**Subsidizing Catastrophe (Ventura County Star---CA)**

Aid programs sow the seeds of future disasters

Ventura County Star

By John Krist, Columnist

November 6, 2003

As the last flames gutter and the pall of choking smoke dissipates,
Southern California's most recent confrontation with incendiary disaster
is losing its dramatic pulse and becoming the much less gripping story
of recovery. Already, the migrant media horde has decamped, seeking some
fresh nightmare to plumb, and politicians soon will seek new images to
replace smoldering homes as backdrops for press conferences.

In some ways, however, this is the most critical phase in the wildfire
cycle---that enervated pause after the inferno has passed---for it is in
the aftermath of one disaster that the seeds of the next are sown.

Typically, this phase is referred to as "disaster recovery." What it
ought to be called is "disaster facilitation," for in seeking to soothe
the pain of one catastrophe, institutions of public aid all but
guarantee its repetition by rewarding the bad decisions that helped make
it possible in the first place.

Since Oct. 21, fires have scorched more than 740,000 acres and burned
more than 3,500 homes from Ventura County to Mexico. As the weary
firefighters who battled those blazes depart, they are being replaced by
insurance claims adjusters, charity workers and representatives of the
Small Business Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
the California Department of Social Services, and local planning and tax
authorities. Together, these institutional Samaritans offer a
multibillion-dollar smorgasbord of grants, loans, fee waivers and
insurance payouts to help fire victims rebuild their lives and
reconstruct incinerated homes.

The urge to help others in need is an admirable trait, reflecting a
truth written in DNA: Human beings are social creatures whose
biologically improbable dominance as a species owes as much to the
cooperative instinct as to big brains and tool-making ability. Public
aid programs are the institutional embodiment of this trait.

It seems churlish to question the appropriateness of such aid,
especially when the recipients are so deserving of sympathy.
Nevertheless, a critical examination is needed, because much of the help
offered to fire victims in coming weeks will merely ensure future
victimization, from a public-policy perspective, it will be money
ill-spent.

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural disaster." The
term refers to what happens when human beings put themselves in the way
of natural phenomena such as earthquakes, floods and wildfires. These
are entirely predictable events, in the sense that they inevitably recur
in the places they have occurred before, and thus are avoidable. They
inflict no permanent damage on natural systems adapted to them; it is
only when people move into their path that such events become
"disasters,"

There is no better illustration of this than Southern California's
recent wildfires. The Piru fire, for example, which has burned 64,000
acres west of lake Piru in Ventura County, destroyed only a single home.
The slightly smaller Grand Prix fire in San Bernardino County, which has
charred 60,000 acres, destroyed 135 homes and damaged 71 more. The
difference between the two was the presence of large suburban housing
tracts in the fire-prone San Bernardino Mountains, and the absence of
such development in the path of the Piru blaze.

Yet, despite the evident risk of fire in the areas that recently have
burned---and the statistical certainty that they will burn again---vast
sums of money soon will be poured into reconstruction of homes in the
danger zone. Although well-meaning, this assistance amounts to public
subsidy of recurring disaster.

And subsidy it is. The difference in price between FEMA's low-interest
loans and the commercial lending rate represents a cost borne by U.S.
taxpayers. Building and permit fees waived to expedite reconstruction of
fire-ruined homes are a financial drain on local government and, by
extension, all the local residents who rely on its services.

Insurance companies cover repeated losses to wildfire by raising
premiums for all their customers. And then there is the several millions
of dollars a day in taxpayer money---not to mention the blood---expended
by federal, state and local firefighting agencies to protect private
homes built in a combustible landscape.

Many strategies have been employed to reduce the destructive capacity of
wildfires in Southern California---brush-clearance laws, purchase of
expensive firefighting equipment, nonflammable building-material
codes---yet the damage toll rises year after year. Perhaps it's time
also to stop publicly underwriting construction of fire-threatened
homes. That might seem heartless today, but in the long run it may be
the most compassionate thing to do.