Grace Ross: How to Prevent Fires in Foreclosed Buildings
Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™
On top of this we’ve had a drought for a winter. Many times the notice on my phone from the National Weather Service is for “fire watch weather!" I said something about it to the woman that lives next door to me. She said what’s “fire weather”? It’s when it’s been dry for too long and windy. And it means it’s easier for fires to start and much more likely they will grow quickly and out control.
Fires Grow Quickly
The thing about fire (and I was taught this by my firefighter friends in Worcester) is that a fire in our wood buildings doubles in size every minute. An empty building where a fire is not likely to be seen until there is smoke into the street and someone’s looking in that direction is pretty much guaranteed to be a goner. In Lowell, the fire that started, started in a building that was supposed to be empty. Two buildings on either side of it caught fire fast and went up as well before the fire could be put out. The six alarms brought firefighters from five surrounding communities.
Firefighters – part of our safety personnel that we all pay for with our taxes – get stuck in these bad situations when there aren’t enough firefighters and there are too many fires. They have to try to decide whether it’s safe to go into a building or not, whether there might be someone needing to be rescued or even a pet needing to be gotten out. If they don’t know, they don’t know whether to go in. With positions cut because of municipal budget cuts in recent years, they may arrive later than they would have in years passed and they have to assess, based on how far along the fire is, how dangerous it is to go in there.
It’s why it’s always made me angry when I listen to budget cuts and the discussion is around cutting fire stations or fire trucks. Somebody will say “it will only be two or three minutes longer to get to a fire on the outer skirts of the area so what difference does it make?” Two or three minutes can make the difference between a fire that’s two or three times larger than it was.
Some of this issue of fires can be seen as individual problems.
Unfortunately, it’s not an individual problem when budget cuts leave fires to burn longer and become more dangerous. Nor when lack of legislative action on foreclosures allows for a huge increase in vacant homes due to eviction of people who can afford to rent post-foreclosure. In Massachusetts between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of vacant homes (not summer cottages but actual dwelling places) went up by 72.2%! The tenth highest increase in vacant homes of any state in the country. That’s a huge increase in vacancies and the vast majority of these are preventable.
Those vacancies combined with cuts in firefighters, fire weather – all increasing problems unless present policies are reversed – means real danger to all of us. It means danger to the remaining forests in our state, (Massachusetts was pretty much all forest before so many human beings settled here). Our entire ecology depends on those trees. Or this endangers the safety of cities and towns where we live and where a building next door might go up in flames and actually be consumed because it was empty and no one discovered the fire when it was just starting.
Call to Action
What I’m most struck by in these stories, however, is the lack of civic engagement. Where are real political leaders? I have an image in my head of what real political leaders do in a situation where the danger is spread through out the community, unpredictable, metamorphosis. Real political leaders, even real religious leaders, community leaders, would be bringing people together. Political leaders would be bringing together civil leaders from all walks in a press conference in front of these buildings or brush fires. They would be talking about what we need to do going into a summer and a fall when fire may be much more prevalent and we have too many empty buildings.
Instead, these days, political leaders do not treat the people in their community as if they’re resources; we are treated as problems or as voters that they just need to placate or champion an issue for so that people will vote for them.
There are things that can be done. Just like kids in school do fire drills and learn about fire prevention, we as communities need to be thinking about what could we do. Yeah, we’re not trained professionals to go into a fire unless someone’s crying for us and we’re crazy enough to try to do it, but there are plenty of other things we could do. People used to know to do bucket brigades. People used to think of things like hosing down the buildings and trees surrounding a burning building even if it’s not safe for us to go into the fire itself.
Imagine civil leaders calling us as communities to come together, to see each other as a human resource to each other in a dangerous time and begin to rebuild the bond of real community where people are mutually interdependent. Imagine our leaders understanding that there is a civic role, an ethical role, a human role for each other in creating safety in times of trouble. This could spread to all aspects of our lives – coming together to address burgeoning hunger, protecting our green spaces, reversing increased poverty, ill-health and obstructing unjust evictions.
If this is not an overall time of trouble – and I’m not just talking about the fires now – I don’t know what is. Now the question is: where are the real political leaders and community leaders who understand that this is an opportunity to bring us together? That there is a kind of leadership that reaches for our deepest and best humanity? And that together we can solve our common problems?
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