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GELFAND’S WORLD - Suppose this had been a true heat emergency? You know, getting to 124 degrees and staying that way for a week, with nighttime temperatures above 110? How would the city have responded?
If we look at the past week, the answer would be: Not Too Well.
If you look for cooling centers here in San Pedro, you find that there is a county facility over on 3rd Street. It's in an odd place, hard to find and stuck on a dead-end street. It was closed on Sunday evening, even though it was still early, and in spite of published hours.
That's the one official cooling facility for a population of 70,000 people. It would not be sufficient in a real heat emergency -- not by a factor of a hundred.
The one other official cooling center is the public library, but it is closed for remodeling. We are directed to other libraries in other parts of town such as Wilmington -- this in spite of the fact that it is a long way off -- and people without personal transportation would be most affected.
Still, the residents of Los Angeles handled the heat pretty well, in spite of how inadequately government responded.
It's heartening that in spite of the record temperatures this past week, we've seen few heat related deaths. This is presumably due to widespread air conditioning in the hotter parts of town. But what if there had been a power failure in large parts of the San Fernando Valley or in the other areas where temperatures stayed well above 100 degrees? Note that there were rolling blackouts on one day. The more air conditioners are turned way up, the more stress there is on the utilities, which sometimes respond by shutting parts of their service areas off.
We should be thinking about a heat related perfect storm: Sustained high temperatures and, in the worst moment, a catastrophic loss of electric power at DWP. Loss of air conditioning to large numbers of people. Perhaps even a loss of communications through internet outages and loss of power to television and radio stations. And, as our officials love to tell us, there is always the danger of terrorism.
It's kind of the earthquake scenario except without the shaking. The sickness and death toll could even be worse, depending on how hot it gets. Not many people are going to do well if they have to try to endure a sustained period at 127 degrees. And what would people do? They could try to walk to some cooling center, if only there were one, but what happens when the cooling centers are not prepared to generate their own electricity?
Not only that but look at the cooling centers that the City of Los Angeles offers. According to the official web site, there are 5 of them scattered around our 400 square miles. You can find the map here.
We should be considering the worst-case scenario while we have the chance. The remedies aren't really all that hard. We just need to install electric generators in a few thousand places around town so that there will be room for a few million people if the need arises. It's an engineering problem that is solvable. It's not even all that difficult, since the technology already exists.
The problem is that preparing the city for a heat emergency would cost money, and the City Council has already put the city into a budget emergency. It's all a matter of priorities. How about we decide that we should be ready by next summer? That way, the next time we have a heat dome on top of an already warming globe, we will be ready. We should be able to buy the electric generators for ten million dollars.
The Debate and Trump's latest
Presidential debates are the likeliest opportunity for Democrats to talk to the other side. The rest of the year, the Trumpists listen to Fox News, missing many significant stories because the masterminds don't want them to hear what the rest of us are reading. It would be nice if Kamala Harris would take the opportunity to inform Republicans that they have not been hearing the whole truth and nothing but the truth. She might point out that when Trump accuses somebody (like a tv network) of being fake, he is really talking about himself and his own friends. The idea here is to whittle off a few people who otherwise are not being politically and intellectually challenged by their favorite sources.
The latest news on the campaign front is that Donald Trump is now threatening his political opponents with prison, based on some claim that he will search out and arrest those who engage in election tampering. You can read about it here. OK, you're right, this is the proclamation of a tyrant, a latter-day Tsar, the Emperor Trump. But we should also recognize that it is out of the standard Trump playbook, which is to accuse his opponents of what he is, himself, most guilty of. We might notice that he has been indicted both in federal and state courts over exactly this crime. The federal indictment goes a bit further, but the Georgia indictment goes to an attempt to tamper with the result of the 2020 presidential election.
Probably the best way for Harris and the rest of us to deal with this latest threat is just to laugh at it and to laugh at its maker. After all, it shows, if nothing else, how ignorant Trump is about the law and the Constitution and the institutions which serve them.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
