After several days on the fire lines and, more pertinently for this posting, driving around San Diego County from assignment to assignment or just scouting for fire news in general, I can tell you something that will be shocking. Especially if you've been watching national network news.
Sit down and take a deep breath. Exhale. Okay.
San Diego is still here.
Seriously!
So, for that matter, are Escondido and Ramona and Poway and Fallbrook and a lot of other towns you may have been hearing about this week.
Coverage of the wildfires this week from the national perspective has been pretty instructive and can be applied to other topics. The networks did not make a mountain out of a molehill. Our fires are absolutely a mountain of a story. However, they've managed to turn Mt. Whitney into Mt. Everest.
I spent today in Poway and the city of San Diego section of Rancho Bernardo. Many homes were destroyed. Many, many, many more were saved. In the areas where the fires passed through, my observation was that the ratio of homes saved to homes lost was conservatively 50-to-1. You probably can't tell that when the network news locates its programs at the end of a completely destroyed cul-de-sac.
The story is the same throughout Southern California. This is a huge place. The fires affected a wide area, but San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties are far wider. If you're planning to come here to attend a convention, visit for a long weekend or see relatives, give it a week or so because the hotels are filled with evacuees. But the vast majority went home today to intact homes. Our attractions like the San Diego Zoo, SeaWorld and The Wild Animal Park -- which was right in the path of the flames -- are still there.
That might be news to you if you're not from around here, and the breathless national news-types are to blame. A colleague of mine told me that Katie Couric of CBS News Tuesday walked around Qualcomm Stadium -- the city's main evacuation center -- before her newscast and did not make eye contact with anyone. There's a way to boost ratings.
When you watch national network news in the future and see stories on politics, Iraq, the economy or other major news, ask yourself whether they are making big mountains out of small mountains. Because they might be.
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A lot of what you read about how San Diego is handling the situation, when compared to Hurricane Katrina, is true. Evacuees are behaving themselves responsibly, shelter conditions are good and volunteers by the thousands have donated time, money or goods. Yet even those comparisons are overblown by the national media, because New Orleans was more or less wiped from the map and it was the less-fortunate who were affected -- with very few people left to help them. Here, most of the city is intact and, for the 500,000-plus who evacuated, another 2 million were available to assist.
The major and comparable differences between New Orleans and San Diego are leadership and civic pride. Putting San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders against Ray Nagin of New Orleans would be cruel. So would a matchup of the Governator vs. Kathleen Blanco. From police chief to police officer, from fire chief to fire fighter, things are better here. And we do have civic pride, though a more laid-back sort. This response is what we expect from ourselves. San Diego has been let down by previous mayors and city councilmembers, along with city management, but they've been run out of town. In New Orleans, the poor leaders were left in place for years and years, and were in place when Hurricane Katrina hit. The differences between them this week were clear.
