Who’s going to be the most impacted by climate change in Santa Barbara County?
I’ll give you one guess.
It’s not the people who own pieces of the pristine Hollister Ranch area—including filmmaker James Cameron and musician Jackson Browne—who like to keep their private portion of California’s coastline as inaccessible to the general public as possible.
And it’s not the happily Dutchified city of Solvang, which is going to start charging businesses in the downtown tourism district for hosting live music indoors or outdoors now that the city’s requiring conditional use permits for doing the thing that all restaurants and bars do to try to bring in a few extra customers.
No, it’s not ExxonMobil, which is gainfully taking a stab at attempting to truck liquid gold through the most environmentally sensitive county on the coast because it has no other way to restart its offshore oil platforms—and continue contributing carbons to the climate-change game.
OK, that’s three guesses. I give up on you! It’s … drumroll please … unemployed folks, senior citizens, children, impoverished households, mobile home residents, and those who live in overcrowded homes! Surprised?
Nope. Nope. Nope. Is it any wonder that the folks who society has failed to figure out how to keep from slipping through the cracks are also the most vulnerable to what comes with climate disasters?
“They are already having a tough time. They are probably less equipped, have fewer resources … . They do not have the ability to adapt or recover with climate impacts strike,” Long Range Planner Whitney Wilkinson told the Sun.
They can’t bounce back from something like a mudslide or major flooding event like people with money can. Just like they can’t bounce back from disruptive life events like health issues or a sudden loss of income. The demographics listed as the most vulnerable in the county’s Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment are also the most vulnerable in society, period.
It seems like it would behoove us to tackle issues simultaneously, since they are so connected. Hopefully, the county’s goals to work on homelessness—as outlined in its recent plans to tackle encampments and get folks into more permanent housing situations—will make progress before flash floods sweep through riverbeds in Santa Ynez, Lompoc, and Santa Maria.
Hopefully we can address climate vulnerabilities faster than the Santa Barbara County Fire Department has been able to get a regional fire dispatch center up and running to address some of its call response time issues. County fire’s biggest issue with the way things are currently run by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, which oversees dispatch for EMS, fire, and law enforcement, is an inability to dispatch the closest resource to the call.
Although the Sheriff’s Office believes it can be fixed with a new technology upgrade—that’s also what it’s said in the past. But now, after years of asking for it, the county Fire Department is headed toward a dispatch center for fire and EMS that can dispatch calls across city and county boundary lines, ensuring that the closest fire or medical resource is the one that gets sent to the emergency call.
I don’t understand why that isn’t already happening.
Just me?
The canary is always surprised. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 7, 2021.