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Southern California Wildfires

tsywake

tsywake

Sheikh of Smoke
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I know a few posters are from or have family from the San Diego area. Hope you and your families are staying safe. Those fires are pretty damn impressive.

 
Saw some interesting research at Berkeley last week that looked at wildfire data to learn more about drought patterns in California. Bottom line was that the resulting drought data showed a pretty clear and stable trend, but the wildfire data that picture came from was really, really noisy. The researchers said that was essentially the nature of wildfire -- that no matter how good we get at preventative measures, it just takes one small slipup somewhere along the line and then 100,000 acres go up like a match.
 
We've really changed our tactics in the past few years, mostly due to studies like the one you mentioned. It's taken a long time for us to accept findings that go against the traditional ways that we were taught to fight fire. Its come as a necessity though, because we keep making the same mistakes and firefighters keep dying needlessly.

A big push out there now is to essentially accept that wildfires are going to happen, but work on ways of containment. It starts with development regulations, building fire breaks and containment lines, but they're expensive in an already incredibly expensive real estate area. Another, much cheaper part of that is educating homeowners to limit vegetation around their homes. Sure, it looks pretty having all those plants up next to your house, but when conditions are dry, they're like matchsticks. Keeping all plants 10ft or so away from the home vastly improves the survivability of the structure when the fire approaches. Wildfires are a natural occurrence, and no matter what, they're going to continue to happen. Its not such a big deal if the acreage is burned, as long as we can protect as many structures as possible.
 
The heat has been brutal. What a lot of people don't realize is how open most of CA is. There isn't much in many of the hills to stop a fire.

Another unusual factor is hills go right up to the beach in many areas. You can go from 500+' above sea level to the beach in almost no time.
 
RJKarl said:
The heat has been brutal. What a lot of people don't realize is how open most of CA is. There isn't much in many of the hills to stop a fire.

Another unusual factor is hills go right up to the beach in many areas. You can go from 500+' above sea level to the beach in almost no time.
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Adding onto that, many of the neighborhood roads are narrow with steep grades. Trying to move apparatus of any size into the more remote areas are problematic.
 
RJKarl said:
The heat has been brutal. What a lot of people don't realize is how open most of CA is. There isn't much in many of the hills to stop a fire.

Another unusual factor is hills go right up to the beach in many areas. You can go from 500+' above sea level to the beach in almost no time.
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Yeah, this. Besides the Bay Area and Socal, there's an amazing amount of nothing in CA.
 
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bigdoublezero said:
Yeah, this. Besides the Bay Area and Socal, there's an amazing amount of nothing in CA.
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You can be in the middle of nowhere in about 45-60 minutes in almost any direction (other than west-you'd get wet).

You can go about 30-45 minutes from here to the Ortega Highway and be in the middle of nowhere. It's a wild ride out to Lake Elsinore. They had a huge fire up in those hills about 10-15 years ago. The Air force and Navy had to use their choppers to drop tons of water. There was no other way to fight the fire in some places.
 
RJKarl said:
Along these lines, about five years ago there was a fire in SD. It encircled a casino. The fire marshal set up rules that you couldn't drink or smoke in the casino for a couple of days. He was afraid would try to leave.
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Incredulity.jpg
 
I was out there last week (just North of SD). It was mid-sixties and just perfect. Amazing how quickly temps can change. Really unfortunate.
 
As Lewis Black says, the best job in the country is being the weatherman at a network TV station in SD. You make $500,000/year and your job 96% of the time is saying,"It's going to be nice tomorrow."
 
Also, looks like these DC-10 pictures are from Aug 2013 from what I'm seeing.
 
It really has been crazy hot, coming home in my 2nd story apartment in the corner of a building where no air comes through at like 6:30 was brutal last night. No ac in my place
 
So many props to the firefighters out there this week. It's been hot as hell. Woke up to smoke blanketing southern OC this morning that had drifted up from SD. Kids at school had to stay inside because the air was nasty as hell. Not sure if any of these were set intentionally but I think arson that causes wildfires is a seriously horrible crime. Not only endangering property but so many fire fighters lives.

Posted this pic on the chat thread the other night but most probably didn't see it. Here is a chopper dropping water on a brush fire behind my house on Monday. Was pretty impressive and they did a fantastic job stopping the fire before it could explode thank goodness.

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