August Lightning Siege of 2020 | Welcome to CAL FIRE
In case you were wondering what the smoke is like in California, Oregon, and Washington – all up and down the West Coast of the USA – here's the NOAA satellite imagery. (In case you're reading this in the future, here is a representative still image, and also I'm pleased to hear that we have a future. Is it nice?)
If you go to CAL FIRE's Incidents page right now, the page title refers to the "August Lightning Siege of 2020". This is because the two largest fire complexes they're managing right now, at 396,000 acres burned and 363,000 acres burned (approx 1,600 and 1,460 square kilometers, or "slightly larger than London" and "About the same size as Delhi or Mexico City", respectively) were started by lightning storms, exacerbated by unusually hot and dry California weather.
Remember how I said San Francisco and the Bay Area don't get many thunderstorms? So, on the morning of August 16th, at around 4:00, I woke up in a frothing rage at my neighbors, who have a bad habit of setting off fireworks for funsies, even when the city has explicitly banned them. And there were a lot of fireworks. Those big cluster ones, where for a handful of seconds it sounds like popcorn popping. And they just. Would not. Stop. It was lighting up my window.
...which is what I thought for a good ten minutes, as I came more fully awake. Then I realized that it was lightning.
Since then, I've been kinda obsessively watching the CAL FIRE incidents page. We've got fires to the north of us, fires to the east of us, fires to the south of us (into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred?), and the two lightning complexes are... not exactly in our neighborhood, but just about a neighborhood over.
The nice thing about San Francisco is that we're on the tip of a peninsula, and thus surrounded on three sides by water. That makes us relatively well-defended by natural firebreaks. If a fire were to sack the city, it would pretty much either have to start here, or chew through all the cities to the south of us.
On the minus side – which I have been chewing over, recently – it makes the city nigh on impossible to evacuate. San Francisco is 880,000 people crammed into a 7x7 mile postage stamp; you can't shift that kind of a population over its bridges. I've been joking with my friends that my evacuation kit is going to consist of a dive bag and a bunch of pool noodles, and I'm just going to run directly to the ocean and hope for the best.
...
Some of the latest horrors in the California wildfire season include the Creek Fire around the Sierra National Forest, which has currently burned 176,000 acres (710 square km, about the size of Bangalore) and is 0% contained. Hats off to the heroic – and I use this term advisedly – helicopter crews who were rescuing hikers from the blaze. (One of my supervisors at work has a roommate who decided to go hiking in the forest as part of his Labor Day plans. Friends and family advised him that this was a bad idea. As I understand it, he ignored them, went hiking, got trapped by the blaze, had to be evacuated by helicopter, was potentially exposed to COVID-19 at the evacuation site, and is now self-quarantining. Fortunately he has his own private bathroom, and is just going to stay in there and his bedroom, avoiding contact with my supervisor for two weeks.)
The horrors also include the El Dorado fire, which has currently burned 12,600 acres (about 50 square km, slightly larger than Manila or half the size of Paris) which was sparked – wait for it – by a colored smoke bomb someone set off at a gender reveal party.
My snarky response on hearing this was "This just goes to illustrate the destructive effects of assigning gender at birth." I'm glad I'm not the only one.
If you go to CAL FIRE's Incidents page right now, the page title refers to the "August Lightning Siege of 2020". This is because the two largest fire complexes they're managing right now, at 396,000 acres burned and 363,000 acres burned (approx 1,600 and 1,460 square kilometers, or "slightly larger than London" and "About the same size as Delhi or Mexico City", respectively) were started by lightning storms, exacerbated by unusually hot and dry California weather.
Remember how I said San Francisco and the Bay Area don't get many thunderstorms? So, on the morning of August 16th, at around 4:00, I woke up in a frothing rage at my neighbors, who have a bad habit of setting off fireworks for funsies, even when the city has explicitly banned them. And there were a lot of fireworks. Those big cluster ones, where for a handful of seconds it sounds like popcorn popping. And they just. Would not. Stop. It was lighting up my window.
...which is what I thought for a good ten minutes, as I came more fully awake. Then I realized that it was lightning.
Since then, I've been kinda obsessively watching the CAL FIRE incidents page. We've got fires to the north of us, fires to the east of us, fires to the south of us (into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred?), and the two lightning complexes are... not exactly in our neighborhood, but just about a neighborhood over.
The nice thing about San Francisco is that we're on the tip of a peninsula, and thus surrounded on three sides by water. That makes us relatively well-defended by natural firebreaks. If a fire were to sack the city, it would pretty much either have to start here, or chew through all the cities to the south of us.
On the minus side – which I have been chewing over, recently – it makes the city nigh on impossible to evacuate. San Francisco is 880,000 people crammed into a 7x7 mile postage stamp; you can't shift that kind of a population over its bridges. I've been joking with my friends that my evacuation kit is going to consist of a dive bag and a bunch of pool noodles, and I'm just going to run directly to the ocean and hope for the best.
...
Some of the latest horrors in the California wildfire season include the Creek Fire around the Sierra National Forest, which has currently burned 176,000 acres (710 square km, about the size of Bangalore) and is 0% contained. Hats off to the heroic – and I use this term advisedly – helicopter crews who were rescuing hikers from the blaze. (One of my supervisors at work has a roommate who decided to go hiking in the forest as part of his Labor Day plans. Friends and family advised him that this was a bad idea. As I understand it, he ignored them, went hiking, got trapped by the blaze, had to be evacuated by helicopter, was potentially exposed to COVID-19 at the evacuation site, and is now self-quarantining. Fortunately he has his own private bathroom, and is just going to stay in there and his bedroom, avoiding contact with my supervisor for two weeks.)
The horrors also include the El Dorado fire, which has currently burned 12,600 acres (about 50 square km, slightly larger than Manila or half the size of Paris) which was sparked – wait for it – by a colored smoke bomb someone set off at a gender reveal party.
My snarky response on hearing this was "This just goes to illustrate the destructive effects of assigning gender at birth." I'm glad I'm not the only one.