federal government could do for California, I learned quickly that if I raised only one issue at a time, I would get a fair hearing. It wasn’t surprising that I had a warmer relationship with his father. With George H. W. Bush, I was more of an admiring protege, soaking up everything I could learn. George W. and I were almost exactly the same age, and we both had to represent interests that were sometimes at odds.
But when the fires raged, President Bush was incredibly impressive. He’d learned lessons about emergency responsiveness the hard way during Katrina, and he asked the kinds of questions that only someone who’d been through a disaster would know to ask. He understood that the federal government might not initially move quickly enough, out of a natural need to save responders for other emergencies throughout the country. President Bush told me that his chief of staff would get us everything we needed and that I should call him, the president, directly if there was anything I wanted him to know. I was skeptical, so I called him back forty-five minutes later to ask a question, and he picked up the phone again.
Within three days, President Bush was on the scene. He shook hands with firefighters, visited homes, held press conferences, and peppered me and the fire chiefs with questions. He showed real leadership.
My own chief of staff, meanwhile, reported that the National Guard was on its way. Susan was staying in Sacramento to coordinate the governor’s office response with Dan Dunmoyer, the cabinet secretary, and I’d directed her to have one thousand National Guard troops pulled off a border-security operation and sent to Qualcomm Stadium. She called the adjutant general to say we needed the troops. The guy had obviously never encountered Susan in commando mode before, and he made the mistake of insisting on paperwork. “Okay,” he told her. “We need a mission order.”
“The mission order is to get one thousand men off the border and get them to Qualcomm stat,” she repeated.
“But I need a mission order. It has to say—”
Then she turned to the cots that people would obviously need that night. Thousands of cots, pillows, and blankets had been stockpiled in the region for emergencies. “They’re on their way,” officials kept saying. But she and Dan kept calling and discovered the supplies hadn’t arrived.
“That’s not good enough,” she said, “We need to
Moves like these are not in any disaster response manuals. I saw what happened during Katrina when officials at every level waited for someone else to take action—because that’s what the manuals say you’re supposed to do. “Every disaster is local,” the experts told me. State officials are supposed to wait until local officials ask for assistance; federal officials wait until state officials ask for help, and so on. “Bullshit,” I said. “That’s how thousands of people were left stranded on rooftops in New Orleans. That is
Once my team was assembled, we headed for San Diego. We could see the gray haze from the fires over one hundred miles away as soon as the plane took off. That afternoon, I would fly in a helicopter to visit the fire bases and see the blazes firsthand. But communicating with the public was the first concern. I met Mayor Sanders and other local leaders outside Qualcomm, and we went around as a team: first, walking through the hallways and the parking lot to greet the evacuees, emergency workers, and volunteers streaming in, and then talking to the media.
Fortunately, I’d been well prepared on how to communicate during a fire emergency by my predecessor. During the transition period, Gray Davis had graciously contacted me in the midst of a significant but much smaller fire. He asked if I wanted to accompany him while he met firefighters, visited homes, talked to families, and addressed the media. I saw how he absorbed a briefing, and the way he thanked firefighters for their service, while trying not to distract them from their mission. He even served them breakfast as they were coming off the night shift. He would go from home to home, comforting victims, asking them if there was anything the state needed to do. He was a source of strength.
That time we spent together smoothed the transition and proved that we could work together, even though we had battled during the campaign. More importantly, Gray showed me how a governor takes action rather than just phoning in from Sacramento.
In San Diego we started holding regular press conferences so that people would understand that there were no secrets. We spelled out everything step-by-step, saying things like, “We have sixty-mile-per-hour winds, and the flames can jump a mile and a half at a time. But we are going to get this under control.” We sent a clear signal that federal, state, and local responders were all working together, but we were also quick to admit mistakes. Our rule was, “Never bullshit.” When cots got lost, we acknowledged it. It was great to have a guy with Bettenhausen’s experience and sense of humor on hand. He stayed glued by my side, keeping us in touch with the fire chiefs and commanders at the fires. Although the news often wasn’t good, their voices were never frantic, only disciplined and firm: “Governor, we have a major problem. We just lost fifty more homes. We’ve got three firefighters injured, and we’re repositioning our men. We’re evacuating this other area, and CHP and the sheriff are involved, to close off the roads and protect people’s homes …”
We kept open communications with the commanders and always asked what more they needed, and we used their information to give regular public updates.
We heard that the winds had shifted and that the residents of a nursing home in the fire’s path were being evacuated to a makeshift shelter at the Del Mar racetrack. Del Mar was set up as a shelter for horses, not people. It was already evening, but my instincts told me to see it for myself; that it could be a particularly dangerous situation for the elderly residents.
It was sunset by the time we arrived. Close to three hundred patients had been evacuated. I hated what we found there: old folks parked in wheelchairs with IV bags, propped up against walls, lying on mats on cold cement. A few people were crying, but most were silent and still. I felt like I was walking through a morgue. I put a blanket on one old fellow and folded up a jacket to use as a pillow under a lady’s head. None of these people had their medication; some needed kidney dialysis. A nurse-practitioner and Navy Reserve commander named Paul Russo had bravely taken charge of the scene and, with the help of fellow volunteers, was struggling to find hospital beds. It was clear we had to get help or some of the elderly people weren’t going to make it. Immediately, Daniel Zingale and I and a couple of others got on the phone and started calling ambulance companies and hospitals to move the sickest people right away. We stayed a few hours until we were sure progress was being made, and that night we came back twice to check on Paul and his volunteers and the patients who remained. By the next day, we were able to get the National Guard to set up a military field hospital nearby.
Fortunately, failures like the one at Del Mar were rare. The wildfires in San Diego burned for another three weeks, but those first few days set the tone for our disaster response. We evacuated more than a half million people, the largest evacuation in the history of the state. Nine people died and eighty-five, mostly firefighters, were injured. A half million acres burned, and the property damage was widespread, including more than 1,500 homes and hundreds of businesses, at an estimated cost of $2.5 billion. The statistics in the wake of a disaster are always tragic. But we avoided another Katrina, and I was satisfied that our emphasis on preparedness had paid off.
There was a much larger disaster brewing that would disrupt many more households and change many more lives than the wildfires. America was on the brink of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. In Sacramento, our first whiff of trouble came even before the fires, as we started developing a budget for 2008–09. In the spring, we saw effects of a serious slowdown in the state housing market, despite more optimistic economic forecasts nationwide and internationally.
The economists who consulted for the state were saying, “We’re facing some headwinds in housing, but the economy will pick up again in the next couple of years. The fundamentals are strong, and you can expect continuing healthy growth in 2009–10.” Yet only two months later, our monthly revenues from taxes began falling alarmingly short: $300 million below expectations in August, $400 million in November, $600 million in December. The prediction was that we would have a $6 billion shortfall in our budget by the time the next fiscal year began in July
