Ag educator lost in farm tragedy

I want to offer condolences to the family of Max Corbett and the current and former agriculture students and staff at Tulare Union and Tulare Western high schools in Tulare, Calif.

Corbett, the farm manager for the Tulare Joint Union High School District Farm, was killed by a bull on that farm over the weekend. It's a sad reminder of the dangers of working on a farm setting around large, powerful equipment and large, powerful and unpredictable livestock.

I never met Mr. Corbett, at least not that I recall, but I was editor of the Porterville Recorder for a time in neighboring Porterville, Calif., about 10 years ago. The Tulare County economy is still driven by agriculture, as is California's, but like so much of California, a lot of the understanding and appreciation for agriculture is lost in the cities surrounded by all that precious farmland. Teachers like Corbett play a vital role in maintaining interest in agriculture for young people along the rapidly growing Highway 99 corridor through the heart of California's farm country.

You can read accounts of the tragedy from the Associated Press, Visalia Times-Delta/Tulare Advance-Register and Fresno Bee.

Disaster statistics — do the media ever get them right?

When the media provides numbers in headlines and stories, reporters often don’t give much thought to how their audiences will react. It’s not that they don’t care. Often, journalists are just trying to get the latest, best, most accurate number they can under sometimes very trying conditions.

But how will audiences react?

Will the audience react the same way to two deaths in a local town from a traffic accident, as they would to hearing a few dozen people were killed in another part of the country from a tornado?

At what point do hundreds and then thousands of deaths — whether by war, nature or some other tragedy — mean nothing anymore because the audience is numbed to the statistics and they lose their relevance or impact?

In the case of fatalities after a horrible tragedy, sometimes numbers can be more easily accessed than others. If the tragedy is a traffic accident, a confined explosion in a certain location, or some other situation where there was a small, defined area and possibly a certain amount of known victims that were present, then getting numbers is easier and probably more reasonably accurate.

But then there are more challenging examples of what the media must face. Nature causes huge storms that impact greater geographical areas and extraordinary damage: that makes it very difficult to monitor the actual numbers of dead, as well as deal with estimates of missing and dead.

After all, if a whole family — or community, or several cities in several countries, such as after the Asian tsunami — are wiped out, who’s left to even report the missing or dead?

There are also the challenges of dealing with physical debris, general chaos, incredible bureaucracy or even political interference. Deliberate or not, this can cripple a country or city in crisis, and make it almost impossible for the journalists to report facts to the world — or make an audience care about the victims.

As they try to keep up with the number, unfortunately the media become almost a machine churning out updates from one disaster and then rushing off to the next horrible event before ever finally concluding what exact human toll was extracted from the first tragedy.

The last two weeks show several examples of this. While tens of thousands of people are dead and missing from cyclone Nargis, Myanmar’s government has refused to allow aid workers in to help more than 1.5 million people who survived the storm — but now face starvation or diseases.

Each day the number of dead rises by the thousands, but it is clear that probably the true number of dead will never be known because of the physical condition of the mess left behind, but also the political conditions of the country. Military generals do not want the world to know what really is happening there, and many more lives will be needlessly lost to protect military power that existed for more than four decades in one of the poorest nations of the world.

The propaganda from Myanmar’s generals has been despicable as they claim to have the situation under control — when clearly that is not the case — and they take credit for any emergency supplies that have been allowed into the country.

How long will the media try to cover this story when it is so difficult to do so?

Meanwhile, China begins to add up the thousands of dead that are emerging from a powerful 7.9 magnitude earthquake there. Known as a secretive nation itself, China has been forced to be more open than usual with the extent of its disaster mainly because of the upcoming Beijing Olympics in August.

China has always played the propaganda game well on the international stage, but faces much pressure to open itself up to foreign news coverage. Even the official Xinhua news agency in China has surprised the international community with it been quicker and more open in revealing the extent of the earthquake damage and deaths.

But again the media must wonder: How quickly and accurately will officials know the number of dead? And how much of those real statistics will be revealed to the national and international journalists so they can inform the public?

And by the time those numbers do come out, will the media and public even care — or will there be another tragedy — local, national or international — that will divert their attention?

Sadly, too quickly forgotten will be the family of rice farmers wiped out in Myanmar, or the children buried by a school that collapsed over them in China. No one will ever have the real numbers of those who died or provide the respect deserved of those people who are now just another distorted statistic in newspapers and history books.

