The Core

>I think I'd lose it.

It is pretty hard on the kids.

>move in here tonight and tomorrow.

Get your air filters/purifiers ready.


Thanks for posting zoom.earth Ergo.  I'll be sharing that.

>>Cali's old fire/dry history EG posted

This article does a good job of explaining how the climate problem interfaces with the legacy problems caused by mismanagement.
https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/marek-warszawski/article245573785.html

Also, this is interesting from one of the smaller fires in the park

The fire has a 70% active perimeter burning in pockets of accumulated dead and down logs and is creeping and backing with isolated single tree torching along the active perimeter. When conditions are favorable, firing operations are occurring to help bring the fire’s edge to natural containment lines. Fire crews are utilizing unmanned aircraft systems for aerial reconnaissance and mapping, infrared detection (IR), and aerial ignition. This type of aerial ignition aids fire personnel by gaining depth along natural containment lines in areas otherwise too dangerous for firefighters to hike.

In other words, they are flying drones with incendiary devices and dropping them in areas where they think it would be too dangerous to send in a fire crew with drip torches.

I know a friend who was on a helitack crew sometimes got to man the ping-pong ball machine gun, where they fly over and launch ping-pong-ball-sized incendiary devices along the burn line, but that is obviously expensive and it doesn't work during an inversion because you don't have the visibility to safely fly manned aircraft (let alone launch incendiary devices without being able to see where they are going).

But you have to realize that this is over hundreds of thousands of acres. I doubt there's enough electricity in the grid to handle that.

This is why, for the most part, they don't use water to fight wildfires except for the occasional hotspot. There's just no way to deliver enough water or retardant to make a big difference. Those giant drops are merely to cool down the hottest spots so the hand crews can get in there to dig lines and conduct "firing operations."

There's no magical technology that does much on a wildfire.

So a fire during a temperature inversion is basically a giant vacuum bomb. It starves itself of oxygen and slows itself down. The bad part of that is the smoke is so heavy that you can't bring in air support.

But let's say your vacuum bomb works, or maybe a massive nitrogen bomb that pulls all the O2 out of the air. You have to realize that the fire area is still chock full of animals and sometimes people.

People see the dramatic images and they really misunderstand what is happening. There are two things to know about these images.
1. They are cherry-picking the absolute hottest parts of the fire.
2. Look closely. Many of these are taken in relatively low light. It makes it look like the fires of Hell, but these are relatively long exposures.

It is true that fires will sometimes make long, hot runs. But if you hike through a burn area shortly after a fire, what you'll see is
 - large areas where all the big timber is still standing
 - relatively small areas of total devastation, which are always the ones that show up in the news pictures.

The giant fire that almost took out our house in 2018 had frightening photo after frightening photo in the news, but about 90% of the burn area was low-intensity.

Then there's the more germane problem. We do want to protect lives, property and infrastructure, but we do NOT want to put these fires out quickly. The simple fact is that even this year California will not burn enough to even reach historical burn averages that were typical for thousands of years before the era of fire suppression.

Why do we want these to burn?

Selfish reason: low-intensity burns often are better than high-intensity burns rarely. Low-intensity burns do almost no damage to life, property or infrastructure. You can outwalk them if you have to. Easily. They might take a month to grow to 10,000 acres.

Eco reasons
 - many species in the Western US depend on fires. Locally, that would be giant sequoias, knobcone pine, golden eardrops, congdon's sedge and many, many more. Without fire, these species literally would go extinct.
 - fires create open areas that allow other species to thrive. After our fires, where the forests opened up, we had huge blankets of hyacinth (unbelievably beautiful), star tulip, pretty face and others.
 - these blooms create all kinds of seed crops for songbirds and small critters who then support the larger predators.
 - the "fire followers" are essential for supporting other animal populations. Studies in Montana have shown that, "on winter ranges where fires have not burned for more than 20 years, an acre of winter range will typically yield from 30 to 120 pounds of forage [for elk]. On winter ranges that burned in the last year or two, however, the production typically jumps to 200 to 3000 pounds of forage per acre—over a 20-fold increase in forage production."

We actually need MORE fire in California and the Western US, not less. But we need more of the fire that helps protect us. As an index, we typically burn about 1-2 million acres per year in California. This year has broken the record and it goes down with 2003 as the only year in recorded history when we will burn 2 million acres. This year we could hit three million by the time we see the first rains.

But for perspective, before 1800, and AVERAGE year, not a record, was 4.5 million acres. So double our *record* year. But, and here's a critical piece, roughly 50% of that was intentional burning by Indians (and yes, our local tribal council asks that we use their tribal name or call them Indians, not Native American, First Nations or whatever). The Indians, of course, did not have aircraft and fire engines, so they protected their homes in the obvious way. They burned around their homes every year. This they did not just for safety, but because it encourages the growth of oak trees (their major food source, over half their calories), dogbane (necessary for making thread/rope they usef to make baskets which, in turn, were necessary for collecting, storing and cooking food), and just in general promoted meadows, which support populations of game animals and, as we might say today, are the repositories of diversity in the eco-system.

