Posted on 08/05/2007 5:16:05 AM PDT by JohnA
HELENA, Mont. (AP) - Authorities told residents of about 200 homes to evacuate and pulled firefighters off a fast-growing wildfire in western Montana out of concern for their safety.
(Excerpt) Read more at newspress.com ...
Montanans: All the best from your neighbor to the north here in Alberta in your hours of need. If there was anything we could do for you, I’m sure we would.
Montanans: All the best from your neighbor to the north here in Alberta in your hours of need. If there was anything we could do for you, I’m sure we would.
Pray for those people. How awful. I too live in an area that go up in flames. Not much you can do beyond keeping brush away from the house.
Well, at least we know where all the smoke in the air is coming from...(in Western North Dakota). Here’s praying Montanans get this controlled and out soon.
That’s what happens when you don’t have the wherewithal (airplanes) or the system (questionable callout methodology) to get to these blazes early, where you can do some real control work.
Montanans, Is it true the Feds stopped local ranchers from organizing their own fire fighting efforts in some places?
It’s been reported that if you try to do anything for yourself, they’ll withhold services from you this time or the next time. They’ve gotcha by the short ‘n curlies. You don’t mess with these power monkeys. If you complain, they put your name on the list.
How sad.
You got Gingrich saying the War on Terror is a crock and yet you spend a gazillion on it while letting these people lose their homes waiting for the US Forest Service to invent and manufacture (NOT) some airplane they like ....that somebody is supposed to bring to them all tied up in a nice paper bow with all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed on bureaucratic paper.
That’s what happens when you had eight years of an administration who had a ‘let it burn’ policy (More Clinton Legacy).
Amazing how far we have strayed from our independent roots this country was founded upon.
They (the Feds) did that here (North Dakota) during a praire fire in the national grasslands (Interspersed Federal and private ownership), so it would not surprise me. The feds were blocking access roads, but the ranchers knew how to get around the feds (geographically) and did it anyway.
The fire burned a strip about 20 miles wide and 30 miles long, but the ranchers saved their homes and outbuildings (on private land) for the most part.
It is much easier to get around in shortgrass prairie country than it is in the hills and woods around Helena.
Dana Rohrabacher, the one and only Congressman who wanted to hold the US Forest Service’s feet to the fire on the IL-76 waterbomber issue, made reference to this very point in a speech he gave Congress. He held a news conference on it and the US media, perhaps afraid their US Forest Service feeds would dry up, refused to show up.
It would not surprise me to find that many of the bureaucrats who helped create the problem are still in their jobs.
It is a hard fact of life that the city folks back east suffering from 'beltway fever' really do not give a diddley d@mn about the people who sent them to D.C. if it is not an election year, and then tout the 'special' projects which hit the largest cross section of the demographic.
In Western states, that has taken on a rural vs. urban component, where the population of a few key cities can outvote the rural population--with widely differing interests.
I honestly believe the founders foresaw such a conflict of interest groups, and that is the reason the U.S. Senators were originally elected by the state legislatures, thus enabling all areas of a state proportional representation by land area instead of population (as in the House) in the Federal Legislature.
That has since been subverted, removing a cornerstone of the republic, dragging us toward a de facto democracy.
In that sense, firefighting in rural areas comes in with a very low priority.
Using the Spotted Owl and other crap to severely damage the domestic timber industry has further ensured that the business interests which might have had the resources to be able to overcome that legislative inertia are no longer present.
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