In an ironic twist of fate that made me feel like the scum of the earth, I had just finished complaining about the chilly fall weather when I learned of the wildfires in Southern California.

As I waited for the news that would ultimately bring relief that my family and friends who live in the San Diego and Los Angeles area were OK with all of their possessions intact, I turned to the news to learn exactly what happened. According to The Associated Press, more than $1 billion in damage has been caused and, with nearly 2,000 buildings destroyed, about 500,000 people – including my family members – were evacuated to escape the engulfing flames.

After reading the facts, I did what any self-respecting opinion columnist would do in a situation like this: read the opinions – as if I weren’t depressed enough. What I found was an immediate compare-and-contrast to the natural disaster that George Bush apparently spawned out at sea, Hurricane Katrina.

For the most part, most saw the obvious differences between the two, but some questioned the motivations behind the rescue efforts of the two areas. A blogger on my favorite socialist Web site, dailykos.com, decided it would be appropriate to cite the racial differences between the two areas. Eugene Kane, a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, suggests that “maybe it’s a sign that race and class does play a part in government response to some of these emergencies.” I suppose since San Diego is full of rich, upper class, Republican white people, Bush would basically come and wipe everyone’s feet with his tears – but only after rebuilding their massive mansions. Oh, the pain those poor San Diegans must be experiencing.

There are a couple things wrong here. First of all, anyone who’s been to Southern California – particularly San Diego – knows that this speculation is only partially true. Certainly, the area is better off than the area struck by Katrina, but it is definitely not full of corporate fat cats. Some U.S. Census Bureau facts show that not everyone in Southern California is a snot-nosed, rich, white person:

About 79 percent of San Diego County is white, which is close to the national average. Thirty percent of those in San Diego County claim to have Hispanic or Latino origin (this includes some of those white people, for those of you doing the math). The median household income is about $52,000 – only about $5,000 more than the national average. Now, the skeptics will be quick to point out that the New Orleans area is far below the national average in many of these categories – 28.8 percent white, 67 percent black, with a median income of about $27,000. Although this is true, there are many making out Southern California to suddenly be full of nothing but yuppie, white, Republican multimillionaires simply because government aid is rushing in – an idea that’s not pertinent to the situation.

The mess in Southern California is going to get cleaned up not because of who lives there, but because the area was far better prepared. For example, in New Orleans, many decided not to leave their homes when they had a chance to – in part because their city government waited until the last minute to evacuate, whereas in Southern California, people actually did evacuate. Because of this, many in the New Orleans area were not as fortunate as my friends, family and the thousands of other Southern Californians who were able to escape safely.

Since California is just one big disaster waiting to happen, residents are always at the ready. They accept the inherent risk of an impending natural disaster, be it a devastating earthquake, a wildfire or a landslide. They try to design the layouts of their cities and the structures of their buildings with this in mind. New Orleans did not have that attitude, and their citizens suffered much longer-term damage, even though they lived in a coastal city in a hurricane-prone area below sea level with weak levees that engineers knew would break when – not if – a hurricane came.

It is unfortunate that some folks with opinions based in prejudice use this event to point back at Katrina and claim that the federal government is racist. The events in San Diego and Los Angeles only prove that being better prepared for this type of situation is imperative to living in an area prone to natural disasters. Southern California will be fixed not because it has more white people than Katrina, but because Californian cities are, for the most part, at the peak of readiness for any natural disaster.

– Andrew Gionnette is a senior in mechanical engineering from Chanhassen, Minn.