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These pics from NASA show just how large the #CampFire, #HillFire, and #WoolseyFire are.

??: Twitter/ @NASAEarth pic.twitter.com/UHSzmRTuIH

— 23ABC News (@23ABCNews) November 9, 2018

At least they (tree huggers) came to their senses after all the wild fires that destroyed thousands and thousands of acres of ponderosa pine. The have agreed to allow logging with all trees smaller than 14" allowed to be harvested.

They have started this logging in areas surrounding communities. My small community (250 homes, a dozen full time residents) is now protected on 3 sides. Hopefully they will do the other side this winter/spring.

Added benefit of the tree thinning is the growth of grass and forbs on the forest floor. This should cause an increase of elk and deer using this area. Another benefit, is predation from mt. lions should decrease as visibility for the game animals is increased.

Terry

Good ideas and cowardly leadership lead to mishaps like this. Every one responsible for these forest under stories to be polluted with debris need to be held accountable for the losses. From the Sierra Club all the way through to the Department of Agriculture employees. Including their attorneys fighting to stop logging and the federal judges over ruling SCIENTIFIC forest management practices required to minimize the effects of these fires. .

Lately it's been "let the fire go.... it's mother nature...." yeah but it's not your house on the line azzhole. Somebodies azz in gonna be in a sling.... they fell asleep at the wheel..... on multiple levels.

I’ve spent a lot of time on fire lines all the way up to incident commanders on big federally funded suppression campaigns. A fire in a coniferous forest, that has the conditions in its favor is a BOMB waiting to explode. They generate their own weather. And, when you add in steep terrain, extremely dry conditions, and the winds that beast generates added to the natural wind, it truly becomes a monster of its own. No equipment will stop it. Nothing.

I’ve seen them head up, charge several thousand feet up a steep slope, devouring everything in its path. In MERE seconds. Not a half a minute. The body of the fire is quick to follow with wind forces and the heat generated by these runs. I’ve seen fire several hundred feet in the air when it crests like like. A huge ball of debri and inferno tossed like a ball. That lands on the back valley or the next mountain due to these hard runs. It simply is the most dangerous, destructive force nature has.

I’m not trying to steal the show. Or impress anyone. There is no chance to be a brave soul on these things. You do your best, back up, build a line far enough away and in terrain to hopefully get a successful back burn, all while hammering it with planes of water and suppresent. To only loose it a good bit of the time.

Standing with a mile or two of one of these things when they start cooking will give you a good idea of what they can do. They start rumbling like a bunch if trains. If vibrates through your body. The noise gets so loud you can’t hear the man next to you talking. It is simply something you’d have to see to understand just how untamable they can be. When conditions are right, fuel and weather wise, nothing can stop it but the ocean. And they can go from a puttering around little brush fire, to a literal fire bomb in less time then it took me to type this. Which was about 5 minutes.

A couple of points, however. All the current fires are pretty much on state and private land. I'm not sure you can blame the feds for these.

They need fire on the landscape when conditions aren't so bad. Nobody likes it, but that's the only way to reduce the fuel. Otherwise it will burn under the absolute worst conditions, like now.

I can tell you almost every piece of ground in the West will burn at some point. Might not be in our lifetimes, but it will burn. Sooner or later we will realize we need to choose the conditions when fire happens instead of waiting for the fire to dictate the terms. The solution is not just logging, as much of this country doesn't have anything merchantable. There needs to be some mechanical thinning and we need to follow it with fire, the more frequent the better in these wildland urban interface areas.

The images I see from these fires are heartbreaking. 41 deaths so far, that is a tragedy. I am not sure these events are preventable, but we can damn sure reduce fuel loads and make homes and communities more defensible, and hopefully avoid the loss of life we've been seeing on these big fires in the recent past and today.

As far as property, all that is replaceable. But lives lost is unacceptable.

Jerry Brown vetoed a Bipartisan Fire Management bill back in 2016. Probably needed the money for more "important" things, like making sure we enable more homeless, to start more fires! See link

One fella that flew most of the fires I worked for a couple years, was a retired Air Force pilot. He flew planes and helicopters. That guy was unbelievable what he could and would do dropping on a fire. He was the best eyes and advisor a guy could have on where the fire was going to run, where he needed to concentrate his drops, for finding naturally occurring contour breaks and fire lines, etc..... He got a lot of that knowledge flying and fighting fires in Alaska. He was truly invaluable.

All the wild land fire fighting pilots I’ve ever worked with had nerves of steel and incredible ability. They sure made the ground crews feel better when they were working the fire. Made our jobs a lot easier too.

