1.2 Million Acres on Fire, Only 20% Contained
🔥Fire map for Aug 22. This map shows only large fires on lands managed by BLM California. Figures as of this morning. #FireYear2020 #CAWildfires pic.twitter.com/F5RyrNfVJB
— Bureau of Land Management California (@BLMca) August 22, 2020
I went through that map separating out state jurisdictions from federal.
Major California Fires
Grim Stats
- Acres on Fire: 1,209,383
- Acres Contained: 243,6198
- Containment: 20%
Fires Continue to Spread
Gov. Gavin Newsom says raging fires in California have burned an area the size of Rhode Island, with little relief in sight. “We simply haven’t seen anything like this in many, many years.”https://t.co/2Vxv2J4M8E
— NPR (@NPR) August 22, 2020
Hard to See Your Memories Burn
Californians are mourning the damage inflicted by the recent fires to the ancient, towering conifers in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. https://t.co/8ElzvOaTom
— NYT Science (@NYTScience) August 22, 2020
Lightning Siege
“Lightning siege” hits California with nearly 12,000 strikes in a week https://t.co/RzGc1yvKMu
— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 23, 2020
Smoke Spreads
#CaliforniaFires have now spread across 1 million acres. As we warm our climate, fires are happening with greater frequency and ferocity. Smoke from Western Fires will spread into the Midwest over the next few days. @WQAD #WeTrackStorms @ClimateCentral pic.twitter.com/GePs1ctTG7
— Eric Sorensen (@ERICSORENSEN) August 23, 2020
Themes of the Year
2020 in one photo 📷 https://t.co/chlGdGFMXV
— The Standard (@EveningStandard) August 23, 2020
Devastating California Fires in Pictures and Video
In case you missed it, please see Devastating California Fires in Pictures and Video.
Hoping for Rain
Best wishes to all impacted.
Mish
As soon as no jail for burning nature and doing nothing, nobody cares. It so pity how nature is tortured every minute but we have kind something ” best ever !(
These fires are the result of socialism. The socialist environmentalists have made it illegal to clear brush, establish fire breaks, and do the things that in the past made control of fires possible. The liberal socialists ruin everything they control by use their twisted agendas. Everywhere you look from the crumbling, insolvent, liberal cities to the forests of the Redwoods you see the result of Democratic socialist agendas creating ruin and chaos by their tyrannical agendas…. America’s real enemy’s, are not foreign governments, they are the Democrats and Socialists destroying us from within….
These fires aren’t caused by global warming. The reason California has so many fires is they go months without rain every year. Everything dead dries up completely. Doesn’t matter if the temp is 1 or 2 degrees warmer. Everything will completely dry out.
No mention of Colorado at all Mish? Second largest wildfire (by area) in our history and the primary east-west corridor has been closed for two weeks.
The problem with California is that there was a very wet rainy season last year, which led to high brush growth. Doesn’t help that there hasn’t been much of a monsoonal flow this year so it’s very dry. Colorado’s snowpack ended the season slightly above average, in fact we had a brief period when none of the state was under a drought watch for the first time in about 10 years or so, so we aren’t too concerned about water restrictions this year, but now that it’s dry that isn’t doing us much good.
One other odd thing that happened this year was a very late season frost/freeze, which killed most of the flowers on the Palisade peach trees. I know my ornamental trees were starting to bud up right when it hit and I didn’t get any of the usual flowers this spring.
Actually, the central & northern parts of the state wound up with 25-50% less rainfall than average. The south mostly did much better in the 2019/2020 year.
Every year we seem the same stories about loss of houses, personal belongings, memories, etc. No one ever seems to learn from what went before. People have houses that are worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions but they won’t spend the $$ to protect the house in case of fire. Instead, they just whine on the media, time after time as the TV news shows their house and others burned to the ground.
If your house burns and you are going to rebuild, DON’T use wood! Maybe use stone and metal. Maybe put in a water tank or a large access to the main water line. Maybe build part of it in a cave.
And maybe build a fallout/fire shelter where you can store the important stuff in your life plus maybe save your family’s life if necessary.
I’m basically surrounded by fires but live in fairly populated metropolitan area. I’m calling the tree guy now to trim everything away from the house. At some point everything will have to be cut.
