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How We Fire-Beleagured Californians See Things Right Now
The Marvel cartoon sums up our feelings nicely. Several weekends ago, a friend’s property was caught in the wake of this mad man in Lake County, CA. The mad man not only attempted to burn down his residence, but then let his fire spread out over 30 acres across the highway from his place.
I raced over to my friend’s place, to find California’s finest already there. Not only fire truck operators and guys in tractors creating fire breaks, but pilots for the helicopters and air tankers. For several hours my girlfriend, her sister, father, and I stood entranced beneath the aircraft.
We watched spellbound below a careful choreography between the sky acrobats zooming their copters and planes in a dance that would eventually spell the end of the fire. Part of the high-risk job of piloting calls for multitasking: you need to know what part of the fire needs to be hit hardest with what: water or fire retardant. At the same time, you have to make sure that as you dump water on the fire, you don’t slam your aircraft into a tree, or hillside, or another aircraft.
I got the cartoon off Facebook, and it captures how we felt that day.
P.S. My friend’s home and that of her neighbor survived without anything worse than a minor amount of smoke damage. A few hillsides with tall grasses were charred, but the beautiful California live oaks withstood the flames.
Published in General
Rooting for you! Here’s a great article touching on the fires:
https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/30/its-not-climate-change-to-blame-for-californias-fires-and-blackouts-its-democrats/
No @rightangles, the fires are started because of a miniscule rise in Carbon Dioxide. This means, my fair friend, that if you have used a hair dryer, car, blender or light bulb in the last two weeks, you, yes, You! are responsible for these fires.
I never felt comfortable with this meme until now, because with PG & E’s announcement that there will be ten years of these power outages, we Californians most likely will not have any energy to use. So I can no longer be blamed for any of it!
And besides, our public radio stations are using a large segment of Friday’s radio shows to further explain the Global Climate Crisis. If you cannot believe the Pacifica radio show network, who can you believe?
(I haven’t listened to Pacifica stuff for several years. But over the last 96 hours, with our battery powered radio our only connection to the outside world, I became involved with them. Did you realize that Trump has orange hair and is a really bad man? We need to get people here at ricochet to start understanding that!)
Anyway, the Federalist article is interesting. Once I would have found it succinctly informative. But I can’t delve into the matters it discusses as right now, I need to go out and pass out some Bernie Sanders info… Do you realize that if Bernie is elected, we will get all sorts of free stuff? (And if Trump is re-elected, we will be put into camps?)
I remember when California was synonymous with surfing, technical innovations, the wine country villas and spas.
But the photo below symbolizes what it is known for now:
Obviously the smoke inhalation is a secret Democrat/leftist weapon to either kill the conservatives outright or addle their brains!! PS – My sister-in-law in CA has been through a major medical crisis and now has to endure power shutdowns. Sigh.
Question for all you current Californians (I am a former). What collective action do *want* the government to do to lessen the impacts of future fires? What action do you *expect* the government to do?
I heard a good interview with that guy that runs the Reagan Library. He said they use a herd of goats for one month a year to remove underbrush. They also have sprinkler systems to keep a green ring around the facility. They had a fire surround them and they came out fine. More goats!
It’s not just the smoke, although that is a problem; it is all the components of the shut down in the power grid.
We currently have a fire not that unlike a fire last year that ended up taking out 40% of the county. (Mostly brush, trees and grasslands were lost.) Yet during the past five days of power outage, it was very hard to figure out what was going on with it.
It is difficult to sleep at night when you also have to wonder whether the 350 acre is spreading or is truly contained. Last year, our elected officials had the last say in a debate about whether communities needed fire sirens, or if a cell phone alert system called Nixle would do the trick. The elected folks decided that Nixle was the way to go.
Of course, with the power outage starting mid Saturday, and not ending til Thursday, many cell towers themselves had no juice. So Nixle became about as effective as a car without any gas or a battery.
Eventually you are so tired that raging fire or not, you simply fall asleep. Most women wanted a nice shower with hot water and ability to wash their hair. Sports lovers were pissed about not seeing any of World Series games 3 to whatever.
I can’t imagine going thru an operation or other health crisis & then being inside a home without power. That makes dirty hair far less than a big deal.
I’m a rural Californian, of late from the Sierra Foothills. One of the most intelligent men I’ve ever met — and Software Architect from that Bay Area — said to me, this is down to corporate greed and corruption, pure and simple.
Sigh.
I fear it ain’t going to get better anytime soon.
We in my neighborhood have tapped into a program that aids us with education and a bit of funding to remove undergrowth and brush from our property. I see similar neighborhoods doing this in the area which is a great sign. There was a controlled burn in the Tahoe National Forest right next door back in May. Maybe more of this will turn things around, but as near as I can tell most people here blame PG&E which means the state can keep being insane and the same jack-wagons will keep getting elected.
