Napa on Fire again

What is it like to live in Napa these days? You never really get used to the strange sunlight through the smoke. You dread the weather forecast, with its high temps, high winds, and low humidity, And every hour your phone pings with yet another notice from the Office of Emergency Services: new evacuation orders, new evacuation warnings: That’s where Mark and Ann, live, that’s where Fred lives. I hope Sheldon is OK. They’ve even evacuated the hospital…

And you think through, one more time, what you would take with you if you have to leave in a hurry…

This is the image from this morning. Heartrending.

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=83d73b75423c4201aecd08e15fa8e6e7&extent=-13659550.3695%2C4639276.2578%2C-13602069.7242%2C4670156.8172%2C102100

My family members are in Santa Rosa, now evacuated. Hoping for their home. So sad for so many who are losing their homes!

Unfortunately this has become an annual event for the Sonoma, Napa areas among many others in California and the Western US.

This past week the weather forecast clearly showed conditions were going to be ripe for bad fires. It would be good to understand what fire mitigation steps have been taken and continue to be taken given the history and the propensity for fires in the region.

I don’t write this to criticize but to genuinely understand what concrete steps have been taken or are planned. It’s clearly past high time to invest time and effort at the state and local levels as well as private initiatives; all these need to be coordinated so effective plans  are made and fire mitigation practices are adopted.

We simply can’t just wring our hands and continue to offer “thoughts and prayers” as we watch such needless tragedies unfold with such regularity.

I don’t claim to have any answers but it’s critical this gets addressed to prevent the continued  loss of lives, impact to health, hardship, economic disruption and much more.

Please feel free to move this to another thread that might be more appropriate.

City of Calistoga is now under mandatory evacuation orders. Napa Valley College, where I teach a few classes, is now an emergency shelter for refugees from the fires. 68,000 people in Napa and Sonoma counties have been evacuated.

My own home is fine, the fires are a good ten miles north of us, but so many friends have been affected.

I hear you on the need for fire mitigation and coordination of efforts. Here in Alaska we have an Interagency Coordination Center, but it coordinates the fighting of fires, not the prevention or mitigation. They don’t have the population of California to contend with.

Given that our leaders cannot even coordinate efforts to get people to wear a simple cloth mask, I’m not very optimistic about our ability to really work on the fire problem long-term. And most people are still completely in denial about the climate change problem. We had a scientific revolution, an intellectual enlightenment, developed the tools and abilities to solve problems rationally, and yet as a society we’re still pre-feudal in thought and planning.

pg and e cut power to 90,000 residents in anticipation of the heat/wind event just prior to this blaze. Last year in October millions had their power cut under worse conditions in an effort to prevent fires from pg and e’s lines.

Parks and other areas close in bad conditions for mitigation. I’m uncertain about what other things might be done. The sept. fires in California were mostly caused by a freak state wide lightning event. The cause of this latest fire is unkonwn at this time.

And yet people still set off fireworks at parties and who knows what else. As Karen says, there are people who live in denial or just don’t care or think the rules apply to them.

As Karen says, there are people who live in denial or just don’t care or think the rules apply to them.

Maybe you’re being kind in saying they “think” ?

I’m well aware of the situation in the Bay area and the recent lightning caused fires and also know of PG&Es PSPS planned outages. My post is about the most recent Glass fire.

Surely more can be done! We can’t simply can’t just make this PG&E’s problem.

I heard fireworks going off in San Jose in the past month (when the AQI readings here were in the 200s!) during the massive lightning caused fires and I was dumbfounded!

And we don’t even need to bring climate change into the discussion; it’s self evident that these fires are a potential source of massive economic disruption.

As bad as the Glass fire is, I think the folks there dodged a much bigger disaster; on Sunday night I was seeing posts online of Highway 12 being utterly jammed with cars fleeing the fires. Had the winds shifted the fire could have swept through all those cars and people: unimaginable disaster!

My heart goes out to you people in CA! Meanwhile, my spiritual sanctuary, the Glacier Peak Wilderness near Dome Peak, was on fire two weeks ago. No words to describe the impotent horror of calling the Ranger Station for updates and being told they don’t have enough fire fighters to fight it. All they were doing was evacuations of hikers stranded back there. All the manpower was off saving outbuildings where humans and dollars mattered. Meanwhile how many species vanished? How many bear, deer, squirrels, frogs, innocent creatures? No mention of that on the nightly news.

I’ve lost the mental ability to cope with it. I just shop for new gear on BPL waiting for the smoke to clear so I can use it.

An excellent piece in Wired magazine about wild land fires; maybe this belongs on it’s own thread but here it is:

West Coast wildfire infernos