Yeap or the may drop your insurance.
Humm i have lived in idaho and now ca. This is what ive learned about fire in the west. The more it snows. The more it grows. The bigger it burns. Ca has the same problem most of the western us has. Warmer temps/ 80 yrs i believe it is of fire suppression/ forest cut then replanted with more trees than can support/ same species and age. / more people building in woods without proper zoning. Where i live get 55 in same as the southeast us It just falls from nov till may.
Be prepared to be put on tree guy’s waiting list. Maybe he will get to you in two or three months.
I ended up just hosing down the trees around the house for an hour. It was a nice rain shower for the kids as well. I really miss the rain.
For a longer-term perspective…
….This work estimates that approximately 1,800,000 ha of
California wildlands burned annually in the prehistoric period.
Our estimate of prehistoric annual area burned in California is
88% of the total annual wildfire area in the entire US during a
decade (1994–2004) characterized as ‘‘extreme’’ regarding
wildfires (Stephens and Ruth, 2005)…..
1.8 MM hectares is about 4.5 MM acres
The times we live in are the anomalous times when the impression that we have subdued nature to a manageable beast is being tested every year.
‘Severe inhumanity’: California prisons overwhelmed by Covid outbreaks and approaching fires
One of the reasons California has not had this level of damage in the past is that there is a wet season and a dry season, so that there usually are no storms to make lightning. I grew up in far northern California and only remember lightning a couple times till I was in my thirties. The further south the longer the dry season, though in the high Sierra and far south you can be affected by the monsoonal weather that is more typical of the desert southwest. As you get closer to Oregon you have a shorter dry season and longer wet, but the wet is just rain not thunderstorms.
So this is an anomaly that is maybe once in a lifetime, we see more news about it because the population is so much bigger now when it happens it affects millions rather than some remote area.
As for Wendmink’s snotty wrong filled post, California has not stopped all logging, just ended the most devastating poor forest practices, such as clear cutting in sensitive watersheds. “California has been a major producer of wood products since attaining statehood in 1850. It emerged as the Nation’s third leading softwood lumber-producing state in the 1940s, and since then has ranked second or third in the Nation, along with Oregon and Washington.” Currently #4.
Hey, Wendmink, maybe if the fascist right like you would just listen to your fuhrer and rake the frigging forest floor this would not be happening!
It is the strangest weather pattern in my 11 years here. Evidently the last time it happen was 2005. And then 1995 before that. A tropical depression in the pacific that is being held off by a high pressure system. We get the clouds but no rain and dry thunderstorms. It reminds me dry storms I’ve witnessed in the deserts ofnl north India and Arizona.
There is a ridge of high pressure that blocks Pacific systems that stretches from the Oregon coast all the way down to Mexico which is why California doesn’t get rain six months of the year. It goes away and storms out of the Gulf Alaska then swoop down from the north west, that is why northern California gets so much more rain. There was one rain guage in the mountains in my home county that got 366 inches of rain one year, 1973 was a very wet winter. They average close to 100 inches per year. South of about Big Sur though those storms do not go. So the south of the state the rains they get are monsoonal mostly. Tropical moist air sucked onto the continent from hot rising air over the deserts. Once every several years they will get a pineapple express from Hawaii that is a river of moisture that stretches thousands of miles, and those can hit as far north as Oregon, but they are a rainy season only affair, I have seen those dump up to 30 inches in a day and a half.
This recent dry lightning type activity is extremely rare. Mostly west coast meterology is easy to predict because it is a lot like clockwork. It has it’s exceptions like the ones I mentioned, but for the most part it varies little year to year.
That has not stopped that boob in the oval office from yet again reiterating his opinion that it is liberals in California failing to rake their forests that is the cause of the fires. How I ask can anyone with half a brain listen to the complete sewage coming out of that man’s mouth and go along with it, support him with a straight face? The GOP has set the bar low I understand that, but this?
THU, AUG 20TH, 2020 BY SEAN COLAROSSI
Trump Threatens To Withhold Fire Relief Funds As California Burns
WHAT KIND OF PRESIDENT would withhold emergency funds during a fire storm?