So, in other words, goats are more productive than politicians. Good to know.
How can anyone properly show gratitude to people whose lives are spent this way, for weeks and months at time?
A big problem for the “forest mismanagement” crowd is that no laws of physics or any laws of atmospheric weather modelling can explain how it is that forest mismanagement can create a situation in which citizens in No California no longer have any dew in May or June. Yes forest mismanagement explains why some fires can spread. However all the forest mismanagement on 10 galaxies cannot explain how a Relative Humidity drops from 45 down to 8 in 12 hrs! While the temps drop down to freezing!!
The Relative Humidity in Northern Calif has been between 8 to 12 RH. (12 to 16 is normal in a desert but even deserts usually do not go down to 8RH.)
Forest mismanagement doesn’t explain why huge storm systems predicted by the National Weather Service fail to materialize. Weather experts’ve gone on the record to state emphatically if a storm system is predicted by the National Weather Service, it has a 90% chance of becoming manifest. Yet our predicted rain-carrying weather systems in Lake County, near Clear Lake, fail at least 45% of the time.
The only person I know in Calif who has it right & can also explain everything is 1Pacificredwood, whose expertise is demonstrated over on youtube channels.
BTW anyone who buys into the idea that it’s all about forest management needs to understand that this notion plays into the hands of the “Global Climate Crisis” believers. Burn and cut down all the trees, and the areas where that happens becomes a victim of desertification. For example, with 40% to 55% of Lake County already denuded of trees due to the huge fires we experienced in 2018, and prior years, and also the loss of pear orchards and old growth forests being slashed for vineyards, this area will have hotter and hotter temperatures in the years to come. And then the Carbon Dioxide crowd will have a further field day.
However even local people who agree with me on the issue are happy to spend their summers slashing down more trees, as Big Bucks from state and Fed governments pay good money to people normally under-employed.
I didn’t know about the camps, but a couple of days ago I was shown a YouTube ad that said President Trump wants to cut Medicare so he can give tax cuts to the rich.
I was shown that ad twice. I’ll need to see it at least a dozen times before I start to believe it.
Oh that is a very popular meme among the Lefties.
And until the latest major success Trump had with terrorist leaders, over the past 3 weeks, the Left-y crowd was hearing that Trump had actually founded ISIS! (I guess he did that in his spare time between being a TV game show host and running his hotel and real estate conglomerates.)
It is so hard to figure out. On the one hand, we are told Trump is a moron who has no business being in the WH. On the other hand, he worked secretly and craftily to create an entire group of terrorists that had to have been funded from what? Trump Tower earnings? But he is also a Russian asset, and the Russian military hates ISIS. So couldn’t the Left at least keep its stories straight?
The Left doesn’t do logic.
First, my younger son is a CalFire firefighter. He and I agree that forest management is about 85% of the fire problem in CA. The weather changes cyclically with the el nino cycle. Also, we are probably at a Maunder Minimum with a possible severe drop in average temperature if it persists.
As for PG&E, it has had budget trouble for decades as crazy enviro Nazis demanded Green initiatives while rates are fixed. SDG&E was our utility when Gray Davis destroyed the electricity market. That resulted in his recall but the problem persisted as the long term fixed rates did not come back.
We left almost three years ago. My son spent his vacation this summer looking for their destination when he can retire. Not in CA.
It’s not about “burn and cut down all the trees”. It’s about removing fuel buildup from artificial fire suppression. The goal is to have more frequent but less intense fires. Burn off the fuel that accumulates on the ground while there is little enough of it to avoid the massive intensely hot fires that destroy the forest.
It’s always amusing to see these arguments about “desertification. In Africa 30,000 elephants were killed to stop desertification and the advocates discovered it made things worse. Don’t always rely on “experts.”
Did they also explain why the fires are Trump’s fault?
As a resident of a high risk area, let me send along my deep gratitude to you and your son.
However, the actual problem is lack of rain. Anyone who understands the impact of weather on fire understands if you have no rain, not any at all, then there would have to be zero fuel to not have any fires. All firefighters I know sigh with relief when we start getting those first rain storms. This yer, in an unprecedented manner I have not experinced in my 35 yrs of living in Calif, there has not been more than one rainstorm, and it produced less than one tenth of an inch! Yet it is now Oct 31st!!
From today’s newspaper’s weather statistics:
Calistoga, Ca Oct 31 ’19 rain to date 0.02 inches
Oct 31 ’18 rain to date 1.48 inches
Sebastapol Oct 31st ’19 rain to date 0.04 inches
Oct 31st ’18 rain to date 1.09 inches
I talk to retired fire fighters, retired police and first responders all the time. They see the same problems I see. A sky filled with tic tac toe patterns cutting into the sky, in a county where there is one very small airport that can barely allow the smallest of jets to land. Yet during Thanksgiving week, which is always the busiest time of year for air travel, there are barely more than 4 planes in the sky in two hours, unless rain is predicted. These 4 aircraft are commercial jets at 22k Altitude, possibly flying LA to Anchorage or San Franciso to Seattle.