I enjoyed it but, it is definitely a tough job. Hardest work, most hurt and fatigued I’ve ever been was while doing it. It’s a young mans game. Takes a lot out of you. I don’t miss it now at all. Not one bit.

Amazing vid WV, and description of what occurs. Makes a lot of sense. It also makes a lot of sense that controlled burns etc would really help reduce these from happening in the future.

Curious though, with such large expanses, can those strategies work? or more so logging etc?

I told you that to make this more understandable. If the far west wasn't eat up with fairy tale prescribing environmentalists, bent on stopping all things except humans living in loin cloths and eating seeds and grubs, Private Forest industry and the feds would prescribe and burn many more areas in the name of real forest and wildlife management. But, under current pubic perception, that isn't likely to happen. If it were put in rotation on good growing ground, it would eliminate a good amount of grounds not currently under such management practices. This could be done at a huge net gain for all public entity's using public land, except the neo- environmental hippie that believes we don't belong in nature. Plus put a real monetary gain in the federal deficit over time.

The NFS used to be self sustaining until lawsuits stopped it. It's still a wander why in times of such deficit, they aren't more proactive in working that way again. The gains would be all around in local economies, healthier forest ecosystems, and better wildlife habitat. Plus help eliminate situations where these fires have so much fuel to grow so big and uncontrollable.

With all that, where controlled burning should be utilized without question is in areas of risk around metropolitan development. But like SmokedTrout pointed out, nobody wants that. Nobody wants to acknowledge the fact that controlled burning, mechanized logging, or anything removing brush not suitable for logging, could be not only beneficial to their environment but down right life saving. So, they protest it because it isn't pretty and neat when going on. Instead they would rather go along living in a ticking fire bomb and, blame everyone but themselves when it goes off.

It is just another example of where liberal beliefs, policy, and living takes into no account of it's real world consequences. It is a shame and, with Climate change being as real today as it has ever been, it can get much worse. The west is hotter and drier then it has been in a long time. That is due to meteorological influences and not man caused. Yet, well funded environmentalist have the influence to see that reality hid behind diversion and lies.

In Delaware, every spring the marshes catch on fire. With a West wind the smoke blows out to the Delaware Bay. The say it is against the law but it is done every year and the police don't bother anyone for setting the fires. It makes super good habitat for muskrats and ducks when the swamps grow back up. Trappers are getting less and less so I bet the marshes won't be burnt much longer and that will be a shame.

The way they burn, most of that movement was in one direction. Probably 80-90% of that was in a line at the head of the fire. If it was moving laterally and consumed 64 acres in one minute, that’s a distance of 13,312 linear feet per minute. That equals 120 miles per hour. If it was closer to 90% linear movement, that’s over 150 miles per hour.

These fires in conditions like this are unbelievable.

No need, Jerry Brown made sure it will all come out of the working man's back pocket

"Governor signs bill allowing utilities to increase fees to pay for fire settlements by Associated PressFriday, September 21st 2018

Jerry Brown

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a measure allowing utilities to bill their customers to pay for future legal settlements stemming from devastating 2017 wildfires.

Brown announced Friday he'd signed the bill, which is aimed at preventing bankruptcy for Pacific Gas & Electric Co. The massive utility faces billions of dollars in liability if investigators determine its equipment caused the Tubbs Fire that destroyed thousands of homes and killed 22 people in Santa Rosa last year.

The measure is the most hotly contested part of a wide-ranging plan to reduce the growing threat of wildfires.

The bill also requires investor-owned utilities to harden their equipment so it's less likely to cause fires. It makes it easier to clear dead trees and brush through controlled burns and other means".

Some level of common sense reg's should be there, water buffers etc... But overall, doing good logging is so good for the forest.

This stuff does remind me of a very small (comparatively) local issue here I was involved with. I was on a property committee that helped manage just under 1K acres in my home town and an adjacent town, which was owned by an NPO in the form of a regional land trust. A few fields had been hayed 2x year from, well, at least 100yrs, but it's possible they were hayed as far back as the late 1700's. The local dairy farmer did the haying - the ONLY dairy farmer still eking out a living at that time (RIP - passed away a couple years ago now). Well, the NPO was worried about the bobolinks nesting time frame in the field and wanted to shut down the haying to keep the fledgling bobolink's safe. This was a substantial part of the farmers business, not to mention, it was he, and his father before him who'd kept the field open via haying for, literally, 100 years.

When I asked the "Environmentalist" from the NPO how the bobolink's would do if the field was never hayed again and returned to forest... or how the bobolinks would have done, had the field never been there - since MA was historically close to 100% forested, the look of: "Oh crap, handnt thought of that" seemed entertaining, especially to the dairy farmer!

