John Montgomery Presents This Week's	May 20, 2000	Creep Logo by Alan Fraser
	The National Park Service
	We Did Start The Fire

We spend a lot of energy at this site bemoaning the evil (John and Patsy), greedy (Time Warner), emotionally disturbed (Marisleysis), hypocritical (Mark Chmura) and political (Rudy) people of the world, pointing out how much misery they cause for the rest of us. But every once in a while, it's a good idea for us to recognize another group who cause at least as much, if not more misery: the grossly incompetent.

You see them every day. The surly kid bagging your groceries who tosses a five pound cabbage on top of a loaf of your bread. The low life underneath your car in the oil change bay who forgets to tighten the drain plug before you leave. The moronic geek behind the cash register at the fast food place who can't add up the bill correctly even though he doesn't have to key in numbers, just pictures of burgers and fries. And let's not forget to mention the majority of your co-workers.

And with the economy booming like it is, the situation is only getting worse. Every place of employment has a "Help Wanted" sign out front, and they're all ready to scrape the bottom of the barrel to fill those spots. The grossly incompetent have moved into every area of life and we consumers and customers have to deal with the results: a motley crew of drooling nitwits severely limited by their lack of intelligence or motivation. Guys like that ought to be standing in the unemployment line permanently. I'll gladly pay more taxes to keep them out of Walmart.

So it's a frustrating situation. But how can we make it tragic? Combine gross incompetence with mindless government bureaucracy and you get the National Park Service.

Two weeks ago, the Park Service at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico started what they call a "prescribed fire," or a "controlled burn". The idea is for the burn to remove some of the dead and dried underbrush so that a more serious fire won't occur. That doesn't quite make sense to me, but what do I know about the subject? Not too much. I can only remember Smoky The Bear telling me not to play with matches out in the woods. I have to assume that people who start controlled burns know what they're doing. Bad assumption, as it turns out. This particular controlled burn quickly got out of control and it's still burning. It spread to nearby Los Alamos, destroying over 400 homes and 47,000 acres. 20,000 residents had to evacuate the area. It even threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which houses nuclear weapons and Chinese spies.

How can something like that happen? Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who conducted an investigation, called it a "cascading series of events" and "an avalanche of accumulating mistakes." He went on to say, "The calculations that went into this were seriously flawed." No shit, Bruce.

The list of errors is long. The "burn boss", Mike Powell, who was in charge, didn't have enough experience. Mike's boss, Roy Weaver, didn't have the proper weather reports. The National Weather Service, the same guys who have all that sophisticated technology and can't predict conditions any better than you can by sticking your head out the window, didn't provide wind information in the extended portion the fire weather forecast. When the Park Service realized the fire was out of control and tried to find help, they got the run-around from "dispatch". Coordination among federal, state and local agencies was lacking, another big surprise.

There's more, but it's very depressing. And very familiar to anyone who's carrying a loaf of smashed bread in a car which is leaking oil while trying to figure out if the McDonald's guy gave the right change. You could read about it in the newspaper, but the paper boy tossed it into the fire where your front porch used to be.