The Core

Ice cream consumption is way up nationally and I think our household may be single-handedly responsible for 0.01% of the increase. I believe it helps considerable offset the health effects of Covid mania and smokey air.

Do you have a good air filter? Or a few of them? This time around it hasn't been so bad, but there have been times where we've fun a filter and thought, "It's not so bad," and the you step outside.

Currently, the PM2.5 is not too bad here (in the 20s on most monitors), but visually it seems pretty smoky.

Just think what California will be like if we ever get back to the pre-1800 levels of fire. We'll probably never see that again, but we're going to need a lot more fire over the next 20-30 years, so what we're seeing these last few days is likely to be typical skies for much of the summer in the future as it was in the past. I doubt there's the political will to burn as much as we need to, but I see a big change since I first started doing fire education talks 10 years ago and now. People are starting to realize that we can't suppress our way out of this.

>“I look outside and I go, ‘Oh geez, it smells like smoke, dammit.”

We get some pretty decent smoke blowing through here most years from fires in the middle of the state. If I can look down the road and see Mt. Spokane I know it isn't too bad. If I can't see the mountain I know the air quality is bad.

Or if I fire up the smoker and can't distinguish the good smoke coming from there vs. the bad smoke in the air I know it is bad.

Wildfires Hasten Another Climate Crisis: Homeowners Who Can’t Get Insurance

Insurers, facing huge losses, have been pulling back from fire-prone areas across California. “The marketplace has largely collapsed,” an advocate for counties in the state said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/climate/wildfires-insurance.html

The result is a dilemma for governments. Either let rates rise, squeezing homeowners, or take the chance that more insurers will pull back from vulnerable areas, as many across the West are doing already. Without insurance, banks won’t issue mortgages, making homes harder to buy or sell.

The challenges are especially pronounced in California, where regulations lean toward consumer protection. The state forbids insurance companies from setting rates based on what they expect in future damages. Insurers are allowed to set rates only based on prior losses.

Regulators also forbid insurers from passing along the costs of buying their own insurance, which they do to soften the blow of unexpectedly big losses. As wildfires get worse, those costs for insurers are going up as well.

Both rules were designed to guard against higher rates. But in the age of climate change, insurers say those rules have prevented them from keeping up with wildfire damage.

My insurance costs about 1.4% of the cost to rebuild my home - as a homeowner, that seems high, but if I look at it from the perspective of an insurer, that seems low. Short of major changes in the way people view fire, manage forests, set air quality rules in California cities, determine responsibility for fires and so forth, I can't imagine my house lasting 71 years without being destroyed by fire.

Is there a recent previous burn in between you and the fire that might act as a buffer?

That footage is incredible.

For those who don't know, we are having a heat wave at the same time making it very dangerous for the fire fighters.  The local temperature hit 107°F/41.67°C today. 

>>we are having a heat wave at the same time making it very dangerous for the fire fighters

I was just talking to a friend who is one of the NPS people involved with the fire response and he said one of the fire chiefs said, "It's going to be a wild ride for a few days." Resources are stretched thin, the terrain is very rugged (yesterday the fire was burning from 3000 feet to 9000 feet), the foliage humidity levels are extremely low, there are record temperatures and there are winds.

This fire was at a reported 50,000 acres, but satellite imagery suggests more like 100,000 acres and they have 450 firefighters and 12 engines.  So for 150 square miles, and rapidly becoming 200, they have basically three firefighters per square mile. It's not become a Type 1 incident, which means resources will be flowing in rapidly especially as the other big fires are winding down, but usually they don't make much headway on a fire like this until they get to about 3000 firefighters and 50 aircraft. With anything under 1000, they are just trying to save lives and protect critical infrastructure.

And... everyone south of us is on evacuation watch. We're on the border. I spent the day leafblowing the roof, gutters, any corners where things accumulate, cutting brush that I've been planning to cut for a month. I'm not worried, since we're pretty well protected because of recent fires, but those are all things that I should be doing monthly anyway, so why not now.