I saw a show on TV
called Live Rescue
about a month ago
that featured
firefighters
photographed
live in action,
fighting California
wildfires.
Live action was
fighting California
wildfires.
Live action was
much better than
fake stunts
in a movie.
I actually felt sorry
for the firemen,
working long hours,
completely defeated
by high winds,
much of the time.
much of the time.
I've seen some large
fires in New York,
as a teen -- we drove
to fires, as our
"entertainment"
when large old wood
structure hotels
had "going out
of business" fires,
right after the busy
summer season ended!
But there were no
high winds like
the California
wildfires.
California's 2019
wildfire season
is usually said to last
until winter begins,
but the next month
is usually not too busy.
Winter is when
about 90%
of the state’s
rain and snow falls.
The state’s bone-dry season
was delayed in 2019, but it
was not eliminated.
Very low humidity levels
combined with high winds
rolling down mountain sides
-- the “Santa Ana” winds
in Southern California,
and the “Diablos”
in the north --
remain a threat
for wildfires this year.
About 163,000 acres
burned so far in 2019,
versus 632,000
in the same period
last year.
Last year a wet, snowy winter
led to a widespread greening
in the spring, which became
tinder after a hot, dry summer.
PG&E Corp.
is "suggesting"
its blackout of
2 million people
earlier this month
may have helped.
PG&E crews inspecting
more than 27,500 miles
(44,257 kilometers)
of power lines,
after the blackout,
found wind damage
that included trees
tangled with power lines
and utility poles
knocked to the ground,
according to spokesman
Jeff Smith.
After the cutoffs,
PG&E found
more than
100 instances
of wind-driven e
quipment damage
that could have
caused fires.
More than 100 !
That just means
trees are too close
to the wires, and
only fixing that
will solve
the problem --
cutting electric power
is an unpopular "crutch",
but may be around
for a long time.
“Had we not shut off power,
this type of damage
could have sparked a fire,”
PG&E Chief Executive Officer
Bill Johnson said in
an opinion story in the
San Francisco Chronicle.
“In fact, vegetation
contacting lines
was the very cause
of a number of fires
in the North Bay
two years ago.”
This year
serious heat
didn't show up
until August.
That helped.
In December 2017,
the Thomas fire covered
281,893 acres in Ventura
and Santa Barbara counties,
destroying more than
1,000 structures.
There are
147 million
dead trees
still standing
in California’s
forests
that were
killed by
a six-year
drought earlier
in the decade and
infestations of
bark beetles.
That's an accident, or two,
waiting to happen, probably
next year.
The 2018 fire hitting Paradise,
California, killed 85 people
-- the deadliest and
most destructive wildfire
in the state’s history.
“The reason
these wildfires
have worsened
is because of
climate change,”
said Leonardo DiCaprio.
“This is what
climate change
looks like,”
said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Two nitwits.
President Donald Trump tweeted,
“The Governor of California,
@GavinNewsom, has done
a terrible job of forest management,”
And Trump was right.
Dr. Jon Keeley, a US
Geological Survey scientist
who has researched the topic
for 40 years, thought
the 2018 Paradise fire
had nothing to do
with climate change.
“It’s almost certainly
not climate change,”
he said.
“We’ve looked at the history
of climate and fire
throughout the whole state,
and through much of the state,
particularly the western half
of the state, we don’t see
any relationship between
past climates and the
amount of area burned
in any given year.”
“The media haven’t gotten
the idea that we have
two very different
fire problems,”
Keeley said.
“And so the politicians
haven’t been reading
about the two very different
problems.”
The first is the
wind-driven fires
on coastal shrub land,
or chaparral, where most
of the houses are.
Think Malibu and Oakland.
Nineteen of the state’s
20 most deadly and
costly fires were there.
The second is the forest fires
in places like the Sierra Nevadas
where there are far fewer people.
Mountain ecosystems
have the opposite problem
from coastal ones.
There are too many fires
in the shrub lands and too few
prescribed burns in the Sierras.
Keeley refers to the Sierra fires
as “fuel-dominated” and
the shrub land fires as
“wind-dominated.”
The on solution
to fires in the shrub land
is to prevent them and/or
harden homes and
buildings to them.
Before Europeans arrived,
fires burned up woody biomass
in forests every 10 to 20 years,
preventing the accumulation of
(wood) fuel, and burned i
n the shrub lands
every 50 to 120 years.
But for
the last 100 years,
the US Forest
Service (USFS),
and other agencies
put out most fires,
resulting in the
accumulation
of wood fuel.
The result can be fires
that burn so hot
they sometimes kill
the forest, turning it
into shrub land.
Keeley published a paper
last year that found
that all ignition sources
of fires had declined
except for power lines.
“Since the year 2000
there’ve been
a half-million acres
burned due to
powerline-ignited
fires, which is
five times more
than we saw in the
previous 20 years,”
he said.
“If you recognize that 100%
of these [shrub land] fires
are started by people,
and you add 6 million people
[since 2000], that’s a good
explanation for why
we’re getting more
and more of these fires,”
said Keeley.
“I don’t think
the president is wrong
about the need
to better manage,”
said Keeley.
“I don’t know if you
want to call it ‘mismanaged’
but they’ve been managed
in a way that has allowed
the fire problem to get worse.”
In 2017, Keeley and a team
of scientists modeled 37 different
regions across the US and found
"humans may
not only influence
fire regimes
but their presence
can actually override,
or swamp out,
the effects of climate.”
Of the 10 variables,
the scientists explored,
“none were
as significantly
significant
… as the
anthropogenic
variables.”
“Climate captures attention.
I can even see it
in the scientific literature.
Some of our most
high-profile journals
will publish papers
that I think
are marginal.
But because they find climate
to be an important driver
of some change, they give
preference to them.
It captures attention.”