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The fried-egg brain that used to star in the anti-drug commercials doesn't seem capable of lighting a joint, let alone igniting a $10 million forest fire across 12,000 acres, followed by a deadly flash flood two months later.
But as US West doesn't say in its commercials, life's
different here
-- especially if here
is part of
the Stupid Zone.
The Stupid Zone extends across broad swatches of Colorado and the rest of the Mountain West, indeed even to the coastlines of this great republic.
From the Denver metro area, though, the quickest route
to the Stupid Zone involves driving southwest. I can't
give you directions to the expensive houses built on an
unstable hillside
Stupid Zone, since I can't find that
clipping in my Stupid Zone of stuff that I might need
someday.
But I can direct you to a disaster waiting to
happen
Stupid Zone, not far from the Buffalo Creek
Stupid Zone, where residents have filed suit in federal
court. They charge that students from a Jefferson County
charter school, out on a school-sponsored camping trip,
left a campfire before it was totally out -- perhaps
because they were ingesting uncontrollable substances.
Head toward Fairplay on U.S. 285. Just after you leave Jefferson County and enter Park County, observe the Will o' the Wisp development on your left.
Note the towering ponderosa -- whose limbs overhang combustible redwood decks and nearly poke into second-story windows. Now consider what might happen after a dry spell, certainly no novelty in these parts, followed by a lightning strike to some tree, and then some strong wind.
Millions of dollars in damage, for starters, with some families losing all their possessions, and perhaps injury and death of residents and firefighters.
And the survivors wouldn't have any supposedly drug-addled kids or tolerant teachers to sue. They'd have to contrive some new responsible party -- perhaps a hiker who walked past the tree that caught the lightning bolt and didn't immediately chop down this hazard.
The Buffalo Creek lawsuit comes from people who built houses in the woods -- forests that have burned at least once a century since the Pleistocene epoch. Fire suppression means that fuels accumulate, so that the fires that do catch burn bigger and hotter, resulting in more total combustion, which removes ground cover that might soak up rain, which means faster run-off and flash flooding.
Kids learn this stuff in school, so it's not exactly classified information. And if no kids had been around to blame, the Buffalo Creek fire would have happened sooner or later anyway.
All the conditions were present for a roaring fire and an ensuing flash flood. The spark might have come from a dragging safety chain on a trailer, or lightning, an old pickup backfiring, or a dozen other places. That fire didn't need arson.
Suppose you bought a lot and observed it had a barrel of nitroglycerine on it. And you went ahead and built your house next to it. And eventually a heavy truck drove by, making the ground tremble, and the ensuing explosion demolishes your house. So you sue the truck driver?
In case there's any doubt that the Buffalo Creek lawsuit
emanates from a Stupid Zone, note that the lawyers claim
that a male and female student slept together on this
school outing, and that the smoking, drug use, foul
language and irregular sexual conduct was part of the
context which included disregard for fire safety.
Over the years, I've talked to quite a few people who have worked on forest-fire-fighting crews -- that is, the very people who must be quite serious about outdoor fire safety. And their accounts of Smokey Bear service often include smoking, drug use, foul language and sexual conduct of all known varieties, both regular and irregular.
I fail to see any connection whatsoever, but then again, I'm not a Stupid Zone lawyer trying to blame somebody else for my clients' willful folly.
As I have argued before, each county in Colorado should declare its Stupid Zones -- flood plains, unstable soil, wildlife corridors, flash-point forests, avalanche runs, etc. The designation would be part of the deed. Property owners could build whatever they damn well pleased in these Stupid Zones, but the public would not be obliged to rescue them, control bears and mountain lions that attack them, or even provide courts for their litigation.
This would save tax money, now extracted from poor Wal-Mart shoppers to provide services for the folks with trophy houses on multi-acre plots adjoining public land. And it would totally respect private property rights -- do whatever you want with your land, but you bear full responsibility for the consequences, which were made known to you when you bought the parcel.
Anybody up for circulating some petitions to put the Stupid Zone on the ballot this fall? Or is it just too much fun to read about these lawsuits from the Stupid Zone?
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