Missed Opportunity

The evening of November 30th Los Angeles was hit with what to some was a crippling wind storm. In some places sustained winds of 80mph and gusts of up to 100mph wreaked havoc on unprepared Angelinos. The next day the aftermath was everywhere. Fallen trees, broken branches, palm fronds strewn everywhere was the scene and no power was the condition in many parts of the city. A week later, from Hollywood to Westwood and from Lake View Terrace to City Terrace the streets are still littered with fallen tree branches, mountains of palm fronds and the occasional palm tree mounted on the curb, but hey, power was finally restored a day or two ago.

While I am marginally upset that this stuff hasn’t been cleaned up yet and fractionally more upset that a City Hall staffer told me to look at it from the bright side that mother nature just did a lot of tree trimming for us, I’m mostly upset that the Mayor and Councilmembers didn’t take advantage of this opportunity to talk about disaster preparedness. While many sections of the city were out of power, I saw how distraught some of my fellow Angelinos were because they couldn’t charge their laptops or cellphones or how impacted some people were because they had just bought groceries that day and they didn’t want their food to spoil and had to buy bags of ice to store in their refrigerators to keep the temperature down. At least these people could go to the Starbucks down the street and plug in or go to the market and buy ice.

Had this been a major earthquake where the whole city grid was cut-off, 7-11 isn’t going to have ice for your fridge and Starbucks isn’t going to be able to charge your laptop not to mention charging your cellphone will be futile because all communications will be down anyways!

The least our City leaders could have done was talk about how that same Mother Nature that just “trimmed our trees”, gave us that 10 minute order to disperse LAPD supposedly gave the City Hall Park occupiers. So what if National Preparedness Month was three months ago, the reality is this town sits on some pretty seismically active land and preparedness should be preached whenever possible. Once again our leaders show the kind of foresight that got us into this budgetary mess we’ve been in for years.