Making oil and natural gas providers pay for wildfires?

 

Paradise lost

There is a movement among some states to make our oil and natural gas providers pay for wildfires, when cities have dried themselves out over the last 40 years, starting in 1986.  

Cities, states, and the EPA bought into a conjoined hoax that started in ‘86: the idea that “Fresh water is a scarce and precious resource that must be conserved!” ignoring both the water cycle and normal cost accounting.

 That same year, we heard about global warming.  I think the financier started the hoax but needed proof.  He started the “scarce and precious” water scare.  What could go wrong? 

Cities overcharge their ratepayers for their use of water and undercharge them for overhead, a system designed to jack up the price of water use.  In Grants Pass, water unit rates carry 40% of overhead and increase 5.28% over inflation every year.  It’s the only way they can pay the overhead. 

Mankind has changed weather three times, and it always involves water:

 

·       killing beavers, who kept water in the land.  This caused country and cities to burn and turned most of the West into desert. 

 

·       cities built water plants to keep cities from burning, by piping water into every occupied building.  People gardened. The water was cheap to use.

 

·       sprinklers evaporate half of what they throw! This is not waste; it feeds the water cycle, making rain.  Rain returned to cities and their surroundings.  The ‘80’s was a wet decade. 

In 1986, cities began to buy into rationing water by rates. They ration clean water with high unit rates, causing many ratepayers to eliminate their greatest use of water: Property maintenance.  These people lose their best insurance against wildfire: a green, watered yard.

 

2-4-2026 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook, and X.com.

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook.

 

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com

Your $50 Million Grant May Arrive Yet

 

Replacing the City of Grants Pass Water Plant will take longer than getting our FEMA funding.

Federal Judge Richard G. Sterns ruled that FEMA must restore billions of dollars in federal disaster mitigation funding, because Congress appropriated the money specifically for these grants and FEMA must follow the law that Congress passed.  We may yet get our $50 million grant for our new water plant.

We look forward to repeal of the panic-induced unit rate hikes that make our city utility bills less affordable.

Better would be to remove all the extra “City Services” fees from what was our water and sewer bill.  Find another way to collect small fees and large fees and remove the possibility of losing our homes because of non-payment of those fees.  Rationing rates for vital utilities has caused many people to lose their homes and wind up on the streets. 

Rate-rationed water has caused huge fires.  If Paradise had not rationed its water with ever-higher unit rates, it would not have burned.  Pacific Power got the blame but was not responsible for the dryness of that city and surrounding forest. 

Wildfire anywhere in or near a city can be laid to city water rationing that was never necessary.  Water vapor from sprinklers spreads upward and outward, humidifying its surroundings.  Evaporation is not waste.

 

12-17-2025 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040           rycke@gardener.com

Water-rationing has Consequences

 

Tubbs fire, Coffey Park, Santa Rosa, before and after

            The eighties were considered a wet decade.  Water was so cheap to use that we thought of it as free.  It was the height of sprinkler irrigation. 1986 was the first year we heard two nonscientific themes all over the media: burning fossil fuels is causing global warming from too much carbon dioxide; and fresh water is a scarce and precious resource that we must conserve. 

          Change began quickly as some cities, like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, grabbed that idea and ran with it, lowering base rates and charging high unit rates for using water.  The area around those cities and to their east got dryer and hotter.

The first sign of trouble was the fires in the Hollywood hills around Christmas, as katabatic Santa Anna winds, caused by high pressure, cold, and dryness, flowed down out of the Sierra Nevada and blew every spark into brushfires with high-speed wind and high heat at lower elevations.  Seems like nobody connected the almost-yearly fires to the change in water pricing.  It being a Southern California problem, people joked about the winter fire season in Southern California.

Meanwhile, water-rationing rates were spreading across the country and around the world.  Grants Pass started them in the nineties in a small way.  But City Manager David Frasher and the City Council got serious and introduced tiered rates in 2006.  Grants Pass started getting fires from dry weeds and brush, and wildfires got closer to the city as lightning storms turned dry.

Jokes about California’s fire season stopped in 2017 when the Carr fire burned much of Redding in August, and the Tubbs fire burned huge, tight subdivisions in Santa Rosa in October.  In November 2018, the Camp fire burned most of Paradise and killed eighty-five people.  These were all katabatic-wind-driven fires.

In 2019, the West got a brief reprieve from big fires after Congress legalized hemp, which had to be watered.  In 2020, we had a rainy May and June and a cloudy July.  But after water masters made farmers stop using unpermitted water in July, temps rose to well over a hundred degrees in August. 

High heat built up a high-pressure bubble that covered the West coast from Mexico to Canada.  September 8th brought us katabatic winds from highlands under that dome, causing the biggest fire disaster of the last fifty years, as fires started in cities and burned them, all over the western half of our west-coast states.

 

Speech to the Josephine County Commissioners and the Grants Pass City Council, 10-6-2021

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener                  541-955-9040                rycke@gardener.com