Pacific County commissioners are wagering the future of their reputation on a false calculation.

Their dilemma, if they wager that we might have a catastrophic fire in the near future and ban consumer fireworks, is that they will lose the support of all the pyromaniacs and those who profit from them.

On the other side, if they continue wagering that there won’t be a catastrophic fire, and continue to refuse to ban consumer fireworks — and the fire does happen — they could lose their reputation and the support of the entire community.

However, weighing this wager on the ability to forecast the future weather, is absolutely the wrong fulcrum. The fire danger ratings provided by the State Department of Natural Resources are not based solely or even mostly on weather forecasts. They are based on how combustible the fuel loads are, which is determined by the dryness of the vegetation that may receive sparks.

High fire danger reflects the high probability that a spark delivered to a forest or to dune grass will ignite a fire. The weather doesn’t have to get hotter or drier for a spark to have a high probability of igniting a fire. When the state has determined that we have high fire danger, we are already there. However, if the weather does get hotter or drier, the fire danger is likely to go up. Rain, or very wet, heavy, low fog can bring down the fire danger, but neither rain nor a soaking fog are in our current forecast.

I am writing this before the big day. I want to assume, as the county commissioners are, that this won’t be the day that a big or devastating fire happens. However, at the moment the fears that it might are more palpable than ever.

The county commissioners are making another wager. They are wagering that the number of people that are sick and tired — of the mayhem, stress, fear, and the tons of toxic garbage that the illegal fireworks free-for-all extravaganza causes each year — hasn’t risen to a critical mass that will see them handily out of office.

In the meantime, what’s being bet on this roll of the dice, is other people’s property, other people’s lives.

Perhaps the commissioners should wake up and smell the coffee before it’s too late.

HARVEST McCAMPBELL

Raymond