The Wildfires Thread

[PCS]

Watching this right now. 

 

South Eastern partof the fire near Caples Lake and Kirkwood. It's spotting ahead about 1/4 to 1/2 mile as I watch. Leapfrogging through the wilderness. This sucks. Yeah. It jumped right across 89 and it's on its way to Nevada now. 

[TheGoodBits]

Could be to Heavenly/Stateline by the end of the day at this rate…

 

My brother’s place is hanging in there. Barely. Flames directly across 50 from his neighborhood, and winds pushing toward them. 

Edited August 31, 2021 by skinsfan_1215

[TheGoodBits]

Evening map is not too much different for the area I’m (selfishly) concerned about with my brother’s house in jeopardy. Fire advanced to 50 right across from N Upper Truckee and the firefighters prevented spread beyond that today. I don’t know much much burned immediately across from his neighborhood or how much is still burning. But the fire seemed to make a serious run at them and was repelled, at least for the moment. I’m cautiously optimistic at this point. 

[PCS]

They've issued evacuation warnings for the Foothills of the Carson Valley below Heavenly. Fire is continuing to move that way. Read a report,(can't find it now),that firefighters on the ground say it's heading for the Heavenly Valley as well. The area that's under warning in the Carson valley is about 7.5 miles away. I'll be watching. Glad to hear about your brothers house. Have a couple of coworkers that live in the area as well. As of right now,still no structures lost in the Tahoe area of the fire. Echo Summit area seems to have taken the brunt of that one.   Wind warning ends tomorrow evening. Crossing fingers. 

 

AQI where I live is 414 right now.  Cough cough. 

[NoCalMike]

I was in Tahoe a couple weeks ago for a small outside wedding at Bijou park.  It was smoky and highway 50 was shutdown.  I had to go the long way around the lake back to Sacramento on highway 80.  It was a beautiful drive despite the smoke and the fact that my little Nissan Sentra is not made for any kind of driving through mountains/hills.

 

It would be devastating for the actual fires to reach any of those small towns bordering Lake Tahoe. 

[PCS]

The evacuation warning I mentioned above included the Kingsbury Grade area,(big homes and condos that wind their way all round the mountain side and some of them right at Heavenly Ski resort. They made it mandatory about an hour ago. As in Extreme Emergency alert. Hell even I got that message on my phone and I'm a ways away. Checked the NDOT traffic cams in the area and several cars and heavy police presence heading up and probably spreading out. Looks like the fire is on its way there. 

[TheGoodBits]

What an incredible picture…

 

 

[NickyJ]

CBS published a fascinating 2 hour documentary studying what caused fires such as the Paradise and Malibu fires in 2018 to have become such impossibly huge problems to deal with. It's narrated by a British woman who moved to California but had never experienced such fires before.

 

Without doing it any justice, my summary of it is 'California was always had wildfires. Through poor land management and housing development, we have made it worse.' There's a few scenes later on showing Paradise and Malibu each having city council meetings to discuss what went wrong and what could be done differently. After seeing how people handle Covid, it isn't shocking that the councils voted to do nothing to improve their safety.

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/bring-your-own-brigade

[NickyJ]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58592376

 

Quote

California fires: General Sherman and other sequoias given blankets

Officials fear the fire could reach the Giant Forest, a grove of some of the world's biggest trees, within hours.

The forest hosts some 2,000 sequoias, including the 275ft (83m) General Sherman, the biggest tree by volume on Earth and about 2,500 years old.

The Colony and Paradise fires have been growing for a week.

More than 350 firefighters, along with helicopters and water-dropping planes, have been mobilised to battle the blazes.

They have wrapped several trees, including the General Sherman, with aluminium foil to protect them.

 

[TheGoodBits]

Forgot to update this thread but my brother returned home earlier this week after a little over a week evacuated. Incredible effort by those battling the Caldor Fire to protect structures in and around South Lake Tahoe. 

[China]

Outpaced: Wildfire control projects are burning up before they can even start

 

This summer, the Twofer-Pillikin forest health project, south of Lake Tahoe, was finally ready to go. Over the course of years, Forest Service scientists had fanned out to study some 10,000 acres of ponderosa and sugar pines. Hydrologists had charted the courses of ephemeral streams. Botanists had surveyed for rare plants, like the Pleasant Valley mariposa lily and yellow bur navarretia. And biologists had tweaked the plans to avoid disturbing Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog habitat, and to create meadows for the Western bumblebee. 

 

Jerry Keir, executive director of the nonprofit Great Basin Institute who was helping to manage the project, had lined up eight contractors to bid on the work. The crews would be responsible for thinning dense sections of forest and removing enough brush to allow for prescribed burns and wildfires to safely move through the trees — measures that should keep flames small and allow firefighters to stop their spread. Lastly, Keir had cobbled together the money to pay for it all, signing a final agreement for a $1.2 million grant from the state of California’s Sierra Nevada Conservancy in August. 

