Cris Alarcon, Placerville Newswire | 2014-09-19
We are five days into a giant fire and the official reports still show "0" structures burned and the public knows this is not true. What the public may not know is the process it takes for those number to get counted and posted.
We are often mislead by common sense and this may be the case here. We would think that they just count them as they see them, but we would be wrong, very wrong.
We learned from the Sands fire that the reports of burned building lagged for days. What we discovered is that it is not simply a count, it is documentation that will involve millions of dollars in monies going here and there. For home owner's the burn has to be documented so that they can make the insurance claim and the insurance company does not want to pay for damages unrelated to the fire. For government agencies, millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars will transfer from agency to agency. Additionally, this has been declared and State disaster and that means additional monies going all over the place. Much of this is based on an accurate official count of building, the amount of damage, and the approximate value of damages.
All of this is based on an official verification and documenting process. Yes, there are teams that do just that, but that is not done by front line firefighters. The official numbers posted are the Official numbers and they do not make estimates to please a curious public as it would lead to more problems than it solved. So the lack of numbers is not about any effort to deceive or underestimate the destruction, just a lag in getting this done.
So why the lag in getting it done?
When a fire is in a fast growth stage, it is all hands to fight the fire. Firefighters are busy trying to save houses, not counting them. And that is as it should be. But there are specialist that just do this so why the delay?
That is all about safety. There is no justification for putting an investigator's life at risk to placate the curios or to done something that can be done safely in a short time. In the last two days we have heard many individuals express frustration when they know they have burned and the official report says no homes burned. We discovered in the Sands fire that when the area is an active hot zone with intense fire fighting efforts, paperwork like counting the damages done, is delayed until the area is not hazardous to those doing the documentation.
When we look at the King Fire we see that no known homes were destroyed in Camino or Pollock at the onset of the fire. The know destruction did not happen in the first couple of days. It was not until the fire reached Stumpy Meadows and Hell Hole before significant damages to home happened. That was just two days ago and the fire in those areas has been intense. Now we see a second day where firefighters appear to be gaining the upper hand against the behemoth we call the King fire.
So now it is the normal time that inspectors are in the field counting and documenting.
But that is not all. I don't know if this is law, or just how we roll in El Dorado County, but we are note going to make the numbers we know right now until we have made a very serious effort to notify each individual of the home's loss. Sheriff John D'Agostini has made this clear, he will notify the homeowner's before the general public.
So for the people that have lost the most, they will be the first to know, and those of us on the sidelines will just have wait a bit longer.
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