Following a fire: what happens next?

My route to work took me past a house that has sat dark more than a week.

There’s a small pile in the driveway of some burnt materials such as drywall, and a free community newspaper that was tossed there last weekend remains still in its plastic wrapper.

The house remains devoid of life, silent.

Looking oddly out of place, a large blue tarp is draped on part of the house’s back wall. The tarp covers a hole made by firefighters sawing through the house siding to tackle a fire that started one evening less than two weeks ago.

That evening, there had been no towering flames, just smoke that billowed out the front and back of the house through any open doors or holes. Sparks had flown at one point when a firefighter had to climb a ladder and snip the power lines to the house. The power company had not yet arrived to help out; that would be about another half hour or so.

The screaming sirens that evening, from several fire engines and police cars, attracted a few neighbors to wander occasionally over to settle their curiosity. On a chilly night, most people didn’t stay long. A couple teenaged brothers from down the block watched for a while, they decided to go back to their suppers grown cold. A woman out for an evening walk with her elderly mother gingerly crossed the street to ask what was going on, then decided to return back to their warm home.

The firefighters toiled at their jobs. They kept floodlights on the house from as many sides as possible. Used chainsaws to cut into a house. Unrolled water hoses to attach to fire hydrants. Entered the house where they could, climbed ladders to investigate more, drank water when possible as they coughed through the smoky conditions.

Families that lived directly across the street from the affected house gathered on their lawns and sidewalks. They chatted to other neighbors from a few blocks around. They tried to guess the cause of the fire, share what they knew about who owned the house and what was its history.

Near the house, a woman appeared and carried a young child snuggled close to her. Walking among the fire engines, she paused to stop and talk to the firefighters and other emergency services staff.

Spotting the small crowd gathered across the road, she gathered her courage — and walked over.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m your new neighbor. I just moved in today. And that,” she motioned towards the house, “is my place.”

Immediately she faced many questions, but also received more than that: There was a reassuring pat on her shoulder, offers to help in any way.

The woman’s family, with young children, had moved in that day to rent the house. They had switched on the power, and her spouse has started the washer to do laundry. Seconds later there was a loud POP sound — they hurried back to the laundry room and found flames shooting out of the electrical box, already licking away at the wall above the box.

They rushed out with their kids, phoned 9-1-1, and as fire alarms screeched in the house, the family helplessly realized all their worldly possessions sat in boxes in that smoky house. They had barely any time to even start unpacking that day.

A neighbor next door gave them shelter as fire engines within minutes had raced to contain the fire. Family within town also helped what they could.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” the neighbors told the mother, who was trying to encourage her sleepy, shy child to say hi to the strangers. Eventually, the mother went over to the ambulance and sat in there for a while away from the cold.

Promising to stay in touch, the neighbors drifted away in the night.

Days later, the house sits cold, dark, blue tarp in the back. All life seems to have vanished from the house and streets around.

* * * *
How a city reacts to a local fire is different than in rural areas.

Sirens and smoke attract the curious, but in this age of seeing spectacular fires on television or on newspaper pages, we have less patience for boring tragedies that happen in our cities.

While a tragedy still impacts a family greatly, a small fire is soon ignored or forgotten. It might not even make the local city newspaper, or if it does, it’s merely a line or two in a police report released a day or two later. Time, place, short explanation of cause if known, that’s about it.

We are attracted to and are fascinated by larger disasters, especially if it happens to someone else. Highway accidents can draw our attention, but unfortunately it’s usually if it’s a fatality, or if it impacts us in some way (we witness the accident, drive by it, or are delayed in our travels because of it.)

Small town newspapers in rural communities go beyond reporting even the smaller accidents and fires — they often say what happened to the families involved, and how people can help out. Rural communities have not become that hardened yet to what happens to neighbors, peers or even strangers who have had fires, accidents or other misfortunes. Usually if there are accidents, no matter how serious, people in the community want to find out what and where it happened, if everyone was okay.

If there are fires, often people in rural communities try to pitch in a hand to help, from being volunteer firefighters, to offering shelter, meals, babysitting or anything else needed to help those affected. They raise money to help out. They want people to know they’re not alone.

Strangers don’t remain strangers for long, and in a time of tragedy, that’s exactly the support a rural community and families need to survive.

In rural communities, a small fire such as that one here recently, would spark long-term warm friendships.