 

A week later, the Caldor Fire erupted and, as Keir put it, “a whole lot of time and money went up in smoke.”

 

Some 150 miles to the north, Tom Esgate, operations manager for the Lassen Fire Safe Council, was also watching in dismay as fire swept through one planned project area after another. “If you want to see a wildfire come to your community, all you need to do is have Tom Esgate plan your project,” he said wryly. “It’s been like whack-a-mole around here.”

 

Twenty miles to the west, the Dixie Fire was burning up the plans of the South Lassen Watershed Group, a landscape management collaborative — making irrelevant tens of millions of dollars worth of project planning and prep work, said Jonathan Kusel, executive director of the nonprofit Sierra Institute.

 

“It is at best demoralizing to see these projects thwarted by precisely the thing they were meant to prevent,” Kusel said.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

‘Shaman’ charged with starting California wildfire after allegedly boiling bear urine

 

A California “shaman” charged with starting a wildfire that is threatening thousands of homes claimed it started by accident — while she was boiling bear urine to drink, according to local reports.

 

Alexandra Souverneva, 30, faces up to nine years in prison for allegedly sparking the Fawn Fire, which has destroyed 41 homes and 90 smaller structures and is threatening 2,340 others, officials have said. She has pleaded not guilty.

 

She is now being eyed for possibly starting other fires across the Golden State, according to the Redding Record-Searchlight.

 

As the fire in Shasta County raged on Wednesday, Souverneva claimed she’d been hiking and trying to get to Canada, according to documents obtained by the outlet.

 

She told forest officials that she was thirsty and had come across a puddle of what she believed to be bear urine — and tried to make a fire to boil it, according to documents obtained by the outlet.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

The U.S. Government Is Wasting Billions on Wildfire Policy That Doesn’t Work

 

Every year, enormous fires burn in the West, and every year, the U.S. Forest Service, along with state agencies like Cal Fire, mount huge military-style operations to fight them, complete with defensible lines, air assaults, heroic fighters on the ground, and blank check budgets. State and federal fire suppression costs in 2021 were $4.4 billion as of November, according to the Northern Rockies Coordination Center. Media tend to cover these battles against wildfire in the same breathless way they would a war. “Firefighters Hold Caldor, Dixie Fires in Check; Newly Arrived Hot Shot Teams Bolster Fire Lines,” reads a CBS headline from August.

 

More than 6.5 million acres in the U.S. have been affected by fire so far this year. The Dixie Fire, at nearly 1 million acres burned, was the second-largest fire in California’s history. Faced with such catastrophic wildfires, it seems only natural for fire services to respond with every resource available. But according to many of the country’s most respected fire experts, there is little evidence that most of these fire suppression campaigns are effective. These critics say that the current practice of trying to suppress every big wildfire is foolhardy, especially given the huge, climate-driven fires more and more common in the West. Some blame this policy on what they call the fire-industrial complex: a collection of the major governmental fire agencies and hundreds of private contractors, who are motivated by a mixture of institutional inertia, profiteering, and desperation.

 

“There’s this war metaphor in fire,” says Stephen J. Pyne, former MacArthur fellow and author of more than 30 books on fire (as well as several pieces for Slate on fire policy). According to Pyne, the metaphor is tragically apt. “If this is a war, we’re gonna spend a lot of money, we’re gonna take a lot of casualties, and we’re gonna lose.”

 

Few fire experts dispute that the advanced technology of modern firefighting is effective when it can be concentrated in a small area. Repeated drops of water or fire retardant at the perimeter of a community can saturate the ground, put out the fire or prevent it from advancing, and save a town. And what ecologists call the “wildland-urban interface”—the transition zone between wilderness and human development—has grown at least 40 percent over the past 30 years, meaning that more people than ever live in communities that could be threatened by fire. But many wildland firefighting resources don’t go to saving people or buildings in imminent danger, but to putting out big fires in the backcountry. And these are nearly impossible to fight.

 

At the scale of blazes like this year’s Dixie Fire, “fighting a fire is almost like fighting a hurricane,” says Timothy Ingalsbee, a fire ecologist and former firefighter who now heads Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, a nonprofit that aims to change the current model of wildfire fighting. A DC-10 can drop a payload of more than 10,000 gallons of fire retardant several times in a day. But with smoke and wind around a forest fire, Ingalsbee says, much of this liquid ends up getting dropped too high, where it gets stuck in tree canopies or diffuses into mist, having little effect on fire spreading on the ground. Even when it reaches its mark, retardant merely slows fire; it doesn’t put it out. Without a ground crew to dig a deep trench in front of it (known as a firebreak or fire line) to isolate the flames, the fire will eventually burn through the chemical and keep going. In the hot, dry, windy conditions that occur more and more frequently in the West, even these containment lines dug by firefighters or clear-cut by bulldozers are often no use: Embers from the fire will simply fly over the line and ignite dry fuel on the ground behind it. Furthermore, bulldozed lines, cut by blades 8 or 10 feet across and sometimes three or four blades wide, scar the landscape long after the forest has started to return.