Does this make any of you proud because if it does then I am entirely justified in calling you by your real name….FASCISTS.
This is the same guy that built an 18 hole golf course on the coast of southern California and 9 holes fell into the ocean during construction. What do you expect.
The 1910 fire in north ID and western MT they were smart enough to learn something. After the fire they started logging the forest to build fire blocks. In the late 1960 CA stop all logging and now look what it’s doing. Stupid liberal DIMS can not learn anything. Something as simple as this and nope. I knew this was going to happen at some point.
Not arguing California isn’t ran by “Stupid liberal DIMS,” but things aren’t that easy.
No logged firebreak are near as wide and the freeway+business corridors along them, yet in the absolute bone dried out windtunnels of California, you have fires jumping half mile to mile wide freeway clearings as if they weren’t even there.
Instead, wildfires will burn for the same reason fossil fuels will be burned, regardless of what “Stupid liberal DIMS” may wish, think, opine and even do about it: Those things which can efficiently be burned, will be.
The fact that “we” have now learned to peck on a phone some Chinese guys built, doesn’t mean “we” are even remotely close to being able to do anything effective about large scale forces and events. All we ever achieve in attempting to “control” them, is letting them build up to ever more calamitous events.
Instead, what “we” need to do, is stop pretending we differ meaningfully from birds and bees, and just live with it as best we can: Sometimes, stuff burns, gets flooded, blown over, knocked down by earthquakes etc. Try getting out of the way of the worst, then either move somewhere calmer, or rebuild. In the latter case, with full awareness that our stuff will likely be burned out again.
A general rule for “dealing” with truly large and complex problems you don’t fully understand, is don’t! Instead, deal only with the specific symptoms, as they present themselves . Quit squandering massive resources trying to predict what may happen and then solving for those. And instead spend your limited resources on mitigating the ill effects of the events which actually did occur. To maximize your ability to do the latter, focus on flexibility, and on building very generalized cushions: Of water, food, fuels, and alternative locations etc. That way, when your world burns, you can cast off for somewhere less hot for awhile without too much difficulty in making the transition.
The ides behind logging is two fold. The fire breaks are the second line defense of the fire system. Logging and allowing the forest to have green undergrowth slows the fire growth and spread.
The fire is just a cleansing system that is needed for a healthy ecosystem. The problem is the lack smaller burns and logging fire prone areas to make the fires smaller when they do happen. This also helps the fire breaks work.
With manipulating any ecosystem we either have to make hard choices now or harder choices later. California like most political systems chooses later.
The REAL problem is in forest management the smart thing is to thin forests acre by acre so light hits the understory and keeps that green and healthy, but, it is not commercially viable to do it that way and not managing the forests at all is even worse. We do not need to rake the forests which by the way is just about the stupidest dumb assed things I have ever heard from anyone, but to thin the trees so it is not flamable in the first place. In California where the mountains are among the most rugged you will find on the planet and with such varying microclimates, logging roads are not economical to maintain. Especially when you are not clear cutting. To just take out a few trees per acre every year you are going to keep dirt roads functional? That cost can’t be offset by the profit from the trees you cut each year.
Helicopter removal would work but again not economical.
I know this stuff because I lived (born and raised) in one of the most rugged parts of far northern California near the coast. A dirt logging road one summer will not be there the next after the mountains get 100, 200, 300 inches of rain over the wet season. One year we had 366 inches of rain (930 CM for our imperial deprived friends) and cutting dirt logging roads that wash out in winter is a huge ecological shitstorm.
My grandfather was a logger, woodsman, used to ride on his Cat when he was cutting roads to get at old growth redwoods back when I was about 5 or 6, not long after Kennedy was shot. So much has changed, but people just do not understand how big the world is and how little area we actaully occupy. They do not understand that the region in question (western US over to about Denver and down to the old dustbowl) has undergone 5 MEGADROUGHTS over the last 50,000 years and which we are entering a new one. It has nothing to do with man made global warming but is a climate variation all it’s own, with well documented periodicity and effects. Google it.
Yes the news will say it is proof of global warming, total bullshit of course, the region undergoes this drying out like clockwork and everything burns up, then eventuall it ends and life spreads back to where it was.
Great comment, Stuki!