California fires again!

Discussion Greater Forumosa
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Been here 18 years and I don’t think we have had a fire this bad in north cal.

The Butte fire is already the worst in calif history
It’s about 45pct contained and full containment by the end of the month.

That would mean nearly two thirds of the month it’s been on fire.

63 confirmed dead but reportedly over 600 still missing. That is a huge number. Doesn’t mean the missing are dead though.

Smoke covers the major population areas like I have never seen before.
Anywhere from 200 up near 400 in some parts
East bay currently right around 200

Very scary for us all here. Next week finally rain is expected which hopefully will put out the fires and clear the air of smoke

Can’t wait for some good rainfall to take care of the problem. Air tankers and over 8000 firemen braving the flames but it’s not out yet

All the masks have run out and so have all the air cleaners

Will have to buy them when this fire is out to prepare for the next one. Can’t buy them when there is a live fire.

I’m using a small humidifier that has a foam filter that is kept wet and that helps . I don’t smell smoke in the house but I do outside . Keeping windows shut and running that. Also the aircon has a nice filter .

But going outside I don’t have any n95 masks .
Using surgical masks which they say do no good.
Was able to take a few days off in Carmel and that was great. But they are up to 100 plus on the particle count too.

May have to escape to Reno. Not sure I can handle days more of this bad smoke

Nows a time when having a lot of cash and not having to work would really help.

Could pack the wife and cat up and pick a nice hotel in Reno that takes pets.

Blew a wad in Carmel already

Better call up a bud in Reno see if we can hang out at his place.

Still gotta see if the boss man will be ok with me off though. Will see how today goes

They keep saying off shore winds will come push this smoke north. Current low winds bring the smoke down to us. Good thing the wind is low but it needs to blow north and bring the smoke north to muck less populated areas. The fire is about 150 miles north of us.

Some sort of temp inversion is keeping all the smoke low to the ground too.

We have lows of 2 and high of 20 c. Today.

Everyone sneezing including the cat

Now they are saying our regular offshore winds may come Sunday and push the smoke north

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Stay safe out there. My sisters in LA, says it’s crazy right now. Saw they even got juvie kids out there to fight fire as well as convicts.

My understanding is that it’s partly due to not managing the forests to prevent fire…because people didn’t want to mess with nature?

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Windy App is useful to get up-to-date wind direction/speed. Kind of cool App to follow typhoons, too.

After SARS went away in Taiwan, local firms still would stockpile masks in coffee breakrooms for employees to use who had the cough or common cold. I sort of built up a large inventory of them and still have tons. They are very useful to always have at home.

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So sorry to hear that. I have a bad allergy due to pollution this time of the year and I feel for you and your cat as I cannot begin to imagine how bad is that air. It is worse than volcanic eruptions in the old country.

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Must be insane experiencing this up close and personal. Looking at the pictures of the charred husks of cars abandoned by the road it looks more like some kind of post-apocalyptic movie. Stay safe.

Why is it so especially bad this time? Are one or some of the organizations responsible for preventing/managing wildfires and forests hurting for funds these days?

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google it.
PG&E supposedly fuqqed up big time.
Something about repairs to a live line, but company didn’t turn down power on the line. It sparked the fire. Stock tanked like 1/4 or more on this and it’s a public utility (only mention this as side note).

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Read some news yesterday about the fires and the dead toll… and I felt like if it were Summer again. WTF is going on in California? I mean, this shouldn’t happen, or not at this time of the year…

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the whole state of California is brown and dry over the summer and into late fall before winter rains begin

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Now I remember @tommy525 and someone else were telling us about fires there during the Summer, and how certain politicians fucked up. Stay safe over there…

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…Is browner and drier now because of climate change, over the medium to long term.

I’m not even from there and have been aware they’ve had a long standing drought over the last decade or so. Lake Mead is another example …

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It’s a pretty complicated issue. The current climate of people looking for easy scapegoats means everyone is rushing to find a single culprit to point at (not saying this is what you’re doing). But the reality is multiple conflicting needs/wants from various agencies/interests over the past 100+ years has resulted in forest management policies that not only helped to build up massive fuel loads but also stifle the natural tendency of forests to burn.

California’s natural forest ecology depends on regular healthy fires to remove fuel sources like under story build-up and unhealthy or dead standing trees. If this natural cleaning doesn’t happen those fuel loads increase and when a fire eventually happens it will now burn much hotter and cause more destruction to the healthy trees, and makes suppression exponentially harder.

Since we haven’t been doing prescribed burns or allowing natural fires to run their course, all those smaller/unhealthy/etc trees that would naturally get thinned out now become large full-size trees. Add to that drought conditions which means there’s only so much water to go around and now you have a whole lot more dead standing wood. And add to that climate change creating longer, hotter periods during which a lightning strike, arsonist, or accidental human cause can now create a massive fire rather than just a small little spot fire.

Why we haven’t let the forest burn is where it gets really complicated, which is probably why it never gets covered well in the media. Essentially, almost everyone could find some way they have contributed to the problem, which doesn’t make for good sound bites or for helping some politician promote their own agenda.

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Well now the fires are not necessarily starting in forested areas

They are starting in towns. Two years ago we had the Napa and Sonoma fire that burned a lot of homes and wineries . Memories fade think it was two years ago

We in the east bay got several days of very bad air but that fire was put out in days

Think it was last year we had a huge fire in the Sonoma area that burned down a town with hundreds of homes lost but us in the east bay didn’t get much smoke on that one

That fire and the current fire started in towns that were near forested areas and the fires became near unstoppable

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Eh. I know the fires are bad and that people are dying, which is a bad thing. But the smell is not something unique to California.

There are peat fires all the time in the Great Dismal Swamp. In 2011 a peat fire there burned for more than two months. Hurricane Irene dumped more than 12" of rain on it. It burned on. A few weeks later Tropical storm Lee dumped another 6" on it - still it burned. You could smell the peat smoke from the Outer Banks north through Washington, DC. In many of the affected areas you could smell it inside your house. Finally heavy winter rains put it out. I don’t think the rest of the country even blinked.

Stay safe, tommy. Stay out of the path of the fire. You’ll survive the smoke just fine, though.

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Thanks . Happy to not be in the line of fire but worried about the pm 2.5

Our air is currently 225 or very unhealthy.

Worried about the effects of the smoke long term.

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Smoke like that is no joke. I was in Vancouver last year when forest fires were raging in British Columbia. It was brutal.

Guy

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And people are still not taking climate change seriously.

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Thanks for the update Tommy, the wife just got back from Cali, apparently took an uber from LAX to Santa Barbra, she was unhappy he was hands off driving taking pictures of fires. Mentioned it to her co-worker, who grabbed her by the hand and poor girl was sweating buckets. Not about the fire, which is terrible, but the uber driver.

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Someone thought it was a good idea to introduce Eucalypts to California

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im beginning to think we live in china because what is the news saying today???

That there are 1300 people missing !!! This figure has gone up from 200 to 600 to 1000 to now 1300. what is the real figure? Over 79 reported dead.

the fire started at 630 from a downed PGnE power line in the town of Paradise, which is close to forests. The whole town burned while most people were asleep. Most didnt even get any sort of warning.

SO i think the over all dead will be quite a lot. It will be one for the record books if 1300 people are found dead in this fire .

It will be unprecedented in calif history.
Friday san fran recorded the highest AQI of some 279. Highest it sf history.

Worse they are telling us that this is the new normal. We can expect huge fires every year in the summer now.

Better move out of the state of calif. but where to go??