By Bernard Rowan
At present, several fires continue to burn in the Los Angeles area, inflicting untold costs and suffering on thousands of people. CNN reports that millions are under a critical fire threat. The L.A., California and national governments appear mostly powerless. Each new buffeting of winds threatens to spawn other fires. The song “It Never Rains in Southern California” comes to mind. It’s a pity. Untold costs and suffering affect thousands and thousands of people.
Last month, 179 passengers died when a Jeju Air flight crashed in Muan County, South Korea. The airport authorities should answer for the concrete barrier that served as a contemporary guillotine for the plane. It was a tragic and sad day, and like the California fires, its impacts and effects are inestimable and continue.
In the 21st century, such national events emerge as world events. People around the world see and feel from afar the same tragedies that unfold locally. These days, there are always investigations and calls for accountability. Usually, there are one to several direct causes and sometimes culpability. Matters are addressed, and corrective actions occur again where possible. The news and the global mindset moves on.
These tragedies should prompt more sustained action, certainly cumulatively. I think the southwestern states of the U.S. and the federal government must invest massively in firefighting and water technologies. A small drone took out one specially equipped firefighting plane. The need is for tens of thousands of them. It might form a special corps of the Army or the California National Guard. I think the Chinese have invented a way to prompt rain with cloud seeding. America needs to invent ways to harness seawater, make water and create redundant pipelines of water — inventions or other ways of addressing the crisis of water shortage and fire prevention and firefighting that are so lacking. I don’t think meteorologists predict a change in the basic weather and geographic conditions for some time to come.
Likewise, South Korea may need to look at how its airports are constructed. Perhaps some of them shouldn’t be in existence, absent major reconstruction, to shore up the kinds of preparations needed for emergency landings. That should go for all other nations. This includes how plane engines are constructed and the matter of birds. I suppose we need to study how many aviation accidents were occasioned by fowl, but in this day and age, we ought to have engines that don’t suffer from this kind of hazard.
Human ingenuity continues to spawn new kinds of cars, vehicles, batteries and other types of engines. There is a wealth of talent and imagination in the world to put into addressing the capacity to handle fire and air emergencies — and pandemics as well. Expectations are higher now since so many people live or work in forested and wooded areas, and since we have sold our souls to the skies flying hither and thither all the time.
It’s easy for me to write in this vein, but I also think that humanity has advanced to the point where daily instances of the tragic create as much negative feedback for civilization as sitting idly by while “Rome is burning,” be it in L.A. or at a South Korean airport. Time is nigh and always renewing for the efforts of human ingenuity to create the technologies of today and tomorrow. Safety and happiness require greater efforts to address global conditions and their impacts on local populations.
President-elect Trump and the present and next South Korean presidents should begin a plan to create technologies to avoid and end the recurrence of these tragedies. Many other nations and the United Nations should issue calls for the collaboration of scientists and inventors to work on these monumental tasks. The public should urge lawmakers to incorporate investments in planning that mitigate and prevent disasters, pandemics and recurring tragedies in public spaces.
I’ve read that estimates of the L.A. fires’ cost at present is $50 billion, a number destined to grow. I’ve not identified the cost of the Muan plane crash. Flyfreshflight.com estimates that the total cost of plane crashes in 2024 stood at 2.5 billion. The cost of U.S. forest fires annually over the last decade has been roughly $2.9 billion per year, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Surely, these tremendous sums warrant tremendous investments that will reap greater savings as the inventions and processes to mitigate and avoid disasters take form.
Bernard Rowan is associate provost for contract administration and academic services at Chicago State University, and a professor of political science. He is a past fellow of the Korea Foundation and a past visiting professor at Hanyang University.
English (United States) ·