Funding halted
Clallam County’s 2009 Community Wildfire Protection Plan found that a major wildfire here would risk the most catastrophic losses in the entire state.
Last year, the county was awarded a $125,000 USDA grant to devise a new plan, to update current climate and fire knowledge and fully engage the community for preparedness.
The county solicited bids, hired an experienced consultant and formed a steering committee, which had its first meeting last December.
Then President Donald Trump took office and a flurry of executive orders froze the county’s grant monies. The project is on hold.
Meanwhile, the threat of wildfire increases as the planet warms, and that warming will happen even faster with some of the other executive orders Trump has signed.
Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is being dismantled, along with critical firefighting units.
So our community finds itself both more threatened and less equipped to do anything about it due to a spate of Sharpie signatures in Washington, D.C.
Millions upon millions of stories like this are happening all over this country.
With all the damage that has been and will be done to people’s lives, security and aspirations, perhaps the best we can hope for is that we, the people, will re-envision government of, by and for the people as a sacred and delicate edifice that needs both continual support and remodeling, as opposed to what happens to that edifice when insouciant demagogues take a chain saw to it for the sake of their own power.
Ed Chadd
Port Angeles