1. For a bill this drastic, I can’t believe how petty and smallminded it is. I mean, if you’re going to write a federal bill that supercedes state water rights law for the first time, nullifies two previous well-established Congressional laws, breaks open settled litigation, and invites all hell to break loose, why would you waste your time on serving such a small set of masters? He does all this just for the monetary interests of powerful West Side ag. That’s so banal. Believe you me, the day I get to completely supercede state water rights law, nullify a couple Congressional laws, re-open settled litigation and invite all hell to break loose, it’ll be for some giant-ass principle, or to make history, or something supercool. Not so that rich people in the San Joaquin Valley can stay rich.

2. Bird’s gotta fly; stallion’s gotta run; Nunes has to say crazy insulting shit. That’s fine. He is who he is. Mostly I can let it slide or laugh at it. But occasionally, he still catches me offguard with something. This bit? Pissed me off.

Rep. Devin Nunes, author of H.R. 1873,  jumped on board, too.

“The communities on the west side of San Joaquin County, I guess perhaps they don’t matter to the minority (Democrats),” he said. “Because evidently, by opposing this bill, you’re basically guaranteeing that the city of Tracy and those water districts where those jobs are created are going to be cut off from their water this year.”

Alex Breitler did a nice bit of fact checking, and showed that it wasn’t accurate about the city of Tracy. But I’m infuriated by Nunes’s statement that the minority communities on the west side of San Joaquin County don’t matter to Democrats. Let us be real clear about what Nunes’s interest in getting water to the west side means. It does not mean getting clean and safe drinking water into farmworker communities in the Valley as so many of those towns desperately need. No. Nunes means that he wants to get agricultural water supplies to the largest farms in California, farms comprising tens of thousands of acres, so that as a byproduct of their raising crops, they can offer menial farm labor to the permanently impoverished communities on the west side. Perhaps that is better than not offering menial farm labor to the permanently impoverished communities on the west side, but it is trickle-down concern at best.

Real concern about “water” for poor communities in the Valley would be about getting those communities affordable clean drinking water. And hey, look who is working on that! Fran Pavley and a bunch of enviros. Hey, another enviro. A Democrat from Fresno. A Democratic governor.

I mostly watch the water politicking and laugh. I mostly watch Devin Nunes and laugh even harder. But the thing that made me the angriest in all the drought propaganda was West Side agriculture suddenly pretending to care about the only sympathetic group of people in their counties, and hiding behind the plight of communities that they have exploited for generations. Fuck that, and fuck Nunes’s insulting bullshit about who “cares” about farmworker communities in the Valley. If Nunes wants to show he cares, he could get some towns in his own damn district some clean, safe drinking water.

You guys know that I’m in favor of the Peripheral Canal, because I don’t think there’s hope for the Delta to be both a functioning ecosystem and an important drinking water conveyance system. I want those functions separated. So I trot around to the blogs and say things like, ‘but it doesn’t have to be a “water grab.” It could be for reliability without being for pumping more water. Reliability for urban drinking water for 25 million people is really fucking valuable.’ Then opponents laugh at me and say, ‘of course it isn’t for reliability. Of course it is for pumping additional water.’. After today, I have to admit, yep. They’re right. The Preferred Alternative is the big tunnel, and it proposes to export more water than Delta has been able to support since its fisheries collapsed. The Peripheral Canal in these documents is, in fact, a bid to get more new water south of the Delta.

So that makes me cynical. Here’s what makes me not-cynical. We totally knew all this was true in the Schwarzenegger administration. The game was rigged then, like we knew. It is, however, the only game going on this scale. The Brown administration has been forced to play it, as has everyone. What else can they do, start from scratch? The new administration swears they are all transparent now, and the process is all open to new voices and stuff. After today, at least, it is way more transparent. It is a transparent bid for more water through giant tunnels. They have finally declared themselves. Now we can see whether the “open” part is also true. I don’t know what goes on in high level executive stuff. But I have somewhat more hope that the Brown administration would consider different Peripheral Canal options than they were handed from the last administration.

Which leads me to my other thought on the new information on the Peripheral Canal. The documents today released cost estimates, and Dr. Michael broke that down into $/af for us, which is what I need.

That comes out to between $3600 and $730 per acre foot of new supply - not counting operations costs – just to get the new water to the Tracy pumps.  Add a few hundred dollars more for operating costs and pumping to Los Angeles.

