Mailbag: Could Laguna Beach be the next Lahaina?

The Jan. 4 issue of the Washington Post has a valuable article quoting Los Angeles City Councilwoman from Pacific Palisades Traci Park:

“About six years ago, she said an evacuation drill was held with the Los Angeles Fire Department in Mandeville Canyon, which has now got fires burning around it.

“‘What that revealed was people were not prepared. It was just on one road and they spotted all kinds of issues,’ she said. ‘So people in the Palisades have been asking, can we do one too? We only have three ways out of here. We ought to practice on all of them.’ But officials have not held such a drill, she said. ‘We also know where the choke points are when people are trying to evacuate because it happens every time. So another thing our residents have been asking for is a more managed evacuation plan,’ Park said.”

“A known bottleneck was on Palisades Drive, where cars were abandoned this week as people fled the Highlands neighborhood and bulldozers had to clear them so fire trucks could battle the blaze.”

Far more than the Palisades, Laguna Beach has extreme limits on escape routes: Coast Highway and Laguna Canyon Road. There are no alternate routes. It has steep canyons, narrow roads, a lot of on-street parking and much dry brush. The fire department estimates that full evacuation would take at least four hours — or eight if one of the routes is blocked. I wonder if this would be on a summer day when some of our 6 million annual visitors are in town?

In Lahaina, Hawaii, people died in their cars as the fire overwhelmed the one road leading to the two ways into and out of town. See the “Frontline” documentary, which is available without cost on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoLHExBL5qU.

Iʻve just learned that in 2023, wildfire evacuation drills were slated to take place in Laguna Beach, but for unknown reasons they never happened.

Evacuation drills — Laguna needs to do them now so that we know we have a plan that works.

Kiku Terasaki
Laguna Beach

Library fate should go to voters

As a longtime Huntington Beach resident and constant patron and supporter of the city’s public library, I applaud Lindsay Klick’s letter in the Jan. 19 Daily Pilot Mailbag. As a parent and grandparent, I do want a “seasoned librarian selecting a broad range of materials” to keep our library collection fresh and wide-ranging for library patrons of all ages to expand everyone’s understanding of our world and its many personalities and preferences.

By contrast, the Huntington Beach City Council insists that professional librarians are incapable of managing libraries and their collections, that parents (and grandparents) cannot possibly make reasonable book choices for their children under the age of 12, and that teens under the age of 18 are not mature enough to choose their own reading materials.

Hence Ordinance 4318, which would give a commission of partisan and inexperienced non-librarians the opportunity to ban books from our library’s collection without the possibility of appeal. And the possibility that the H.B. library system could be taken over by a for-profit company instead of being operated by professional librarians devoted to public service.

In response, the H.B. community stood up and fought back with two wildly successful and legally legitimate signature-gathering efforts to defend the library. Will the City Council do the right thing and arrange an election soon for all Huntington Beach voters to choose or seek once again to pander to their extremist base and deny the electorate a voice in the operation of our beloved library system?

Diane Bentley
Huntington Beach

Immigration outside city remit

Re: “Huntington Beach City Council declares city nonsanctuary, friendly to Trump immigration policies,” Daily Pilot, Jan. 23: If the MAGA Seven were truly interested in making Huntington Beach a safer city they would not waste the city’s resources in actions outside their jurisdiction. Instead of reviewing the city’s preparations for the type of Santa Ana-fueled wildfires that have devastated Pacific Palisades and Altadena, they are dealing in resolutions that have no impact on our city. Immigration is within federal jurisdiction and not a local issue, and being a nonsanctuary city has nothing to do with local issues. Our law enforcement should be concerned with enforcing state penal codes and nothing else and should not be placed in harm’s way enforcing immigration laws. It’s time that the MAGA Seven realize their place in the scheme of jurisdictions.

Richard C. Armendariz
Huntington Beach