California fires

Ruthanne said:
But how do you know the strength of a Nuclear Bomb? I would think some of them could wipe out an entire country.
Click to expand...

I used to read a lot about nuclear weapons in Scientific American and there are no bombs that could wipe out an entire country unless you're talking about Luxembourg or something that size.

Here's an article about the largest atomic bomb every tested which was a 50 megaton bomb. It supposedly could have been 100 megatons but the fallout would have been too dangerous. It wiped a village 34 miles away from where it expolded off the face of the earth and damaged buildings up to 100 miles away from where it exploded. So a 100 megaton bomb would have damaged buildings up to 141 miles away. (Not double because force is related to the square root of the distance not linear.)

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tsar-Bomba
 

With these wildfires expected to last for several more weeks, I'm sure that a lot of people on the West Coast will experience lasting and long term effects from breathing this stuff.
 

asp3 said:
Here's a great article about the known and unknown dangers of the smoke that those of the west coast have been exposed to over the last few weeks. The air quality here has been good for almost a week now, but was fairly bad here for a while.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/wildfire-smoke-health-risks-air-quality-pollution
Click to expand...
Thank you for this. Where I am the sky is mostly free of smoke at the moment. The wind came in from the west last night and cleared it out, again. It is forecasted we will get some rain tomorrow. We'll see how much. My husband and I have managed to stay mostly inside when the air has been thick with smoke. They say don't go out at all when it's bad, but that's not reasonable. There are things a person has to do. Trouble is, since the fires are still burning as strong as ever, if the smoke clears from here, it goes somewhere else and damages others. Thankfully the hot temperatures are gone. Knock on wood. I worry about the wildlife.
 
gennie said:
Maybe Mother Nature does not like what we have done to her planet.
Click to expand...

people settings fires on purpose don't help. And CA is not letting anyone clear brush (to prevent fires), they stopped most removal of trees (even dead trees)... and their not updating old power equipment/lines which also causes lots of fires. bad environmental regulations are to blame for much of the fires. Of course you won't hear most of the news mention that.

CA is the only state in the USA denying residents power on purpose... Not some third world country, but CA....
 
Phoenix said:
Thank you for this. Where I am the sky is mostly free of smoke at the moment. The wind came in from the west last night and cleared it out, again. It is forecasted we will get some rain tomorrow. We'll see how much. My husband and I have managed to stay mostly inside when the air has been thick with smoke. They say don't go out at all when it's bad, but that's not reasonable. There are things a person has to do. Trouble is, since the fires are still burning as strong as ever, if the smoke clears from here, it goes somewhere else and damages others. Thankfully the hot temperatures are gone. Knock on wood. I worry about the wildlife.
Click to expand...

Yes, I also noticed the skies had cleared up some. Havnt heard abt any rain yet coming this way.

But, like you said..we must go outside for some things, so thank goodness for our masks!
 
dobielvr said:
Yes, I also noticed the skies had cleared up some. Havnt heard abt any rain yet coming this way.

But, like you said..we must go outside for some things, so thank goodness for our masks!
Click to expand...
Unfortunately the rain doesn't seem to be going to CA. The regular masks used for Covid don't filter out the dangerous smoke particulates. Only the 95 mask do that, and they need to be saved for the medical and emergency folks who are working to treat us.
 
asp3 said:
Here's a great article about the known and unknown dangers of the smoke that those of the west coast have been exposed to over the last few weeks. The air quality here has been good for almost a week now, but was fairly bad here for a while.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/wildfire-smoke-health-risks-air-quality-pollution
Click to expand...
Thank you, that post is is very informative and useful. I will be resending it to family members on the West Coast. I also looked at the AQI for my area of South Carolina, and that will be potentially useful to me because we do have periodic controlled burns in this area.
 
Pecos said:
Thank you, that post is is very informative and useful. I will be resending it to family members on the West Coast. I also looked at the AQI for my area of South Carolina, and that will be potentially useful to me because we do have periodic controlled burns in this area.
Click to expand...
After our upcoming rain here in Oregon today and tomorrow, it's supposed to heat up again and the smoke is forecasted to get bad again.
 
officerripley said:
I'm about 2 hours north of Sacramento. Wish we would get some rain; it's supposed to be close to 100 again this Sunday, sigh.
Click to expand...
It's raining lightly here now and 60 degrees. The rain amounts where I am are low, but it's better than nothing. Thankfully more fell in the areas of some of the fires. How awful for you. How thick is the smoke? How far is the fire from you? Tuesday it's supposed to be back to 90 here. I'd just like to turn the faucet on the entire west coast.
 
I confess I'm not up on the fires. Is the same areas burning year after year? Or is it totally other areas? I don't want to seem insensitive, but is living in a fire zone equivalent to living in a flood plain? I see the horrific devastation, and the sheer terror of living through a fire, but is it worth it to rebuild in a fire zone?
 
fuzzybuddy said:
I confess I'm not up on the fires. Is the same areas burning year after year? Or is it totally other areas? I don't want to seem insensitive, but is living in a fire zone equivalent to living in a flood plain? I see the horrific devastation, and the sheer terror of living through a fire, but is it worth it to rebuild in a fire zone?
Click to expand...
This is radically worse than it has ever been. Yes, there are always some fires. But nothing like this. This is a direct result of climate change. There is less and less rain every year. More and more of the forests and the brush lands are drying out. Here in Oregon alone, where I live, each year we are at least 20 inches below normal and have been for at least 20 years. It gets worse every year. With a flood the rains come, flood everything and stop, and the people work on recovering. These fires go on for months and burn everything in their paths. There are never enough fire fighters and equipment. It's not lack of planning. A lot of the terrain is steep and rugged wilderness. That's hard to fight. This year for example a good deal of the time they couldn't drop water or retardant on the fires because the smoke was so thick they couldn't see the fires from above.

