panic.

Once again the new crew at the White House fucked up and some innocents paid the price for their incompetence.
They hired a bunch of 18 year olds!  Then they killed them and they turn it into a tirade against some environmental
policy they dislike.  I can't wait until 2004, we've got to get a Democratic majority big enough to impeach them
ALL in the summer of 2003.  I'm looking forward to it.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

"Passions become evil and insidious when they are considered evil and insidious."
        Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche