American Thinker- According to the Cal Fire Current Year Statistics reported on their fire.ca.gov web page, the Combined 2020 Year-to-Date CAL FIRE & U.S. Forest Service (in California) acreage burned, as of 31 August is 1,666,286.
There have been an extremely high number of lightning strikes this year.
In 2018, the “Camp Fire Creek” fire in Paradise, California resulted in 85 deaths. The origin of the fire was placed on a downed electrical transmission line. Pacific Gas & Electric was deemed culpable since their power lines were 68 years old, and the average lifespan is supposedly 65 years. Little was said about government policies of allowing the “fuel for these fires” to accumulate rather than maintaining a proper cleared transmission line right-of-way to avoid such fires.
Total acreage burned in California that year was 1,671,203. With the current fires raging now and others when the dry Santa Ana winds hit soon, 2018’s record will be surpassed easily. Read more
Wow – and we have only noticed the smoke in most areas after August 31. It’s really bad.
Here’s a good information page: https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/
Well this is easy, just ban wildfires.
Thanks Cali, you can shove your environmental policies, your crappy smoke has been in Arizona for about 2 week’s now, and with the mask mandates, you can’t frickin breathe. 🤬
These are the morons who want to tell you how to live. Kill the government class
The red sky pictures from CA are surreal. Stay safe, LCD.
The interest in CO2 would shrink to insignificance if there was not a political agenda behind it. There is not now and never has been any Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming or Climate Change due to CO2 emissions.
^ But you can’t convince the believers in “Science!” that.
Carbon tax the fires.
And Volcanoes…
The CZU Lightning Complex fire is 30 min drive from me. I went hiking yesterday at a place called Devil’s Slide and Pedro Point just a few miles from me. It was so dark and orange that the street lights, car headlights and house lights were on in the distance. It was surreal and it looked like a very orange sunset through haze and fog.
Just about an hour ago Geoff C. and I drove to Bellevue via I-90, which crosses Lake Washington. First off, everything in Seattle is obscured by smoke. But there was literally smoke on the water crossing the Lake. You could not see any surrounding shoreline, and the typical view of Mt. Rainier was out of the question.
Geoff C. was telling me how he just read/heard someone talking about the stark difference in forest management between CA and NV; where on the NV side of the state line in NoCA, the understructure is cleared and the forest has been judiciously thinned with no diseased or heaps of fallen debris. It’s not like CA hasn’t known about the mismangement of its timberland for decades. Grass and brush fires are different animals, though. These are commonly started by carelessness. We watched one get started once by a faulty trailer that had lost a tire and the driver kept driving with the sparks flying. It set off a dry field near Shaniko in E.WA and that hummer went off like a crazy in the dry, windy summer weather. Grass fires aren’t usually as deadly, though, because they run out of fuel and don’t jump over larger breaks like roads and rivers, the way timber fires do.
I’m sick of hearing “To ensure it won’t happen again.” Lame. State gov’t won’t allow logging our forests, but they apparently don’t care if they’re wasted by fire.
joe6pak, I’ll bet my governor, Wretched Witless, is writing up the ban order right now. I’m sure she thinks her power can reach to the west coast.
Abigail, years ago Oregon had the Clean Forest Initiative. Fuel was removed from the forest floor, drastically reducing fire spread. GW Bush went to California after a nasty fire, asked why California hadn’t tried anything like the Oregon plan. Because the democrats hated President Bush so badly nothing he offered could ever be tried. Still that way today.
judgeroybean — I remember those fires. They were south of Bend in the pine forests, I think. There were a lot of dead/diseased trees from the pine beetle. I was driving down 97 that summer when I saw the smoke from them.
Yes, it’s a criminal act on the part of CA’s elected officials and administrators to allow these fires to continue like this down there. They kill and displace people, their entire community, businesses and their hope. No handful of people should ever have that much power.
Different issue, but the same outcome: The people of Seattle and King County have been taxed repeatedly to fund a solution to “The Homeless” and yet the problem is worse than ever. There’s no accountability of anyone. Where’d the money go?
I’m about 30 miles west of the El Dorado fire-you know, the one that revealed the gender of the spawn of some assholes.
We’ve been living under smoky skies for days. It is just awful.
I’m holding out hope that this fiasco combined with six months of lockdown will finally snap my fellow Californians into the reality of what is at stake in November.
I blame global warming and people in general
My entire family save one brother was burned out in the Paradise fire. It happened several days after Jim died. They barely escaped with their lives and everyone scattered to try and start over. Now my niece and her husband just lost another home to the fire in southern Or. Lost everything again, only this time with no insurance. They have a gofundme page, https://www.gofundme.com/f/2nd-time-fire-victims?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=p_cp%20share-sheet&fbclid=IwAR29znESopoX0pMeodRXhE4Jzca4xao98bTl023cLeiFCKp5qLoOAaykqN0 If anyone can help, even just prayers, it would be appreciated. I know I haven’t been around much since Jim died, but they sure could use some help. If it matters, they are conservatives, hard working good people, not liberals.
Oh dear RottyLover — So glad to “see” you here again, and very sad for everything you’ve gone through and are going through. I’m am praying for you, your family and your niece’s family.
DAN
The ?news” in SoCal has said this week that smoke screens the sun causing a 10 degree drop in temp.