ARE WE BEING NEGLECTED?

On Wednesday I attended the monthly meeting of the Mi Wuk Sugar Pine Fire Protection District Auxiliary, as known as the Fire Auxiliary.  Fire Chief Randy Miller gave us a very juicy Chief's report based a lot on the past storm and accompanying outages, downed trees and unplowed roads (took 2 days to get most of Mi Wuk's roads even begun to be plowed).

Here are some of his points:

• When a storm hits down in the lower elevations, i.e., Sonora, all of the resources are directed there first.  People down there aren't prepared for snow and generally don't know how to drive in it.
• Suggestion:
• Divert one snow plow to Mi Wuk for both highway and village roads
• Divert one snow plow to Twain Harte for the same usages
• Communication between the Tuolumne County Emergency Operations Center and the communities needs to be improved!
• This relates to distribution of information to and from Cal Trans, County Roads, and PG&E.
• There was frequently no response to calls.
• Calls had to be made multiple times before they were acknowledged or acted upon.
• There were several LARGE generators 'up the hill' that were available for community usage.  No one in Mi Wuk was made aware of these generators although the power to the Mi Wuk Water Company was out and the warming center at the Word of Life Center had to be closed down and the patrons evacuated.  The generators went unused during the outage.  What a shame.

What can we as a community do?  Contact your county supervisor who in our case is our District 3 Supervisor, Evan Royce.  Evan can be reached at 533-5525.  E-mail: eroyce@co.tuolumne.ca.us  His local office hours are on the third Wednesday of each month at the Mi Wuk Community Center and Lending Library.  I plan on being there this month, April 20th (although I have a class this same time in my stamping studio).  I'm really concerned about these issues.