Don't take your news from a squirrel, they have a pretty small area of responsibility.
Much like the starving Ethiopian kid that you would constantly see photos of the same kid, when the media made it sound like there were millions more just like him, the media will center on the worst. Seems like I have seen the same burned out truck in front of the same burned out neighborhood a number of times. But I don't doubt for a second that this was the right choice.
Evacuate or don't evacuate? I haven't heard of anyone losing their lives at this point, so the evacuate choice seemed to be the right choice. Some neighborhoods did burn, the escape routes were hit and miss, and 90,000 people command a lot of resources so with no source of re-supply, a contaminated water system, a compromised power grid, at least there are about 85,000 less mouths to worry about.
I worked the BC forest fire of 2003, and fire is an unpredictable, goofy thing. We worked a certain area of responsibility, and everything would seem good, we would be proactively working our area to contain any spots that we could find, then suddenly a tree would roman candle out of nowhere. Now you were no longer proactive, but reactive. Or in army speak, we had lost the initiative.
Between weather, wind, and just plain bad luck, fighting these things is tough, and often you are trying to contain the damage until mother nature can take over. Even then, it gets underground into the root system, and just waits to come up again at any time.
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