 

The costs of running a fire camp, however, pale in comparison to those of fire aviation. One payload of fire retardant from a DC-10 costs almost $60,000 to deliver. During a major fire, these planes can make several drops a day. The Type 1 helicopters used by Cal Fire and the Forest Service run more than $3,000 an hour. The costs are not just financial. Aviation is probably the most dangerous aspect of firefighting: Six of the 10 deaths on wildland fires in 2020 were the result of air crashes. Phos-Chek, the most commonly used type of chemical fire retardant, has been shown to be toxic to fish when dropped in streams and rivers. And despite the enormous efforts on the air and ground, most megafires barely respond to human intervention. “All the lines and all the aerial support for fire lines, during the Dixie and Caldor fires, failed to stop fire spread,” says Pyne. But when a fire is burning thousands of acres a day and choking cities with smoke, politicians feel they have little choice but to call in air support.

 

“The alternative, to kind of stand around and watch it go, is not very palatable,” says Jim Furnish, who served as deputy chief of the Forest Service from 1999 to 2002. “It’s not a good look for the agency. You have to at least give some impression that you’re doing everything you can. But the sad truth is that sometimes doing everything you can is having little or no effect on the outcome.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[PCS]

 

 

 

 

Un ****ing believable.  But at the same time...not. 

[China]

 

[China]

 

Live updates: State of emergency declared for wildfires in Boulder County

 

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has declared a state of emergency after wildfires in Boulder and Jefferson County forced more than 30,000 people to evacuate from their homes. The fires sparked when strong winds knocked down power lines around 11 a.m.

 

The entire town of Superior and the City of Louisville have been evacuated as have some nearby neighborhoods.

 

Click on the link for live video

[The 12th Commandment]

Just drove back from that part of Colorado Tuesday (insanely windy for the whole 600 miles).  My sinuses confirmed how dry it was.  Where we were isn't in the fire but just to the east.  Must be smokey as all get out.

[PCS]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[The 12th Commandment]

I cant help but think the preponderance of wood fencing in neighborhoods up there added fuel to the fire, so to speak.  

[China]

 

[Dan T.]

The wind in those videos is fierce.  No wonder that beast spread so fast.

[China]

Judge halts mega-resort in California wildfire zone, says residents could die trying to flee

 

Development of a $1 billion resort and housing project in one of the state's most wildfire-prone communities has been placed on hold after a judge ruled developers didn't adequately plan for what might happen when a wildfire erupts and thousands of people have to run for their lives.

 

The Lake County judge's ruling on the Guenoc Valley Resort could have sweeping ramifications for housing and business developments across a state where fires are growing in severity and local officials are under intense pressure to approve new building projects during a housing crisis.

 

The ruling, under California's powerful environmental law, also represents a major victory for environmentalists opposed to new housing and business projects in areas with extreme wildfire risks.

 

"The court recognized that Lake County failed in one of its most important jobs, to consider how a dangerous development in the direct path of fire can increase risks to surrounding communities," said Peter Broderick, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Star Creek Land Stewards helps fight wildfires with goats and sheep

 

On a foggy morning near San Geronimo, a small mountain community 20 minutes west of Fairfax in Marin County, Silvio Justo, a Peruvian herder, unrolls temporary electric fencing he places around herds of sheep and goats rapidly devouring acres of wild grass surrounding a hilltop home.

 

The livestock belong to Star Creek Land Stewards. The Los Banos-based company was hired by a local homeowner to clear the brush surrounding the home in an effort to help combat wild fire spread.

 

The 2020 California wildfire season was the largest on record -- 4.2 million acres burned across the state. This has led to a spike in property owners hiring sheep and goat grazing companies to help contain fires.

 

The animals feast on fire fuel dry brush to mitigate wildfires. 

 

Click on the link for a video

[China]

Fire season starting a little early this year:

 

NCAR Fire forces evacuation of 8,000 homes in Boulder

 

About 8,000 homes were ordered to evacuate due to a fast-moving wildfire burning in an open space near the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder.

 

The Boulder Police Department (BPD) said wireless emergency alerts have been sent to all cell phones in the affected area, which includes about 19,000 people. 

 

The NCAR Fire started at about 2 p.m. Saturday and was measured at 122 acres, with no containment as of 7 p.m.. No structures have been damaged.

 

“We have evacuated two areas nearby, Table Mesa area on the eastern side of south Boulder and also Eldorado Canyon,” said Marya Washburn, spokesperson for Boulder Fire-Rescue.

 

Multiple aircraft routes have occurred over the fire, Washburn said. Winds were expected to subside over the area into the evening, as firefighters work to contain the fire. 

 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]