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Post by Taildragger on Sept 22, 2020 16:09:34 GMT -5
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Post by fkaJimmySee on Sept 22, 2020 16:16:12 GMT -5
I expect that will continue until fall rains come. We left SoCal in 2015 after a 21 year stay. For us, it was time for a new adventure.
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Post by tahitijack on Sept 24, 2020 13:54:26 GMT -5
The fire threatened the Mt. Wilson Observatory and adjacent communication towers. The news media talked about this a lot, but never said...this might interrupt out signal if the fire overran the property. My neighbor said, it should not matter to us, we are on cable....
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Post by Taildragger on Sept 24, 2020 15:38:43 GMT -5
Investigation of this fire's origin is now focusing on possible malfunction of SoCal Edison (electric utility) equipment. If this pans out, it's going to add to a laundry list of poor (if not criminally negligent) CA public utility maintenance over the past several years. Further north, PG&E is already being spanked for same.
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Post by gato on Sept 24, 2020 16:08:10 GMT -5
"Replace paradise, put up a parking lot". Joni Mitchell's answer to wild fires.
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Post by Taildragger on Sept 25, 2020 23:32:50 GMT -5
This was the fire started by the "gender reveal" pyrotechnics:
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Post by Larry Madsen on Sept 26, 2020 9:20:47 GMT -5
I expect that will continue until fall rains come. We left SoCal in 2015 after a 21 year stay. For us, it was time for a new adventure. I did my ten years there, 1979 to 1989. I don't recall fires being anything like this back then. |
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Post by gato on Sept 26, 2020 16:06:56 GMT -5
Back in the 80's and 90's my department would go on 12/12 shifts twice a year.
First to handle the evacuations due to the Malibu fires and the subsequent looters..
Then, when the rains came, we handled the evacuations due to the mud slides and the subsequent looters. (fires burned out all the vegetation, so nothing to absorb the rain)
Crappy working conditions. Great overtime pay.
Nothing like what's going on now, though.
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Post by Larry Madsen on Sept 26, 2020 16:36:32 GMT -5
Nothing like what's going on now, though. That's how I remember it. Sure there were fires and yes mudslides. Even had most of the piers along the coastline torn off one year, I worked in Seal Beach when that occurred. These fires recently are crazy ridiculous! |
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Post by Deleted on Sept 26, 2020 17:07:23 GMT -5
seems like everything that has never happened before, has happened in the last few years  feels like a movie |
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Post by Taildragger on Sept 26, 2020 17:08:49 GMT -5
Nothing like what's going on now, though. These fires recently are crazy ridiculous! Lightning is the reason. I grew up just north of L.A.. We had big brush fires every 3-5 years or so. We had to evacuate twice in 10 years. Big difference between those fires and this most-recent rash of fires is the cause of ignition. The fires back when I was a kid were usually caused by an accident of some sort or by a carelessly-discarded cigarette or inadequately-extinguished campfire or, more rarely, arson: the point being that they were usually single fires with a single point of origin.
Many of these recent fires were ignited almost simultaneously by thousands of dry lightening strikes which hit multiple, totally random locations over a very short span of time. There were literally hundreds of them ignited in a single night. Many started in extremely remote, difficult-to-access terrain and many were well under way before they were even discovered. Manpower and equipment resources were stretched very thin in any given area because, unlike in the case of a single fire, availability of mutual assistance between county/state agencies was minimal since so many areas were already too busy dealing with their own conflagration to have any resources to spare.
In addition, the fuel load was heavy and extremely dry. Fortunately (at least for my particular neighborhood) we did not have dry, high-velocity, "Santa Ana" (offshore/out of the east) winds arise while the fires were completely uncontained. When that happens, all the firefighters can basically do is just get out of the way.
I was born in CA in 1949 and have lived here almost continuously since 1955, so even though I'm not a firefighting professional, I've been paying close attention to wildfires here over a pretty long span of time.
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Post by Larry Madsen on Sept 26, 2020 17:17:08 GMT -5
Irrational attempts at being "kind to mother nature" can lash back at us. Seems we are being too kind by half. There is a lot I could say about this, but in the interest of the thread's own life ... I'll not.  |
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Post by Taildragger on Sept 28, 2020 11:53:14 GMT -5
Devastating year for wildfires in California: more than 3.7 million acres of land have burned across the state in 2020, causing at least 26 deaths and destroying over 7,000 structures. Add to that the damage in Oregon and Washington.
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Post by gato on Sept 28, 2020 12:55:30 GMT -5
Irrational attempts at being "kind to mother nature" can lash back at us. Seems we are being too kind by half. There is a lot I could say about this, but in the interest of the thread's own life ... I'll not. The Native Americans used controlled burns for thousands of years. "For more than 13,000 years, the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Miwok, Chumash and hundreds of other tribes across California and the world used small intentional burns to renew local food, medicinal and cultural resources, create habitat for animals, and reduce the risk of larger, more dangerous wild fires." The Guardian
Then, 100 years ago, the US government outlawed the process . "Indians. They're such children." ---- Hedely Lamar, Blazing Saddles |
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Post by Taildragger on Sept 28, 2020 13:14:39 GMT -5
And just when it seemed to finally be winding down:
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feels like a movie