Y’all, this is not ag water. There are almost no crops that can return a profit on $1000/af water. Avocados. Strawberries. Maybe weed, before it is legalized and everyone can grow it. Paying for this water would bankrupt the West Side. They are beginning to realize this, which is why they are looking for other ways to secure their water supply. (If I were on the East Side of the SJV, I would start getting nervous, because they are some relentless motherfuckers.) This is, however, still cheaper than de-sal. This may yet be worth it to urban SoCal, especially a SoCal that sees water levels in Lake Mead falling and is in litigation over allocating water to dust control in the Owens Valley. In a catastrophic failure of the Delta levees, it would totally be worth it.

I am still a proponent of a PC, so I am glad to have this all out in the public. People can push back against taking more water from an unstable Delta ecosystem. We can figure out who wants this water at this price. We can figure out if there are cheaper Peripheral Canal options that still protect SoCal’s water reliability. This is all progress, which has me back to being mildly optimistic again.

• If this year is as dry as it looks to be, the obvious question is whether we are in year 5 of a long drought (with a sporadic wet year).  Won’t find that out for a long time.
• Drought is a very strange emergency, since it comes on so slow, without an origin event.  Emergency managers get flummoxed by it.
• So far, the drought hasn’t been a severe one.  It was certainly not severe enough to provoke responses beyond “preserve the status quo!”.   It was forgotten in one wet season.  It was not so severe that the State thinks it needs to do anything to prepare for/avoid a repetition of the last drought.
• It is very hard to know what to DO about a drought, especially for a State that considers itself broke and wants to decentralize power.
• There are things a rich state could do about drought.  A rich state that prioritizes ag could simply give farmers or ranchers money instead of water for a year, so that they still exist as farmers when the drought goes away.  Money is a decent substitute for water, if what you’re after is agricultural resiliency.  Money could be used to subsidize Lifeline rates, so that urban water and energy users don’t feel drought-related cost increases as much.  You could use money to buffer a drought, if you had the foresight to sock it away in advance (during the wet years, as it were).
• There are things a strong state could do about drought.  A strong state could demand effective Drought Plans from every district in the state, plans that actually spell out who gets water during droughts and who gets cut back first.  A strong state could combat demand hardening, by saying that 800,000 acres of almonds and 540,000 acres of vines is (more than) enough already.  I understand the argument that trees have to get water at the expense of row crops because trees are a decades-long investment.  I don’t understand why growers can unilaterally decide to grow a crop that will commit a chunk of water for the life of their trees given that water rights do have cutback provisos for drought.  A strong state could make the Model Landscape Ordinance retrospective, not just applying to new urban landscapes.  A strong state could do a lot more to make policy decisions about drought, but I haven’t seen any willingness to go that far.
• The alternative to making State decisions about how to use water during drought is to use a mostly unspoken “let The Market sort it out” default.  Well, if a grower planted almonds where there isn’t water for them, the trees will die and he’ll go broke and in the aggregate of these failures, the problem will sort itself out.  That is a way to do things, but it is a pretty brutal one.  If it is too brutal for public opinion, the State will be forced to step in and save individuals anyway.
• It is hard for me to see how droughts hurt cities, so long as cities get enough water for direct personal use.  Higher energy costs as hydro-electric power gets scarcer.  Damage to landscapes.  But then, what?  If people don’t get to wash their cars, they’ll still have cars that do all the things that cars did.  Higher water rates take money out of local circulation, although that money doesn’t leave the state economy.   My thinking on this isn’t clear.
• The usual drought response is “Drought?! My God! Pour water on it!” Find water from somewhere and put it on that drought! If the Brown administration does this too, I’ll be disappointed. I’d rather people were looking at what is substitutible for water, and what societal structures are overextended during drought.
• The folks hit hardest by drought were not the political noisemakers last time.  Ranchers feel droughts first, as their pastures falter and they have to buy alfalfa feed.  (Which should also tell you that alfalfa growers make out like bandits during droughts and you shouldn’t believe that ag is a monolith that feels drought pain evenly.)  Sadly, ranchers that lose their herds during droughts also commit suicide disproportionately.  Any serious drought response should include mental health counseling for ranchers and farmers.

If you have other conceptual understandings of drought, please put them in the comments.  But please don’t repeat political talking points.  We’ve all heard those.

