Wishing the best for all you SoCal APUG'ers, hope you're all safe
So Cal fires
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+1 !!
I can smell it from here and I am 22 miles away.
Going to be a whole lot of unlucky people driving home from work finding no house. There are some fast moving fires out there.
If I learned one thing in the Napa fires it's that 22 miles is not very far, be safe.
I see this on TV. Mind boggling how fast this happens. We have grass fires in Iowa, remnant prairie fires. Nothing like what happens in the West. Hoping for the best.
Mike
Mike
Santa Rosa fire was about 70 miles away, Napa/Sonoma was about 50 miles away, we had smoke obscure the sun, and could smell it and have ash land on parked cars!
November - February fires in the hills surrounding LA seemed to occur like clockwork when I was a kid.
In the early 1960's, from Venice, I could see the distant Bel Air fire which lit up the hills in a bright glowing ring. It was a major event.
Sorry for those affected. Houses and some possessions can be replaced; lives and photos cannot.
In the early 1960's, from Venice, I could see the distant Bel Air fire which lit up the hills in a bright glowing ring. It was a major event.
Sorry for those affected. Houses and some possessions can be replaced; lives and photos cannot.
In the summer of 1970 we had a wind like this one and a fire started in the north side of the San Fernando Valley [near Sylmar] and I witnessed the fire cross the valley floor at 35 mph. The fire engines would barely drive that fast and certainly could not deploy ahead. The fire crossed over 15 miles of flat valley floor and spread to the Santa Monica mountains. The fire burned to Malibu and the Pacific Ocean stopped its forward progress.
Be safe, friends, and don't forget to pack your pets if you have to leave.
Stay safe, and be prepared to go if you're anywhere near them.
I’m working on the Napa fire cleanup right now, it’s hard to imagine what these people are going through after loosing everything. I know I would be devestated if it happened to me. There’s virtually nothing left that’s salvageable. Many people keep a few bags packed with irreplaceable things like family photos so they can just grab it and go.
It is about 4 miles north of my place [in the flats south of UCLA]. It is about 2 miles west of where I owned a house for 25 years in Beverly Glen. These home are very expensive and the people keep the brush cleared so these fires have to be arson.
The smoke is rising so it is terrain driven today unlike yesterday which was wind driven.
The smoke is rising so it is terrain driven today unlike yesterday which was wind driven.
Not necessarily arson...high winds send burning embers flying long distances. We were just up in the Tubbs fire area (Santa Rosa, CA) and in spite of considerable spacing between homes in the upper scale Fountaingrove development the homes were wiped out, whereas the Coffey Park area was densely developed blue collar neighborhood; yet each of the two areas had about 1500 homes destroyed. And in the more rural areas, large expanses of land would be untouched, and then you see pockets of devastation with clusters of homes burned to the ground.
I drove through the BelAir fire this morning, when it was still rather small. Now it has grown and consumed 4 or 6 homes (mansions). Not too sure how I'll get home since the freeway is still closed... a minor inconvenience compared to those evacuated or directly involved.
In this situation, the fire appears to have started at the freeway. Perhaps too far for a flying ember, but there hasn't been any news that I've heard speculating a nefarious cause.
You would be surprized at the distances for 'spotting'.
One person writes: "The 2009 bush fires in Victoria, Australia had embers spotting 10 - 20km ahead of the fire front. As a firefighter in Queensland, Australia we study those fires a lot as a worse case scenario. Personally, I have seen embers only flying and lighting up at around 300m. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires "
From this academic paper https://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/weise/psw_2010_weise(koo)001.pdf
"Strong convective columns and fire whirls are more common in large-scale fires such as forest fires. Therefore spot fire distance becomes more important in forest fires and wildland–urban interface fires. In these kinds of fires, spotting distance can be on the order of kilometres..... In the 1991 Oakland Hills Fire, a firebrand, shown in Fig. 8, that was found ,1 km west from the perimeter of the fire may have travelled several kilometres."
In another academic paper www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/6/6/177/pdf
"As reported by Ellis [9], the Ash Wednesday fires in Australia, which occurred on the 16th of February 1983, produced spotting distances of between 5 and 12 km, with the most extreme incident measured being 25 km from the primary fire."
Both the SoCal fires currently raging, and the NorCal fires of October have 70 mph winds in common!
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Fascinating information. Thanks!
And, yes, I was surprised.
And, yes, I was surprised.
A careless driver chucking burning cigarette that can be carried over to the brushes by the wind will start raging fire in no time. Even a hot car engine can start a fire. I have personally seen a semi going off the road in front of me as it ignited the dry grass underneath it somewhere by Route 5 many years ago.
The fire started next to the freeway where to bush was completely cleared so someone had to set it.
Today the air quality was so bad that if one walked around outside their teeth got gritty from the soot.
You should contact the authorities immediately and let them know because as of 10 minutes ago they say “The cause of the fire is unknown.”
My sympathies. Things look really bad. It makes you appreciate what a benign part of the planet this island called the U.K. is
pentaxuser
pentaxuser
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I've lived through several fires of this magnitude. The Forest Service calls for a twenty-foot wide clearance perimeter around structures. Twenty miles would be more realistic. The current fire in the Santa Barbara hills is right on schedule. Calif. brush takes about forty years to mature after a fire, then it is ripe to burn again. What is different now is that there is a greater degree of suburbanization into the woods, as well as a greatly extended fire season due to climate change. And for millennia, the Calif. Indians used fire on an annual basis to keep meadows and trails open. Once that stopped, tinder heavily built up, and now fires burn much more catastrophically. Then in the mid-level elevations of the Sierra, just like other vast tracts of western North America, there are millions of dead pines due to the pine beetle epidemic - a stunning proof of global warming, and a giant fire hazard monster.
Brian, you were wrong and I was right. It started in a homeless encampment. When fires start in carefully tended and watched areas, they are almost always set. When fires start in very empty areas they are usually from power lines followed by hunters, campers or smokers. Those usually do not start from embers. There is not a lot of spontaneous combustion.
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