California is dealing with a series of wildfires that have broken out up and down the state as high heat, high winds, and a historic number of lightning strikes have hit over a short period of time. According to The New York Times, the Golden State was hit with “about 10,849 lightning strikes in California over the last 72 hours.” This has meant more than 367 “new” fires over that time. Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for a state of emergency to muster up resources to fight these fires, which have burned more than 300,000 acres of land.
The Sacramento Bee reports that one of the big problems facing the state is that it has next to no one available to fight these wildfires. That’s because so much of California’s emergency wildfire personnel over the past few years have been comprised of California inmates. The problem is that state prison officials have had to place “12 of the state’s 43 inmate fire camps on lockdown” due to massive COVID-19 outbreaks in Northern California’s prison system.
This isn’t surprising, as many people reported that California’s unbalanced and dangerous reliance on prison labor was more than problematic. In September, CAL FIRE Captain Kyle Ferris told reporters that prison reform‚ as opposed to the $5.12 a day salary, had led to a shortage of inmate volunteers. You see, the program works best if the volunteers are people who probably shouldn’t be in prison anyway—aka nonviolent offenders. The payroll disparity between CAL FIRE’s non-inmates and inmates has been so egregious that trying to defend it under the guise of “work release” programs has been difficult.
Meanwhile, the other source of wildfires in the state is power company PG&E, and its failures to maintain the safety of the power grid. Now, PG&E and other California power companies are running rolling blackouts, despite rising heat and thousands of people who depend on electricity for things like ventilators and the like. California’s inability to properly try and contain these disasters, along with a federal government run by arguably the single smallest man in the history of the United States, is a recipe for a truly historic disaster. Numerous reports and events have shown that Trump is willing to sacrifice millions of Americans lives if he believes it will keep him in power or winning, in whatever fashion he believes the word “winning” to be.
