40 Dogs and 40 Nights

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BURNED AGAIN: Since the Baby Jesus Fire, Arnie Cooper and Chris Chamness have developed a thing about women whose last names end in “i.” And that’s not necessarily a good thing, either.

Shortly after the Palomino Road A-frame that Chamness and Cooper shared burned to the ground, they got a call from Traci with Independent Housing Solutions (“We’re looking out for you”), a small company specializing in finding temporary accommodations for natural disaster victims. Cooper and Chamness managed, however, to locate new digs on their own with no help from anybody. Rent was $3,200 a month with a security deposit of $4,500. But Traci called again, this time offering to help lighten the couple’s paperwork load. She’d deal with Sandi at the insurance company to ensure that funds were released to pay the rent. Not only that, she’d mail the rent checks herself. For Cooper and Chamness, then inebriated by the collective kindness of strangers that erupts in the aftermath of natural disasters, it was one less headache. Until, of course, they saw the invoices a few months later.

Angry Poodle

Traci, it turns out, charged $250 every time she mailed a rent check. And that doesn’t count the additional $700 fee she charged for handling the security deposit. For this kind of dough, Cooper, a freelance writer, was more than happy to write his own checks. He called Traci to complain and got nowhere. He called Traci’s boss, Patti, and got nowhere, too. It’s okay, they said, the insurance was paying for it. The problem here is that “the insurance” is the very finite “Additional Living Expenses” (ALE) fund in the Cooper-Chamness insurance policy. For the next two years, their insurance company is on the hook for up to $79,000 in these “additional living expenses,” as Cooper and Chamness get back on their feet. If Independent Housing drains their ALE account with over-the-top charges now, there might not be enough money down the road when Cooper and Chamness could still need it. And there was no advance disclosure that such exorbitant fees would be charged. In fact, the Web site for Independent Housing explicitly states, “We do not place a mark-up on our negotiated lease terms.” When I called Traci, I got company owner Bill Tillotson instead. Based on my interview notes, I can only surmise I was afflicted with a temporary loss of hearing. Why else would Tillotson say five times, “I have no comment.”

While Arnie, Chris, and about 300 other South Coast families wiped out by recent fires are urgently figuring out how to get the most out of their often limited coverage, a busload of high-powered national fire experts and hard-core brainiacs — assembled by the Department of Homeland Security — toured Santa Barbara’s charred firescapes last Wednesday in hopes of rendering such insurance squabbles all but unnecessary and irrelevant. Initially, Homeland Security planned on hosting its Wildland Urban Interface Fire Colloquium in North Carolina, but Santa Barbara — having experienced four major wildland-urban fires in 22 months — somehow beckoned. What Santa Barbara is suffering an especially acute case of is afflicting much of the country, even the hot and humid South. Every year, the feds spend roughly $1 billion suppressing wildfires that threaten urban populations. Every year, the size and number of such fires increases. Maybe there’s a better way. At least that’s the hope.

The first conclusion arrived at by these brainiacs — according to Cal Poly’s Dan Turner, who led the show — is there aren’t enough planes, helicopters, fire engines, or firefighters on the planet to save us. The really scary fires are wind-driven; by the time adequate resources — like, for example, the 4,100 personnel, 500 fire engines, 19 helicopters, and 11 fixed-wing planes assembled to fight Jesusita — arrive, it’s already too late. The trick, he said, is to make sure that homes located in the urban-wildland interface zone are fire resistant. The technology exists. But how can it be made available cheaply and attractively enough so that people actually will embrace it? That’s one of the questions Homeland Security hopes will be researched further. Part of the answer is simple; beware all patio furniture, and don’t plant flower beds next to the house, especially when bark mulch is involved. They go up in a flash. And so do wood roofs. Duh! Most wildland fires that threaten populated areas spread by embers. One of the brainiacs likened the phenomenon of a windstorm to “a hurricane sleet storm of flying embers.” By placing screens and metal flashing at strategic spots on your home, you can reduce your abode’s vulnerability to ember invasion.

The Homeland Security folks are looking to inspire research on problems for which no solutions yet exist. Like, how to communicate effectively when no less than 259 separate firefighting agencies have assembled to beat back Jesusita? Or how to track the location of the 500 fire engines in the field, driven in most instances by out-of-town firefighters who have little familiarity with Santa Barbara’s serpentine grid of hard-to-pronounce street names? Or what happens when 100 engines simultaneously hook up to hydrants, on a system not equipped to accommodate a small fraction of that demand?

During the Tea Fire, water pressure became a serious problem. Thanks to a new computer system, city water workers could better track reservoir levels during the fire and respond appropriately when the levels dropped at a rate of five feet an hour during the height of Jesusita. Getting reliable info amid a runaway fire is next to impossible. Firefighters heard from countless authoritative eyewitnesses that the Santa Barbara Mission and Natural History Museum were engulfed by flames. They never were. During the first day of the Jesusita Fire, estimates of its size fluctuated wildly. It’s hard to fight a fire if you don’t know where it is. For such vital intelligence, Fire Chief Andy DiMizio relied on Battalion Chief Pat McElroy, then driving like a wild man through the South Coast and yelling in reports on his cell phone. In other parts of the country, unmanned drone planes are deployed over fires to provide accurate data. Maybe we should try that here. Maybe that and a whole lot of other things.

It will be about six weeks before the Homeland Security Brainiac Brigade issues a final report identifying key research needs. What happens then is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, I wouldn’t give people with names ending with an “i” such a hard time. The real culprits are companies that proclaim, “We’re looking out for you.” That’s the problem; they are.

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