1. Deception isn’t going to “fell” Dr. Gleick.  The dude has a track record of decades.  Pearl-clutchers are going to clutch their pearls for another week, and within a month or two, Dr. Gleick is going to get invited to conferences again for the same reasons he always was.  He knows the data, makes his point(s) clearly and is a good speaker.

2. This level of “deception” shouldn’t fell Dr. Gleick even if it could.   This was a situation in which there were two morally impure effective outcomes, and a morally pure ineffective outcome. 

a. Morally impure effective outcome #1.  Gleick does nothing; the Heartland Institute continues to deny climate change, damaging what we recognize as a comfortable world.  Billions of people in the Third World suffer more than they otherwise would.
b. Morally impure effective outcome #2.  Gleick uses subterfuge.  Heartland Institute is discredited, maybe can do less damage from here on out.
c. Morally pure, ineffective outcome.  Gleick tries to get more out of the Heartland Institute in an above-the-board fashion.  Nothing happens, except that the Heartland Institute now has the knowledge to hide the fact that they’re bought and sold denialists.

Of those options, Dr. Gleick chose the one that causes the least damage, which is the right thing to do.  The folks who whine on and on about being perfectly morally pure aren’t acknowledging that there are moral costs on the other side of the balance.  Sometimes all you can do is choose the least bad option.

3. “Water leadership” doesn’t depend on Dr. Gleick’s presence.  Outside the field, people are super impressed with him.  If I had to choose only one message to get out to laypeople, it would be Dr. Gleick’s, because it sets an enviro standard.  But inside the field, he is one good thinker among a half dozen, and he’s lost a fair amount of credibility with people who simply cannot agree with the Pacific Institute’s claims that there is substantial wet water to be gained from agricultural water conservation.  Lots of people agree there are very good reasons to manage ag water very closely, and many of them think that getting big yields of transferrable water is not one of those reasons.  I don’t think Dr. Gleick should be discredited over the Heartland emails anyway, but if he were, it wouldn’t create a leadership void in the field.

After saying all this, which I could summarize by saying that I’ve got the same respect for Dr. Gleick that I always did, I cannot resist needling him some.  He’s disapproved of my pseudonymity for years, but perhaps this has given him a new appreciation for separating your work from your identity.  The reason I have the same respect for him that I always have is that he does damn good work.  He does everything I want to see:  collects and shows data, shows his derivations, shows how he arrives at conclusions.  I have every reason to think that the next report they put out will be exactly the same, since he’s been doing that for thirty years now.  When I read that report, I’ll do what I always do, which is to look at all those, and either agree or be able to point to where we diverge.  It won’t matter to me that it now comes from Big Fat Liar Gleick or that it used to come from Sainted Holy Gleick.  Fuck that noise.  None of it should change how I read his reports.  If it did before, that was always laziness and taking the shortcut of going by reputation. Which is a big part of why I blog under a pseudonym.   I could be an extraordinarily debonair type with a wall full of illustrious degrees.  More likely, I am a debauched lout who blogs from a bar covered in the remnants of my most recent meal.  But you don’t know.  You will have to read my work to evaluate it.  Which is what I want you to do.  And how I hope you’ll evaluate Dr. Gleick’s stuff from now on.  And how you always should have.

Big ag in the Valley doesn’t want a Peripheral Canal anymore?! I see two interpretations. First, they realize they can’t farm with water expensive enough to pay back the costs of building a Peripheral Canal. They won’t get enough new water to spread those costs over, and the reliability aspect of a new Peripheral Canal isn’t worth the money to them. (Maybe they’ve come to this conclusion based on early access to whatever BDCP has produced, I don’t know.) AND, they’re willing to accept a different form of reliability.

My interpretation is that big ag in the Valley is willing to accept a re-write of water rights law giving them priority in lieu of a canal. They don’t need expensive new cement if they can get the feds and the courts to make sure they get the first portion of our variable supply. Maybe they’re willing to trust that because Westlands has been diligent about staffing the district with very politically connected folks from the Bush Administration and because their GM is an extremely litigious lawyer.

