Dori: Big surprise — I-5 brush fire likely started by homeless encampment

Jul 27, 2018, 7:00 PM

(Andrew Smith, Flickr)

KIRO Newsradio Host

Last night, there was a huge brush fire on northbound I-5 in Northgate that jumped the freeway — 10 lanes of traffic — and started another fire on the other side. They suspect the fire began in a homeless encampment.

Locals said that the people in the homeless encampment are cooking all the time. Police found cooking materials in the camp.

There is a burn ban right now in King County. But drug-addicted vagrants can steal a propane tank, bring it back to their encampment, improvise a barbecue, and cost taxpayers a fortune by starting a brush fire.

Jay Inslee wants to tax our families hundreds of dollars a year because of carbon emissions. How many carbon emissions are spewed into the atmosphere by every brush fire started by a homeless encampment? But we don’t enforce anything at all, at least not on homeless encampments.

I have a question for our politicians, especially for Jay Inslee, who is trotting all around the country getting his name out there so he can run for president in two years. When are you going to start addressing the consequences of the homelessness crisis in your own state? I’ve never heard him talk about the homelessness issue, even though it is certainly a statewide problem.

Think about the number of areas where taxpaying citizens have laws enforced against them, yet drug-addicted vagrants do not.

There are places where people get jaywalking tickets downtown Seattle, yet you can protest the youth jail by lying down in the middle of the street, gridlock the region for hours, yet the police will do nothing about it.

If you park for more than 72 hours in front of your house, your vehicle can be towed. If you are a drug-cooking RV, you can be left alone for weeks or months.

One set of laws for the taxpaying citizens, one set of laws for the drug-addicted vagrants.

If you’re out drinking in Belltown on a Friday night and relieve yourself in an alley, you can be ticketed for public urination. But the drug RVs can drop waste right out of their vehicles right onto a parking strip. In all of the encampments, there is all kinds of public urination and defecation. There’s no enforcement.

If you’re caught with cocaine, you’ll go to prison. If you’re a drug-addicted vagrant, you can shoot up heroin between your toes on a downtown bus bench in front of a cop, and no one will do anything to you.

The word is out, all around the United States — the Puget Sound area is the most drug-friendly region in the country. And that’s why we have the level of problems that we have around here; we’ve attracted the worst of the worst from around the country. Yet you don’t hear the governor or any other public official say anything about that — they just keep going after the taxpaying citizens.

Follow @http://www.twitter.com/dorimonson