Sure, proper forest management would be a plus. However if it rained as much as Nature intended, what with the huge volcanic activities impacting the Pacific Rim, we would not have had a single fire of more than 5,000 acres this year. It actually should have rained all summer!
No rain is forecast for next week either!
Especially not those experts who are in the journolists’ contact lists.
I left California about twenty years ago, but at the time the objection to the goats was that the goats would spread “non-native” plants to different canyons. One week the goats would eat the underbrush in one canyon, then be transported to another canyon to eat the underbrush in the second canyon. While eating the underbrush of the second canyon the goats would poop out seeds from the plants they consumed in the first canyon, which plants might not be “native” to the second canyon.
So, for fear that seeds might find their way across geography, we were supposed to refrain from letting natural fire break builders build fire breaks. [Goats can remove burnable underbrush from places bulldozers and other mechanical equipment cannot reach.] No explanation was offered as to whether goat poop transport of seeds was statistically different from transport by wind or by birds.
However there is not a single decent climate modeling scientist who will not admit that cutting down tons of trees does not result in desertification.
In fact one of the top Climate Modelers, that many here at Ricochet rely on for his decent studies regarding climate change has stated again and again that the cutting down of trees results in climate changes. For instance, this man has stated that the tremendous loss of the snow cap on Mt Kilimanjero in Africa was not due to carbon dioxide increases world wide, but due to how impoverished people in the area cut down so many trees year after year, and decade after decade, that the snow cap has either disappeared or been severely decreased.
I’ll look through my older OP’s on ricochet to see if I can locate that scientist’s name.
Most of the Midwest (and New England) was denuded of trees by clearcut logging in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Where are the deserts? And why hasn’t our snow gone away?
The people with homes just north of me in the foothills are required to clear their brush every year. If they don’t, the city does it and charges you twice the price.
I do to. Actually, I am all three, or better, “former.”
Of course you see more contrails when rain is predicted. They’re the effect of higher humidity in the atmosphere, not the cause. The jets are there all along. You just don’t notice them.
There’s so much here I want to comment on that it’s driving me nuts. But I’m effectively off Ricochet for a few more days – have to finish a major project.
I posted something on Ricochet, oh, I think, two or maybe three years ago. In the present situation, it wouldn’t hurt to read it again. Here’s a link – I hope; http://ricochet.com/545224/archives/august-20-1910-the-day-that-changed-the-world/
There’s a lot of food for thought toward the end of that article.
And lawsuits by environmental groups in the Tahoe area forbade homeowners from doing that required clearing for a few years, and the U.S. Forest Service from inspecting and enforcing the federal laws about them. This was a major contributing factor to the highly destructive fire that went through some of that area, oh, maybe five years ago now.
The environmentalists should have major (fried) egg on their faces. They should have learned something. But did they? Nooooo….
Apples to oranges
I never saw any denuding of forests in the Midwest until the 1980’s when trees were cut down en masse.
You ask why if the settlers cut down trees, why are there no deserts in New England or in the MidWest? This is probably due to how in the midWest and New England there are copious amounts of rain. Huge amounts. So if trees were cut by settlers, who you also need to remember, couldn’t sterilize the soil with RoundUp or other weed growth preventors that didn’t exist back then, so within two years the trees started to come back in.
It is also true the settlers were fond of planting apple orchards & peach, pear & cherry orchards too. They cut down trees & replaced the trees with other trees. They also turned entire counties across the MidWest into farms planted with corn, alfalfa wheat and other grains as well.
Let’s examine the rain fall in California with that of New England: Annual rain fall last year in Calif, my area, May 2018 to Nov 1st 2018: 1.3 inches or so. This year we have had 0.02% inches of rain over same time period.
Given such scarce amounts of rain there is little possibility for trees to re-grow, especially since what is de-nuding so many hillsides in Calif is fires, which are combatted with fire retardant. Very hard to promote re-growth of trees when fire retardant is sprayed.
By contrast, New England has had over 3 inches in just the past 7 days:
https://www.agweb.com/weather/cumulative-rainfall
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Apparently orange hair is also incendiary!!
Nobel Laureate in Physics; “Global Warming is Pseudoscience”1:25:42December 17, 2015from the 1000Frolly channel Professor Ivar Giaever, the 1973 Nobel Prizewinner for Physics trashes the global warming/climate change/extreme weather pseudoscientific clap-trap and tells Obama he is “Dead Wrong”. This was the 2012 meeting of Nobel Laureates. The 2015 speech by Prof Giaever is here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCy_UOjEir0