It makes for an interesting contrast to the widespread “plumbing is destiny” belief in the Delta and Northern California. Canal opponents in the Delta and NoCal simply do not believe that a Peripheral Canal won’t be used to “take more water”. If the big canal is built, it will get filled, and no governance structures (Delta flow requirements, a Delta Plan, state laws, agreements, DWR’s solemn promise) will stop LA and Big Ag from using every cfs of canal capacity at the Delta’s expense. I personally don’t share this view, but I understand that it is compelling.

I’m just guessing, and like I say, Nunes is too erratic to be a good predictor of much. But I’m intrigued by this possibility that big Valley ag isn’t interested in a Peripheral Canal anymore (even if they’re still looking for substitutes, like shameless governance structures that favor them). If they drop out, the purposes of a Peripheral Canal (insure a reliable urban supply to the South, separate water conveyance from Delta habitat requirements) become much purer and we can decide how we value those.

Dr. Lund’s list of curiosities about water management is interesting. I’ve wondered about the State and Fed’s role diminishing, especially as the legislature and the agencies explicitly set their water management approach as ‘supporting integrated regional water management’. I worry about that some, since I believe that local governments generally don’t have the luxury to do anything more than work in their immediate self-interest and compete with their neighbors for “growth” and its accompanying new tax revenue, which will always require additional water sources. By the way, I read Robert Self’s book American Babylon: race and the struggle for postwar Oakland over my vacation in a tropical paradise. It was a fantastic discussion of the California promise to keep taxes low by continuously shifting the collective burden onto new growth. A little dry, but you should totally read it (it also mentioned race and stuff). Anyway, if “the locals” are going to be making most water management decisions in the future, I would still want the state to set regulatory boundaries that prevent both a race to the bottom between neighboring jurisdictions and perpetually relying on growth to fund government.

To my mind, the most politically important of his points on water management was the paragraph on how people immediately work to optimize whatever system exists, and capture the benefits from it. Which is sorta great, butcept that no matter how sucky a system is overall, there will be groups that really genuinely depend on some aspect of it staying exactly the same. “We bought this house in a floodplain and now you have to fix that levee forever.” They aren’t wrong; they have a legit reliance interest. But there would be people with a legit reliance interest no matter what the system is, because people love to optimize. So the existence of a section of society that genuinely needs things to stay as they are can’t be the only reason that a new policy gets blocked.

***

I didn’t agree with Pia Lopez’s reasoning on the Peripheral Canal, but I thought she hit one of the most important issues squarely.

You can bet on this: Southern California water users are not going to spend billions on a peripheral canal if it only gives them the amount of water they’re already getting. They want to maximize water exports south of the Delta. More water, not just “reliable” water.

This is a tricky point. I think two contradictory things. First, I believe that water policy elites do understand they’d be paying billions for reliability and not additional water. The savvy lobbyists for the Peripheral Canal get this; they aren’t being personal hypocrites as they make their case for the Peripheral Canal and BDCP. Second, I have no idea whether they can sell that concept to their ratepayers. Ratepayers don’t even seem to like paying for local O&M, preferring instead to let their systems fall into disrepair and deferred maintenance. Can they really get behind paying lots more so that their supply is at much less risk from earthquake and sea level rise? I don’t know.

Which brings me to another point. To my mind, the thing that could convince SoCal users to pay billions for reliability is to calculate the costs of a disruption. Which would be a great piece of a full cost-benefit analysis of a Peripheral Canal. Which might also reveal that while SoCal cities might be talked into paying more for the water they get now, the costs of a Peripheral Canal could price water out of agriculture’s range. All of these things would be interesting! As far as I understand his argument, Dr. Michael thinks a full cost-benefit analysis of the Peripheral Canal would reveal that it wouldn’t be worth it to the water recipients. My own guess is that it would, but I don’t know that. So I’m joining him in saying that one should be done.

***
Governor Brown’s State of the State sounds to me like a clear signal that he intends to back a Peripheral Canal. Since I’m in favor of someone making an arbitrary decision on that, I’m not especially sympathetic to the local politicians saying that he is ramming things through without enough study. But I do wonder that all the coded political reactions came out today. Honestly, what did people think it meant that the Governor’s budget includes 135 new positions for DWR to complete “preliminary engineering work” for BDCP. Whatever could all that staff be needed for?

(No, I didn’t think that hiring on with Westlands showed that he’d been biased all along. They have a long history of buying political clout and talent; I’m not surprised they bid on Wanger. Looked to me like he followed legal ethics. I think his own writing showed he’d become biased, presumably from living in a pro-ag milieu during a very politicized few years, but a lawyer working for the highest bidder doesn’t mean to me that he had always sided with Westlands.)

