It was a beautiful afternoon. That ended quickly. The sunny day became a sun we can’t see anymore. We’re nowhere near the flames, which are going up mostly on federal lands, but when you’re dealing with so many fires and three of which spanning a combined 550,000 acres (850 square miles) you don’t have to be. The wind that was annoying us earlier by rattling doors and shades was apparently enough to bring it here.
I had to take my contacts out because my eyes sting. Our noses are stuffed up. I took the dog for a walk and half an hour left me winded. Cigarettes are hardly necessary. I’m getting a headache.
Living out here, we’re immune from hurricanes. Tornadoes aren’t much of a concern. Earthquakes are a possibility but nothing of grand consequence. Even blizzards are rare. But everywhere is vulnerable for something.
I washed the cars just yesterday. I’d thought to myself “They’ve halted the work next door, apparently. It’s been a while since we’ve had a fire. The cars are all covered with… stuff.”
Murphy messed up. When you wash your car, it’s supposed to rain.
We have fire. And flood, and earthquakes. Tornadoes are pretty rare, though… and as yet no hurricanes or cyclones.
We got that crazy wind storm, though. 70mph winds are not something we build for.
Yet people still choose to live in California.
Well, that’s because I’m here, and I’m awesome.
Makes me glad to live in pittsburgh. nearly the safest place in the nation.
I am told that a perverse incentive exists to allow acerage in fires to expand before the fire is contained and extinguished. Budgeting for USFD fire departments is based upon last year’s level of activity on the theory that what was done last year is an indicator of what will need to be done next year, and the unit of measurement is the number of acres burned.
Anyway, that’s how rumor has it. I don’t know if it’s true.
But if it’s true, the result would be lots of burning in mostly-uninhabited areas, with structures preserved and people evacuated, and some tut-tutting about how fire is part of the natural cycle of the forest’s existence. This in turn is a true, but deceptive, observation. In pre-industrial eras, it’s doubtful that forests were managed the way they are today, creating large stockpiles of fuel in a drying, warming world.
My understanding is fires used to be more frequent but smaller. They would take out the underbrush and leave the big trees because they could withstand the lower flames.
Much of the western forests used to be park-like — mature trees and grassy ground cover. I used to have, but have misplaced, a link to a project in which a professor was identifying exact locations in old pictures and taking new pictures from the same spot in order to compare forest structure. The results were really amazing. Then, fully mature trees and grass; now, overgrown masses of stunted trees and bushes. The generally accepted model is that back then, ground fires would occur every few years, burning off the dead grass stems, pine needles, and fallen branches. The pattern persisted long enough that some species of tree evolved to require fire-level temperatures to open the pine cones and spread seeds.
Overgrown forests are one of the contributing causes to the spread of various beetles throughout the West and the resulting large areas of beetle-killed timber. I am very much afraid that this year’s fires are only a warning of what’s to come. And the western US states are relative pikers compared to the areas of beetle-kill across the border in Canada. BC has, by some estimates, 35 million acres of dead trees waiting to go up.