Avoiding the costs of fighting forest fires
Re: “Prevention is best cure for forest fires,” July 17 editorial.
I agree wholeheartedly that prevention is the best course for fighting fires in national forests, where natural history has adequately demonstrated that fires occur regularly and are a normal part of a forest’s life cycle.
But how to prevent the huge costs of fighting fires is another question.
As a former insurance inspector, I have stood atop the wood shake roofs of luxurious homes perched on cliffs.
As a former newspaper reporter, I have reported on the firefighters’ complaints that their fire trucks cannot get up the winding mountain roads in some places.
We have all read the tragedy of the Storm King fire in which a number of young, dedicated servants of the public lost their lives in an attempt to protect homes built in the wrong place.
Prevention should include: no insurance coverage for homes built in forest areas where fires have occurred more than once in the past 20 years; stiff zoning code requirements on those who insist on living in those areas to mandate fire resistant materials such as metal roofs and masonry walls; and a solid resistance to putting the lives of firefighters at risk to save homes built in places where fighting fires is costly, foolish and potentially fatal.
Paula Rhoads Hook, Denver
Suing schools over lack of special education
Re: “Fighting for special education; Parents question whether kids get services ordered for them,” July 26 news story.
Struggling to serve students who are ready, able and willing to learn, in addition to a few kids with disabilities and a few with bad attitudes, my daughter’s third-grade teacher got to the end of the school year and pulled me aside to apologize that he “hadn’t gotten to math” that year. He was fired.
Thugs then ruled my daughter’s fourth-grade classroom, culminating in a letter coming home from the principal stating that four little boys had touched a little girl inappropriately. My daughter viewed public school as a violent and chaotic place in which she could not concentrate. During the summer, I downloaded a math assessment from the Internet and discovered my daughter still had third-grade math skills.
We pulled our daughter out of school in order to educate her. After home schooling for a year, the Iowa Basic Skills Test reveals she has competency to the sixth-grade level in math.
I’ve read your articles on families suing to receive a decent education for their kids. How can I sue for the costs of the curriculum and my time to make sure this young American citizen is able to do math at the level the state deems to be the standard?
Elisa Cohen, Denver
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I am angered and saddened by families suing school districts to get services that go above and beyond what they should or can provide. Since when are schools supposed to provide life skills or emotional counseling to all students? Whatever happened to schools providing academic education and families providing life skills and emotional support? While every handicap, be it physical, mental or emotional, can cause hardship to a family, when did it become OK to bankrupt a system meant for many for the benefit of just one?
Perhaps it is time to define school systems’ job as academic education only. Could teachers then begin suing parents when students turn up hungry, distracted or ill-prepared?
Janet Williams, Arvada
Privacy and the use of public cameras
Re: “Let’s get candid over cameras,” July 25 David Harsanyi column.
David Harsanyi got it backwards in his column regarding security cameras on interstates and RTD vehicles. He expresses concern that the public “isn’t averse to yielding a degree of privacy to feel safer,” yet I wonder how much privacy one can expect while out in public. If a bank or shopping mall can mount a “security” camera, which will provide no more security than the cameras Harsanyi is objecting to, then I see no reason why the government should not be permitted to add monitoring cameras on public projects.
More disturbing to me is Harsanyi’s curt dismissal of concerns over the renewal of the Patriot Act. Section 215, he says, has been used 35 times. I always get nervous when people present numbers in this fashion, like a low number somehow justifies a bad law. What would an unacceptable number be? 35 million? 35,000? 36? Personally, I feel that the government has no more right knowing what I’m reading than they do mounting a security camera on my property – even if I am reading “Dirty Bombs for Dummies.”
Douglas G. Madison, Clifton
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David Harsanyi states that the use of cameras on the highways for counterterrorism is (1) an invasion of privacy and (2) will not prevent any act of terrorism.
First, any judge would not regard any criminal act caught on camera as an invasion of privacy. If a person shoots a passenger or fires a gun out the window, whether a cop sees the shooter or a camera catches the shooting it is still a crime – just as speeding in a school zone is still a crime even if no one sees it. Furthermore, a car and its occupants are in plain sight to everyone and are not private.
Second, the cameras will not ever prevent a terrorist act, but they may help catch a terrorist. Granted, the cameras will catch a terrorist if he is in the right spot at the right time, and this will be a very small percentage of the time. This is the price we have to pay to catch terrorists.
Dave Hoover, Evergreen
Disclosing the facts
Re: “Congressman’s questions about global warming,” July 26 Open Forum.
Larry Neal, deputy staff director of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, says public money for public science doesn’t fall down from heaven but from the pockets of working people who earned it. He says scientists should be eager to explain their research and funding to the people who pay for it, letting the facts to speak for themselves. I totally agree.
Perhaps the same standard could be applied to the oil executives the vice president meets with, or Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr.’s work product on behalf of those same taxpayers, or Karl Rove and Scooter Libby coming clean regarding their leaks to reporters. I’d welcome those facts speaking for themselves.
Richard Holicky, Denver
Valerie Plame affair
Revealing the identity of an uncover CIA agent is a federal crime. Now that one of the leakers seems to be Bush adviser Karl Rove, the White House has circled the wagons, once again refusing to release information to investigators, refusing to answer the questions of congresspeople and refusing to hold Rove accountable.
We have a government run in secrecy which is not responsive to citizens nor accountable for errors or crimes. How can we possibly trust our government to do the right thing?
Kathleen Flynn, Arvada
White House flip-flops
Every now and then, the gods smile on us. A recent example is having a girls’ champion sports team go to the White House wearing designer flip-flops. Shocking! What is this world coming to?
Unfortunately, less noticed is the big flip-flop by George W. Bush over the outing by his officials of a covert CIA agent. Chances are that one or more top White House officials have committed a felony by undermining national security. Bush has flip-flopped because he said at the beginning of this incident that anyone “involved” would be fired, as they should. Now he says that no, only someone found to have committed a crime would be fired. Big, big difference.
Can you remember all the people at the Republican convention last year waving flip-flops to disparage John Kerry? Hey, you patriotic Republicans, get them back out. We need you.
Patrick Hunter, Carbondale
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