***

I already regret wading into this one more time. I especially regret it because I read the Pacific Institute’s Water International article and thought that Point 1 (that non-productive consumptive use doesn’t get enough attention, although eliminating non-productive consumptive use is pretty much the whole point of drip and sub-surface drip irrigation) was very good. But I thought the gist of Point 3 was pretty unfair (to agricultural water experts). Every serious ag water conservation person I talked to said “We don’t believe there’s anything like the water yield the Pacific Institute proposes, but we believe in ag water conservation because of all the other benefits: energy savings, improved crop yields, decreased entrainment, water quality.” In fact, the fact that most ag water conservation folk didn’t accept the Pacific Institute’s water yield estimates means that they were believers in ag water efficiency for those other reasons.

Mostly, though, it galls to have the Pacific Institute tell us to get past our out-moded emphasis on new water.

But “new” water is not, and should not be, the only measure for evaluating efficiency programs.

DUDE. “New” water was the way the Pacific Institute made their report glamorous. Millions of free acre-feet of new water, that agriculture wouldn’t miss. Now, those are a few years old now, and the controversy over that report may have led them to revise their thinking. But even at the time, I was all, wow, that’s unusual that they’re willing to proclaim about new water. No one does that. So I would just like to say that a vague collection of experienced ag water professionals weren’t the ones bringing up new water from ag water use efficiency, nor are we the people who need to get over it. Now, laypeople whose thoughts on water are entirely shaped by Cadillac Desert could stand to revise that emphasis, so I hope they all read Dr. Glieck’s post in the Chron.

Finally, I do want to say that this whole Pacific Institute v. others feud (to the extent it exists) is dumb. I thought their initial report was overbroad. They suffered some unprofessional attacks, and I suspect (without knowing first hand) that they’ve dug in and attributed the unprofessional attacks to ideology, when actually people without the same ideology could have the same (and different) concerns about the Pacific Institute’s first report. Now I’d say the various sides are moving much closer to each other, which was always the position that there are very good reasons to make ag water efficient, and “new water that could make its way to urban uses” isn’t one of them. From the little I’ve observed, I think the whole thing was hard on a number of people and I wish that weren’t the case. I should do my part by shutting up about it.

***

I don’t know what to make of this UC ANR study on “community conversations” in the Delta. On the one hand, I’d agree with a lot of it. On the other hand, so fucking what? My main objection is: even if every word in that report were true as gospel, what could “policymakers” do differently at this point?

People in the Delta feel that they haven’t been “heard” in the political processes around the Peripheral Canal. Dude. They’ve been heard. Their policy preferences are fully understood. They don’t want a Peripheral Canal; they think will divert freshwater that they 1. want to use themselves for agriculture and will 2. change the current freshwater patterns of the Delta. They are afraid their own land may be condemned to become part of the path of the canal, or converted to marsh as part of habitat restoration. The counties are afraid of losing tax revenues. They don’t believe their levees are at great risk of flood nor earthquake, or at least not as much risk as the state says they are. They are afraid their communities will be chipped away, if not entirely displaced. They are afraid of losing their way of life. They think the Peripheral Canal will be an expensive debacle to move water to uses they judge as immoral (houses in the desert or agriculture on selenium-poisoned lands.) Dude. We know. We HEAR them.

But here’s the thing. When advocates say “We aren’t being heard.” what they mean is “we aren’t getting our way politically (because if they could hear the arguments that are emotionally powerful to us, that would necessarily convince them to take our position).” But losing this political fight may continue to be true for Delta residents. Even if every bad prediction that Delta advocates make comes true to its fullest extent, it may still be worth building a Peripheral Canal, for water reliability south of the Delta. (Not a new water grab, but insurance against catastrophic failure of the levee system and disentanglement from the Delta ecosystem.) Advocates don’t want to be “heard” in the abstract. When they say “heard” they mean “given more influence or a veto”. But the Delta, as one (relatively small) player among many other players only has so much. How much influence could be a good conversation*, but then I would like that to be the explicit topic of discussion.

