CALIFORNIA ISN'T READY FOR DISASTER.

Byline: JILL STEWART 

ON the outskirts of Sacramento, local politicians allowed construction of massive residential projects in a flood plain. Whenever I see them, I marvel at how little California is doing to avoid mass loss of life and property when our Big One hits.

You think California is not Louisiana. But the ``plans'' in our big cities for mitigating and responding to cataclysm are not much better than those in New Orleans.

As one longtime politician, Victor Mow, of the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors, explained to me, ``There are two kinds of disaster planning - planning for the front-end and planning for the back-end.''

The back-end is a detailed local plan saying what to do after a disaster, and who does it. These thick local protocols even detail how to minimize the problem of ``first responders'' who flee their jobs - something we saw New Orleans cops do, en masse, to save their (foolishly) nonevacuated families.

California's local disaster plans include local evacuation transport and local evacuation pickup sites - the very stuff contained in the New Orleans city emergency plan but ignored by its incompetent mayor as he was playing to the cameras.

The creepy truth, as New Orleans reminds, is that our fate hangs partially upon people we place in office during elections nobody really pays any attention to.

Little surprise California isn't ready. Michael Shires, a public policy professor at Pepperdine University, tells me that ``placement of assets'' is a troubling California disaster-planning deficit, requiring such things as stocking warehouses around major cities with water if the Big One hits and saltwater gushes into a water supply used by 20 million people.

Shires says under current plans, critical ``urban search and rescue teams who go door-to-door'' likely won't get inside crushed buildings to save lives because ``human assets'' and equipment are not strategically placed.

Some cities don't even know if their disaster-control headquarters are built on bedrock or silt.

Moreover, Mow says our crucial local plans ``rely heavily on the fact that hospitals will be available. All of our plans.'' He asks, ``How do we prepare for worst-case devastation if the San Andreas Fault goes?''

Despite the hysterical media finger-pointing at the feds over Katrina, when the reporters at CNN calm down and the media dust settles, much of the blame will eventually, and rightfully, fall on the bizarre New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, and the grossly unprepared Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a former schoolteacher.

In recent days, Nagin and members of Louisiana's state Legislature and congressional delegation have all insisted they fought hard for federal money to build New Orleans' levees and storm walls beyond a Category 3 hurricane level.

Well, not exactly. Louisiana's pols demanded all sorts of federal funding for pet projects and pork. And yes, they also asked for levee money on their wish lists. But building levees and flood walls beyond Category 3 wasn't a priority. It was the complete lack of urgency by locals pols that has destroyed New Orleans.

What's unfolding is a cautionary tale for California. We are led by loudmouths like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who apparently live to see President George W. Bush besmirched - but get little done. California is not prepared to handle even a 7-magnitude quake.

``Do we build to withstand a 7, or go even higher?'' asks Mow.

An honest question that should have been answered long ago by our 120 do-nothing state legislators, useless members of Congress, past governors and past mayors. Now it falls to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and mayors like Antonio Villaraigosa and Gavin Newsom.

But not to the feds. Despite Bush's admissions of failure, everyday Americans know intuitively that local politicians prepare local areas for crisis and are in charge when crisis hits. Not Washington.

Americans expect local officials to create and follow effective, institutional memory-based, workable plans for worst-case scenarios. Yet in California, only a massive bond measure or dedicated tax - one our pols can't raid - can provide the billions our communities need to avert thousands of deaths and mega-billions in property damage.

I'm a fiscal conservative. I hate pie-in-the sky plans. But there's one prediction California should spend the bucks on. And that's the one disaster we all know is coming.