There is research being done to help with that, but it takes time. We don't have time. There are never enough resources. Some of these fires are purposely set by humans. Some are caused by lightening. They were made worse this year when the weather got unseasonably hot and there were high winds. If you read back over some of the articles that are here in this thread, you can find out some of the information. Some of the stuff included here is by naysayers, but the fires are now consuming whole towns. Last year only one town burned down in northern CA. The name of that town was Paradise. This year Oregon and CA have lost towns.

To get out of the firezone people would have to move out of CA entirely. In Oregon, a lot of the fires are in areas that used to be rain forest. We are at fault, all of us worldwide. The jet stream that brings us our weather and the gulf stream the delivers the ocean currents up the east coast have changed because of the CO2 in the atmosphere caused by our recklessness and denial. Since everything everywhere is warming up the weather in all areas is radically worse. We'd have to move to another planet to get away from all this.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
I confess I'm not up on the fires. Is the same areas burning year after year? Or is it totally other areas? I don't want to seem insensitive, but is living in a fire zone equivalent to living in a flood plain? I see the horrific devastation, and the sheer terror of living through a fire, but is it worth it to rebuild in a fire zone?
Click to expand...
It is the same areas burning year after year *but* with more & more areas added every year. I suppose that living in a fire zone could be judged to be equivalent to living in a flood plain if you realize that just as a lot of people who live in the flood plain, those who live in a fire area (and what has recently *become* a fire area) simply cannot afford (economically or family-situation--elderly parents, etc.--wise) to move in too many cases.

For ex.: when the 2018 Paradise, CA Camp Fire happened, 11,000 homes (along with businesses) burned with that adding up to 50,000 people (6 of whom are family members of mine) being displaced. Only about 5,000 have wanted/been able to return. And since a lot of those 50,000 worked in Paradise itself or nearby towns, and since some retirees/non-working were living there to be near family, many have not been able to afford to leave, either Paradise itself or the nearby towns. Sure, you could maybe find a bottom of the barrel apt. in a town as much as 2 hours away but then lots of these people (again, some of them fam. members of mine) couldn't afford to pay for that 4 hr/day commute. So. Since some of those 50,000 found out how expensive rents, home prices were in this nearby town, some found it cheaper to live in RVs, vans, cars on the lot where their house was.

So sometimes, for various reasons, people just can't move unless they're willing to live on the streets or abandon an elderly fam. member. They can't.
 
One of the problems with so many people living in CA is that it's a desert with the people who live there creating artificially green environments with water from somewhere else. The Colorado River is no longer what it once was because the water supports a lot of CA, especially southern CA. Tell you what, with the climate change what are they going to do when the Colorado dries up completely? My friend near San Diego said that when they had the opportunity to get water from the ocean through a new desalinization plant, they didn't and invested instead in a system that would not work, long term.

If they can build pipelines to bring oil from all over the place, they can build a system to collect the water from the excessive flooding and redirect it to the places that need it.

We wise up or we perish. It's our choice.
 
Phoenix said:
One of the problems with so many people living in CA is that it's a desert with the people who live there creating artificially green environments with water from somewhere else. The Colorado River is no longer what it once was because the water supports a lot of CA, especially southern CA. Tell you what, with the climate change what are they going to do when the Colorado dries up completely? My friend near San Diego said that when they had the opportunity to get water from the ocean through a new desalinization plant, they didn't and invested instead in a system that would not work, long term.
Click to expand...

Yes, the Colorado River "basin" is facing more and more stress. Lake Powell is little more than a pond, and Lake Mead is slowly being depleted. A couple of years of minimal snowfall in the Rockies could quickly become a problem for the entire desert SW. As it stands now, hardly any water finds it way into the Gulf of Mexico. The aquifer that has fed Phoenix, for decades, is being depleted, and that will add substantially to the issue.

If weather patterns continue the present trends, water will become the "new gold" in the SW, while the Midwest and Eastern states have excessive amounts of rainfall. A pipeline from the Mississippi or Missouri rivers to the SW would be an expensive proposition, but it may be the Only solution to maintaining the SW populations.
 
Don M. said:
If weather patterns continue the present trends, water will become the "new gold" in the SW, while the Midwest and Eastern states have excessive amounts of rainfall. A pipeline from the Mississippi or Missouri rivers to the SW would be an expensive proposition, but it may be the Only solution to maintaining the SW populations
Click to expand...

Maybe it's time to rethink having all this population in the SW and west coast. A lot of that land and ecosystem is fragile and we are overwhelming it with people. I know people won't like this but I think the time has come to consider designating more of that area as natural resource and prohibiting people living there. People have demonstrated they are not good stewards of the land.

Piping in water from other areas of the country would just encourage the type of bad eco-system management that has led to the current problem. Besides, the Rocky Mountains are in the way.
 

You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top