CA Wildfires

Martin Riddle martin snipped-for-privacy@verizon.net posted to sci.electronics.design:

Fire breaks don't mean much in 30+ mph winds.

Yep, we have Wisconsin for that.

Tim

-- Deep Fryer: A very philosophical monk. Website @

Both the Cedar Fire in 2003 and the Witch Fire this week jumped I-15,

Best left to the folks who know how to do this and have the suppression equipment. If the fire gets out of hand, things go wrong very quickly. There's still lots of brush to go up in flames around here, even after our 240000 acre (97000 hectare = 960000 farthingdales) fire a few months ago. Our government agencies don't do enough proactive stuff because there is risk which means if something goes wrong, someone looses a job. We have had controlled burns get out of hand before. Thus, from a job risk management point, it's better to not to do anything and get lots of praises how well everybody did fighting the conflagration.

Mark

The green fairies here in AZ won't even allow controlled burns or clear cutting in very remote areas of the state.

Thus, like in the past few years, a big fire takes out half our forested areas.

...Jim Thompson

Nope, not this round. If I was still in Irvine, I would have a great view of the Santiago fire, and I looked at a lot houses up there in foothill ranch. I also worked on the Foothill toll road that the fire is buring around.

For the bad days, here in the desert, the weather was beautiful. No wind, warm but not hot, dry, just gorgeous. I invited any of my co-workers that needed clean air to take a drive on out, but got no takers. Wednesday, went up on the tram, and could just see the smoke of the Arrowhead and running springs fires.

Yesterday, it got a little gray in the afternoon, and today we can smell it, but it isn't too bad. It was last year that we had fires out in this area, but even then, we are in true desert. There isn't enough to burn out here to really get a good firestorm started.

Charlie

The smoke reached Phoenix on Wednesday.

...Jim Thompson

You should have got a juicer and bottled it. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Charlie Edmondson wrote in news:472246cf$ snipped-for-privacy@news.cadence.com:

snipped for brevity.

One more thing they could add to homes is a fire suppression system to the roof;sprinklers to give a full coverage of the roof and eaves(IOW,all vulnerable areas),also somewhat cooling the air around the home. Maybe make it temp activated. Then the residents could even evacuate and still have the sprinkers come on or continue running,protecting their home.

Maybe they could use their swimming pool as a backup water source.

Rich Grise snipped-for-privacy@example.net posted to sci.electronics.design:

That is interesting, but what fascinates me is the people that rebuilt from the 2003 fire in the same stupid way and got burned again. I doubt that they can get fire insurance now (at a price less than 30% of structure value per year). Another pet peeve of mine is that many of them will expect Government bailout for their blatant stupidity.

John Larkin snipped-for-privacy@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com posted to sci.electronics.design:

Awwww. Even with the sky high property prices and labor rates, not even a little shaking and baking will deter them, because the weather is so fine the rest of the time.

It's not just the weather. California is a great place to be weird.

John

...

What _really_ cheeses me off is that they'll get away with it! >:-[

Thanks, Rich

I live close to both the 2003 Cedar Fire and the 2007 Witch Fire in San Diego County. To the best of my knowledge, there were no replacemen houses for 2003 losses that were burned this time. Do you have an example?

Heck, fighting a fire for a week or two might just cure them.

John

At least they're using thousands of prison inmates to fight the fires.. but too bad they exclude arsonists, that's just mean of them.

In Australia, certainly in areas like the California fires, not having a built in sprinkler system on the roof, firebreak walls constructed of adobe or brick, a firebreak would be considered to be asking for trouble. Also it is fairly common for every able bodied male to be a member of the CFA (Country Fire Authority), which is a volunteer fire service with a truck in ever country town of the state. If a fire gets started a bell rings in town and a fire crew then heads to the truck and then off to the fire. A lot of farmers have a tanker which can be placed on a tray truck etc. In short every on is prepared and involved with dealing with fire. I never remember a compulsory evacuation because if you are well prepared your house should not get burnt. No matter how big the fire. If you have 200 foot trees 10 feet from your house occasionally these will fall over but again, this is just not planning ahead. In my viewing of the news it seems like everyone was surprised that these fires were going to cause a problem. The problem was that no one had any idea how to deal with wildfire and how to plan for it.

Andrew

Well Andrew you have hit the nail on the head.

We have a remedial society in the USA.

No one wants to think about any kind of problem before it happens, but there is always someone else's money to fix it later.

Education, health care, jobs, you name it.

The current state of the economy is also victim to this way of thinking.

Now if you ask what people want to do about their retirement, they get interested about doing something today, because they know the government will do little or nothing to help their future.

Then the government is surprised that millions of boomers will be asking for the promised social security they have been paying into.

But as we all know social security is just another tax with a fancy name and a broken promise behind it.

This is a problem for both parties here in the US.

don

The California situation is different. Enormous areas are heavily loaded with trees and brush. It rains in the winter and we get essentially zero precip from April to November, and most of the grass and brush goes to seed and dies and turns light brown (hence the name "Golden State".) The prevailing wind is off the Pacific, cool and damp, but about this time of year we can get hot, near zero-humidity winds from the east, the Santa Annas, peaking near 100 mph.

People have been building houses in the woods, on ridges, and in canyons. Firebreaks are impossible, and fires of this magnitude spread faster than a person can run and easily jump freeways. The fires are natural, and are bigger but less frequent when small fires are put out. The houses just were built in harm's way.

I suppose putting out the small fires is somewhat offset by the increased human-created ignition sources, so that sorta cancels out.

And speaking of Australia, the non-California-native eucalyptus trees are everywhere here and are major fire hazards. They cover the ground with flammable bark litter, and the trees practically explode when they burn. The native California trees don't do this; many survive fires, and in fact depend on them to eliminate competition and parasites.

Some things just happen, and can't be prevented, and there's nobody to blame.

John