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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
Not true at all. It’s true that the first fire retardant chemicals used for aerial firefighting was borate, which is, in fact, a soil sterilant. This came to firefighters’ attention almost immediately. We stopped using it, and first switched to a slurry of water and bentonite clay. Then they added a phosphate, which has excellent temperature – absorbent properties, and, incidentally, is a primo fertilizer. The result is slimy, sticky slurry that coats everything it hits. If the fire gets to it before it’s dry, of course, the water does wonders. But after the water’s gone, the clay and phosphate remain stuck to leaves, branches, and e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g else. The clay and chemicals also form a very flame – retardant coating. So the area that gets a coating of retardant is actually better – conditioned for re-growth than it was before. The first job I had as a firefighter was in 1966 I think, and “borate” was already a distant memory. The name, “borate bomber” remains, but in fact that red-orange stuff is actually fertilizer. Go figure!
When it’s fresh, its consistency is very comparable to snot. When a retardant drop is due nearby, firefighters are taught to put their chin strap down, lie face down, in the direction of the expected drop, with their hand tool held firmly, at arms length from their body. You only do that once, because then your tool gets coated, too. So after that, you lay down with the tool and your hands / gloves underneath you. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to swing a pulaski when the handle is coated with snot.
I lived in CA for 60 years. You might read VD Hansen’s piece on CA infrastructure. There is a long history of drought cycles in CA history. The reservoirs were built to contain the snowpack water between cycles. CA stopped building reservoirs under divinity student Jerry Brown. The population has doubled. The Oroville dam nearly collapsed a few years ago after a wet winter due to poor maintenance.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/04/why-californias-drought-was-completely-preventable-victor-davis-hanson/
My in-laws house burned down with all our wedding presents in 1961. It began on November 5.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_Air_Fire
This is excellent information to have about the non-sterile properties of the retardant. Thank you.
I know when I showed up at my friend’s property I was relieved that for the almost entire time the airborne tankers and helicopters did drops, close to the home and corrals we were standing by, they used only water and not retardant. The retardant was dropped only on the section of the fire nearest the highway.
One question: when firefighters end up having it dropped on their bodies, how soon and how easily does it come off? Or do people end up looking very orange-y-red for a while?
I will check it out. However I doubt anything Hanson could say would shed any light on why we here in Northern Calif are at 8 to 12 R humidity, when even Death Valley does not see such low humidity most of the time.
I don’t doubt the ability of a fire to hit any neighborhoods of LA in November or later. However I don’t live near LA. I live 500 miles away from LA in a very different climate. We usually have rain by now. I have lived in No Calif for over 35 years and have not once before experienced a year in which there is no rain by sometime in October.
It is very fishy to me, and I appreciate 1PacificRedwood for his podcasts on youtube as they make sense of it, meteorologically speaking. But the sense he makes is not comforting at all.