Thumbs down: Earthquake warning? Fuggedaboutit

Sonoma County residents won’t soon forget what can happen when a disaster strikes without warning. And county officials promise that they won’t fail to activate the Wireless Emergency Alert system the next time that fire conditions prompt a red-flag warning. It’s a shame that the Trump administration isn’t equally committed to an early-warning system to assist California and other West Coast states when - not if - there’s a major earthquake.

For the second year in a row, President Donald Trump submitted a budget that zeros out federal participation in the early-warning program administered by the U.S. Geological Survey. Meanwhile, on the other side of Trump’s dream wall, Mexico’s alert system provided up to 60 seconds of advance warning of a Feb. 16 temblor - time enough to broadcast warnings.

The USGS has been working on a West Coast alert system, with California contributing some of the seed money. It serves some areas, but it will cost $38 million to complete the sensor network plus $16 million a year for operations and maintenance. That isn’t even a rounding error in the federal budget, but as they say in the president’s native Queens, New York, fuggedaboutit.