Out of Control
As wildfires blaze out of control the Extreme Heat has Turned California Into a Furnace.
With extreme heat roasting California on Monday, fire crews faced another difficult day battling a rash of new wildfires that have burned homes, cloaked cities and forced thousands of people to flee.
The fires, burning from near the Mexico border to the forests of the Sierra Nevada, spread a curtain of smoke over much of the state, as meteorologists warned residents from Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay Area to expect another day of oppressive heat and dangerously foul air.
Chris Donnelly, the fire chief in nearby Huntington Lake, said that a former fire chief from Big Creek told him: “The town is gone.” Mr. Donnelly said it was difficult to get basic information about the progress of the fires.
“Cellphones are down, all the landlines are down,” Chief Donnelly said. “My assistant chief has to drive to the top of a ski lift in order to get a cell tower. It’s really hard to know what’s going on.”
7,000 Acre Blaze Started at Gender Reveal Party
A gender-reveal party is an event during pregnancy in which the expecting parents, family, and friends learn the sex of the baby.
The El Dorado fire, which has burned 7,000 acres, was caused by a ‘smoke-generating pyrotechnic device’, fire department says.
The stupidity of this event is obvious.
El Dorado Fire
EXTREME Fire behavior on the #ElDoradoFire created a fire whirl. pic.twitter.com/K3e9PeJ3Yx
— SoCalFirePhoto (@SoCalFirePhoto) September 6, 2020
The fire is only 7% contained.
State of Emergency
https://twitter.com/TODAYshow/status/1302929189281169411
Record High Temperatures
Here are the two sites that broke their all-time high temperature records today. 121° was the highest ever recorded at an official site in L.A. County. Ditto for Paso Robles 117° in San Luis Obispo County. Burbank tied all-time high of 114° from yesterday. #cawx #LAheat #Socal pic.twitter.com/5c4FH3GMme
— NWS Los Angeles (@NWSLosAngeles) September 7, 2020
Critical Fire Conditions
As if there weren’t already enough going on in California, Oregon is about to experience once-in-a-generation extreme fire weather event. Extreme wind event on heels of summer heat & dry winter–ominously reminiscent of conditions prior to recent CA autumn firestorms. #ORwx #CAwx https://t.co/kCklJuN83l
— Dr. Daniel Swain (@Weather_West) September 7, 2020
Evacuations
#CreekFire (Sierra NF, Fresno/Madera Co) – 120 more civilians removed from the fire area. No medical emergencies mentioned during earlier talk between the National Guard copters & ground units. https://t.co/kIa79Xv5Jl
— CA Fire Scanner (@CAFireScanner) September 7, 2020
Smoke Map
#California is being impacted by many big #wildfires. Satellite imagery shows the smoke emanating from these fires. #SantaAna Winds will arrive to #SoCal Tuesday night-Wednesday, worsening the wildfire risk. #CAwx pic.twitter.com/PsKP55mUCE
— NWS San Diego (@NWSSanDiego) September 6, 2020
We can see and smell the smoke here in Southern Utah this morning.
New Risk of Blackouts
The Wall Street Journal reports California Faces New Risk of Blackouts This Week.
An extreme heat wave in the Southern half of the state sent temperatures in some areas above 120 degrees, forcing residents to shelter inside and crank their air-conditioning units, boosting electricity demand. As a result, the grid operator’s power-reserve margins wore thin at several points throughout the evening as solar generation began to decline.
California narrowly averted rolling blackouts Sunday night to relieve strain on its electric grid as parts of the state suffered record-breaking temperatures.
In addition to the heat threat, parts of the state may also face power outages throughout the week due to an expected windstorm. On Saturday, PG&E Corp., which serves 16 million people in Northern and Central California, said it may pre-emptively cut power to about 103,000 customers in 17 counties starting Monday to reduce the risk that its electric equipment could spark wildfires.
Mish
It’s poor air quality in SoCal right now. The CalFire data sets online are inaccurate. The reporting is being mismanaged. Yea it sucks we have so many idiots in one state.
MOTHER NATURE JUST KEEPS CLEANING HOUSE
oh, but global warming(not)
bad decisions(YES) by state govt
ex: fence off power lines 150 on each side, let in GOATS along line and watch vegatation disappear
The air doesn’t smell too bad and the air pollution map ( link to aqicn.org ) doesn’t look bad for here in silicon valley. However, the skies are completely white. I guess the smoke is high in the sky instead of at ground level. Yesterday and the day before we had temperatures as high as 106 degrees. The portable A/C unit could barely cool the living room of my 70 year old, uninsulated shack. Well, at least the power didn’t go out due to rolling blackouts!
I read 90% of fires are caused by human activity. The primary reason CA has more fires is because the population is spreading farther into wild areas. Has little to do with global warming, but you keep reading the scientific morons claiming it’s caused by global warming and if you don’t agree you’re a science denier.