It is possible that a different presenting/facilitation/public engagement style would make Delta residents feel more “heard”. But I also don’t think they’re going to be fooled. This debate, over where the next century’s water should be allocated has genuine winners and losers. I think the losers can tell that their lifestyle is at stake. They may well feel that a different political process genuinely engages them. But even if they knew deep in their souls that every word of theirs struck home and it deeply pained every single member of the Delta Stewardship Council to call for a Peripheral Canal, they would still notice if their property were condemned to make way for a canal. Even if they’re the most “heard” people in the world, that won’t make it any easier for them if the state’s collective needs outweigh theirs.

Finally, I am fully aware that a lot of state meetings suck, and we could do a whole lot to get better at them. But I don’t think “having different kinds of conversations” is going to cure the level of political anger in the Delta. For the one, they have a whole lot at stake and their potential losses will be the same no matter how the matter is negotiated. But more, the State has a lot of ugly backstory and they would be right to approach any new type of meeting structure with suspicion. I do believe they were playing a rigged game during the Schwarzenegger administration. I do believe that people with a lot of political clout were spending a lot on BDCP and drought propaganda to force a Peripheral Canal through. I believe their representatives were shut out of water bond/water bill negotiations. They know they were getting screwed for years. The trust is lost (although maybe the Delta Stewardship Council as a new and transparent entity still has some) and any new process would be rightfully looked on with suspicion. So I don’t know what the state policymakers can do NOW to fix the conversation.

So I didn’t get much from the UC ANR report. Sure, our process is pretty bad. But the problems go way deeper. Honestly, the only new process I hope for these days is an arbitrary, unilateral decision by someone with the authority to force it through.

*i.e.: as the locals, it should be absolute. Or, as a few hundred thousand people among 39 million, it should be proportional to their numbers.

“One state, one water!”

…It’s the latest DWR propaganda to get us to believe that Northern California water also belongs to Southern California.”

I interpret Mr. Wilson to be asserting the opposite: that the concept “one state, one water” is self-evidently wrong. I believe his alternate view is that areas of origin have strong claims on water, and that the regions to which we’ve shipped water for decades have no good claim. This belief should be hard to adopt for a Delta partisan; they are not themselves the area of origin of any water, and we’ve recently seen the foothill counties start to get more possessive about water that would eventually run to or through the Delta. It is also possible that Mr. Wilson is more tribally oriented than watershed oriented; there’s a lot of Northern California disdain for Southern California. Perhaps he associates the Delta with Northern California (although I understand that the good citizens of Jefferson don’t ) and by that alignment, doesn’t care what happens to the people of Southern California. The op-ed doesn’t give me enough to figure out precisely which angle he is taking, but I’ll argue against either.

The view that the state isn’t a collective that pools its resources, or at least that a region that has it good in some regard shouldn’t have to share, is nasty, small-minded parochialism shortsighted. Completely aside from the practicality of unilaterally shutting off a good chunk of the water that 25 million people depend on, I wonder how the people of the Delta would feel if the same concept were applied to different collective resources of the State. The Delta doesn’t generate any of the following, and is completely dependent on any of the following state resources:
A market for their agricultural products (39 million eaters for tasty Delta pears).
A system of higher education.
Road or freight transportation out of the region for their crops.
Ports for ocean access for their crops.
Tourists.
Emergency response capacity (they have some of this, but not enough in a flood)

These things aren’t as tangible as water, but they are entirely parallel – a resource provided by some parts of California (even evil Southern California!) that isn’t locally generated in the Delta. It is exactly as stupid to say “propaganda to get us to believe that Northern California water also belongs to Southern California” as it is to say “propaganda to get us to believe that Southern California food markets should also be open to Northern California farmers.”

We live in one political entity. Regions taking an “I got mine” and “Devil take the hindmost” attitude is going to break us. Not in the way they might enjoy thinking of, as in, we peacefully dissolve into separate regions. But “break us” as in fuel enough political delay that foreseeable bad things happen before political processes can prevent them. Tribe-based squabbling (and north versus south is only one angle; there are other possible alignments, like mountain counties getting possessive about additional water.) could well hold up the Delta Plan past the day when a big flood knocks out a bunch of islands. On that day, Southern California may find that depending on complex plumbing four hundred miles away isn’t a good strategy for Southern California. But Burt Wilson and the Delta will find out far more acutely that their own counties cannot provide all the emergency evacuation, food and shelter they will need. That day, they’ll believe in a collective State and using resources that come from elsewhere.