This week fire departments across the Pacific Northwest—including Seattle’s—sent hundreds of firefighters to California to help as many Los Angeles residents as possible not lose their homes and then think for even a moment about moving up here.
“We just wanted to do our part to help prevent more people losing their homes and then inevitably thinking, ‘Why do I live in a metro area with twice the population of the entire state of Washington that has almost no natural water source of its own? This is insane and it was always ecologically kind of insane to live here when you think about it: I’m moving to Seattle,” said Seattle firefighter Rick Benson. “It’s heartbreaking to think of even another Californian losing a home that is appropriately far far away from raising my property taxes and Mexican food spice levels.”
Benson said his team has already been thanked by many Southern California homeowners for joining the around-the-clock fight to keep the fires from burning more homes and getting people to think about moving somewhere that has a season other than summer.
“The last thing either of us wants is for millions of Angelenos to realize sooner than later how absolutely fucked this whole place is as the impacts of climate change inevitably pick up and then move somewhere it would have ever remotely made sense for a city of millions of people to exist,” Benson said. “The Pacific Northwest and California may have their cultural differences, but at the end of the day, we all just want to come home safely and live in denial of what’s really going on here and not adjust to it for as long as possible.”
At press time, fire crews in California confirmed they had successfully kept Tom Hanks from being Sleepless in Seattle in a houseboat again.