CANCEL – CALIFORNIA
I’m laughing my ass off at the CA fires. I knew this was coming sense 1960’s when they stopped logging in CA. Now CA imports all their lumber from Canada, just think about the all the environmental pollution from importing all the lumber from Canada. WOW Liberals are seared brain enough to believe their own lies and half of Americans are stupid enough to believe them – DIMS. WOW WOW WOW
I’ve seen logging trucks for the last 10 years I’ve been here. Who told you logging was stopped. They literally go right past the main street every morning from the foothills.
I was hiking a couple of miles in from the Pacific in CA on Sunday. Had a nice little sea breeze, temperate was 20°F lower than 5 miles to the west and the air was reasonably clean. Location, location, location…
Here in Denver we can’t see the mountains because of the smoke. However, it is suppose to rain tonight and snow tomorrow. I wish California was so fortunate, but I do see a lot of California license plates, like I saw a lot of Michigan license plates during the last recession.
Wow, people are really stupid. Ironically a few years ago in Arizona another ‘gender reveal’ party started a big fire, and the perp got fined something like $8M (that he’ll never pay back) and he should have known better, I think he was a park ranger. Forest fires are really easy to start when conditions are dry, even a grinder giving off sparks can start one near dry brush.
50% of the population are in the bottom 50% of the intelligence measure.
….and the rest aren’t far off….
…As, among other things, evidenced by the number who seem to believe that it perfectly reasonable to believe millions of people can walk softly across a sea of nitroglycerin, just as long as the ambulance chasers are there to sue those who are “stupid” enough to land a bit hard on their heels for just one step on occasion.
Designing perfect systems for perfect people, seemingly makes sense those sufficiently imperfect to never be able to design any such thing. Who are instead reduced to complicating and expensifying matters for those who do, by cheering for run-amuck juntas insert useless little them into value chains created and operated by their infinite superiors.
For everyone even the tiniest trace higher up the evolutionary ladder, the problem is neither the nitroglycerin nor the one-in-a-million “stupid” guy. Those are both givens. Instead, the task at hand is lowering the cost of adding resiliency: Against both devoid-of-humidity shrub, and devoid-of-brains inhabitants of said shrub.
Doesn’t mean neither attempts at adding, or at least not reducing, moisture; nor discouraging the most extravagant displays of stupidity; are pointless. Just that relying on them to work, even remotely close to the 100% of the time required for doing so to be a useful strategy, is simple folly and nothing but.
Sheez, that’s very poetic Stuki 🙂
If only they paid more taxes, this wouldn’t be happening.
Northwest Oregon is currently under an extremely critical fire weather warning. This is only the second time ever that the Storm Prediction Center has ever issued one for anywhere within the state Oregon. The other time was August 29, 2006. link to twitter.com
Portland is suddenly very windy and filled with forest fire smoke this evening.
….To identify past droughts, scientists studied thousands of tree rings to find out how much – or little – rain fell hundreds of years ago. Scientists used historical data in combination with several computer model simulations to reach their conclusions.
One additional worrisome fact from the study was that the 20th century was the wettest century in the entire 1,200-year record. It was during that time that the population boomed in the western U.S., and that has continued.
“The 20th century gave us an overly optimistic view of how much water is potentially available,” said study co-author Benjamin Cook, a NASA climate scientist, in a statement….
…Williams said that “because the background is getting warmer, the dice are increasingly loaded toward longer and more severe droughts. We may get lucky, and natural variability will bring more precipitation for a while.
“But going forward, we’ll need more and more good luck to break out of drought, and less and less bad luck to go back into drought,” he said…
Glad that I did not retire to AZ.
I read elsewhere the worst floods came after the droughts. This is what flooded cities across California in the 1800s. Low lying areas are due for a monster flood. It hasnt happen since 1996.
Israel has good technology for desalination of ocean water. CA is going to have to dump big funds into this, rather that give money to the homeless and illegals.
And who knows, if we can process enough ocean water, maybe sea-level rise can be mitigated.
That’s what they get for not raking their forests, as Trump recommended. Climate change is a hoax. Odd though, how most of the fires are in federally controlled lands. The deep state must have prevented all the forests from being raked.
I’m skeptical forests were ever raked. This isnt like taking your backyard. The best thing is for these areas to burn to the ground. That is what happen before humans existed.
My colleagues in Colorado Springs said they could smell the smoke at Pike’s Peak.
Most of that smoke is from the Cameron Peak fire west of Ft. Collins.
Cameron Peak Fire, yesterday
Smoke at noon today, outside Ft Collins
If you want to see the air quality effects, this is a good site:
Despite the doom and gloom the AQI where we live in California is 51. A few years ago during the paradise fire it was 500. So it definitely could be worse.
If you’re in Saint George you are probably seeing/smelling smoke from fires just to your west in Nevada. Smoke from California will be at a much higher altitude.