So in short, not only do we not have the magical technology tool for putting out fires, we don't even WANT it. What we want and need is
 - much more fire in California. Fire ecologists estimate we have to burn at least 20,000,000 acres in the next few years to get on top of our problem
 - more human-started, low-intensity fire in general
 - and maybe some great new tech that would make protecting infrastructure and property easier.

I have mixed feelings about the last one. If we get too good at that, it just convinces more fools like me to build in high-fire areas. I was so ill-educated on fire when I moved here over 17 years ago. Totally clueless.

>>We have to stop permitting new homes being built and rebuilding homes that burn.

Yes, we are facing a crisis similar to flood insurance, which only exists because it has been propped up by the feds.

Of course, the problem is that most of the land in the West *is* high-fire-risk. There are, of course, places like San Fran that have been rendered less risky with massive amounts of concrete. But there is almost nowhere in California that is naturally low-risk for fire.

The alternative is to approach rural building like we do urban building. It used to be that cities burned all the time - San Francisco, Chicago, London, Geneva, and many others all burned down at one time or another. Then we created codes that make it harder for cities to burn down.

The talk in the fire community is "resilient landscapes." With a combination of intelligent building codes and tightly enforced fire clearance codes, you could make it so that a fire can sweep through an area and not do major damage. That is how the Indians managed the land.

There are obstacles there too. For example, it means no trees in your yard within 60 feet of the house, and no dense trees within 100 feet. It means that the 10 feet or so around your house must have no growing things, no firewood storage, no gas or snowblower or lawnmower storage. On small lots, that means no trees in a whole subdivision. People really hate that. They dream of a mountain home surrounded by pine trees, but that's the sort of thing that only made sense for about 50 to 100 years of human history, and those years are over.

Then the enforcement end is hard too. It's private property and as it stands right now, authorities do not have the right to "search" a property for violations without a warrant. So there are actual constitutional issues there.

And there's just the cultural problem. The Rough Fire took place in an area for which I was doing marketing at the time. One of the hotels was destroyed (not one of ours) and the owner was irate. He said firefighters with engines sat there and watched it burn and did nothing to save it.

The thing is, I had driven by there a month earlier and said to my wife, "If a fire come, that guy is f###ed." He had massive amounts of uncleared brush. There was no way to get a fire team in there, but he had the utterly unrealistic expectation that despite is gross (in fact, criminal under California code) negligence, he still had the right to ask firefighters to risk their lives.

People have completely irrational views. I have a neighbor who told me that "we always do the right thing and rake up our pine needles" and she had trees *touching* the house on three sides.

A second-home owner told me that all he sees in the city is concrete and that he would rather have his second home burn down than cut down the trees touching his house. He doesn't realize it's like the herd immunity problem. If 20% of the homeowners think like him, we're all at risk.

And then there's me. I have one of the most protected houses in the neighborhood (I would have said the most, but after all the bark beetle dieoff, a couple of the worst houses are among the best, having lost 69 trees on a quarter acre in one case). I still have three trees. They are all limbed very high off the ground and set off a long distance from other trees. And honestly, if every lot looked like that, we would be fairly fire safe. But it is both logistically and emotionally hard to drop a perfectly healthy 140-foot high tree because it might catch on fire some day.

So I think like many of our problems, it is solvable, but we lack the political will to make the hard choices we need to make to solve it. And even if we did have the will, it would take time. If we took every measure we could today, the fire problem in the West is going to get worse for the next 20 years. No way out of that.

Actually, the insurance industry is where all the enforcement is. It is the only weapon in the arsenal right now.

I think there should be some areas designated, and I live in one of them, where in event of a total loss, insurance pays out cash, but does not cover rebuilding.

The part I haven't worked out, though, is what happens in a community like mine if 150 houses get wiped out and 50 are still standing? We already have extremely high costs for water and sewer and such. If you take away 75% of the rate payers, what happens to the remaining 25%? At a certain threshold, you would have to effectively condemn an entire community, even though there might be dozens or hundreds of undamaged houses still standing.

People just don't get it.

Almost every day, North Lake Tahoe’s emergency dispatch sends fire crews to put out bonfires on the beach, charcoal grills in residential neighborhoods or campfires smoldering beneath towering pine trees.

In a single week in the middle of August — when a lightning storm ignited wildfires across the state — 15 wildfires were reported to the U.S. Forest Service in Lake Tahoe. Of those 15 fires, 11 were caused by humans and four from lightning.

https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/Tahoe-emergency-crews-respond-illegal-fires-15533700.php

>>500

We had a couple days like that. It's brutal. Right now we're 229 mcg/m^3, which is about a 285 AQI. Not 500, but not a festival either.