I'm all for environmental stewardship and using science to help with that... But man, there has to be a balance point between "we should do nothing" (CA burning) and "we have an impact, and should responsibly care for the amazing lands we are lucky to live upon".

Hopefully when this is done, CA becomes an example for all regions on how to better manage forests for their health, and ours. Because if the massive losses incurred by the fires in CA, and the west in general over what, the last 10 years or 15 years, is not a good lesson that we need to evolve... I dont know what would be.

Seriously, I look at those subdivisions in the hills, even the mansion subdivisions, and they look like stacked cordwood with piles of kindling in between. Add steep hills, drought, and high winds? Good luck.

Ike that is truly grim news.

Screen Shot 2018-09-13 at 12.56.21 PM

Every governor has signed regretful legislation, or made a disastrous pardon he or she would like a chance to re-do. California’s whacky outgoing Democrat governor has spent the last eight years trying to convince the people of California that we are to blame for droughts, wildfires and “extreme weather,” and that climate change is an existential threat to the California way of life. Showing no regrets, Gov. Jerry Brown calls the people “freeloaders,” and “deniers,” and has mocked our “little green lawns.” Brown even spitefully signed legislation subjecting every man, woman and child to 50 gallons of water a day in the near future… despite the state’s 189,454 miles of rivers, and that large body of water California sits on.

Last year, as California residents were burned out of their towns, homes, neighborhoods, schols, hospitals and businesses, Gov. Jerry Brown was jetting around the world spouting climate change propaganda, and calling the fires California’s “new normal.” Gov. Brown had many chances to sincerely and realistically address California’s increasing wildfires since his election in 2011, but instead chose to play politics, placing his new friends at the United Nations over the people of California.

What many do not know, is that California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bipartisan wildfire management bill in 2016, despite unanimous passage by the Legislature, 75-0 in the Assembly and 39-0 in the Senate. SB 1463 would have given local governments more say in fire-prevention efforts through the Public Utilities Commission proceeding making maps of fire hazard areas around utility lines. In a gross display of politics, this is especially pertinent given that Cal Fire and the state’s media are now blaming the largest utility in the state for the latest wildfires.

While hindsight is always 20-20, California was on fire when this bill made its way through the Legislature and on to Jerry Brown’s desk.

The 129 million dead trees throughout California’s state and national forests are now serving as matchsticks and kindling.

With California on fire once again in the North and the South parts of the state, Gov. Jerry Brown continues his bizarre claims that devastating fires are the “new normal” and a result of climate change. Only Brown updated his phrase: “’This is not the new normal,’ he said, employing a phrase that state leaders have used to describe the past two deadly, prolonged California fire seasons,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “’This is the new abnormal, and this new abnormal will continue certainly in the next 10 to 15 years.’”

Yet, the same climate change impacts private lands as public lands, but private forests are not burning down because they are properly managed.

(continued at link)

Interesting...California wildfires map lines up with proposed high speed rail for California

more images at link

"...This looks like an interesting piece of evidence when discussing the wildfires...Or so called wild fires all over the State of California. Basically all you have to do is search a California wildfires map in the last year or so and put the map of the proposed California high speed rail system continually being pushed by the far left government of California. What do you get when placing these images next to each other...Well it just so happens that the California wildfires happen to be all located along the proposed lines of the California high speed rail project..."

I wanted to leave this... Just in case. ;)

That said, it was amazing today to see overlay's of the fire sizes on different regions of the US. CRAZY! Amazing to think how significant these are in scope and magnitude.

I read one girls escape out of the evacuation. She was rear ended while driving and ended up in a ravine. She got out and tried to get into an abandoned vehicle but the door handles were melted off. She started running and her pants burst into flames because of the heat. She said her throat was bleeding from the super heated air she was breathing. She saw a fire engine and to it. She said it was melting from the heat(plastic and maybe aluminum) anfirrman grabbed her and pulled in. He said hang on we might not make it out.

A few months ago, we had a fire almost burn down town, but for some heroic efforts by local firefighters setting a backfire and planes swooping in. My kid's mom drove off with the kids and a bomber doused the house and driveway which allowed them to leave and saved the house. I still have phos chek on my truck. I almost lost everything - house, family, everything. They only had time to get the dogs in the car and drove through flames and sparks. It's amazing how fast it happens. I was weathered in out in a remote village on the north slope in AK at work. The feeling of helplessness was something I hope to never feel again. My neighbors on one side lost everything.

Gov. Jerry Brown Quietly Admits Trump Was Right, Eases California Logging Rules

November 19, 2018

California Gov. Jerry Brown appears to have quietly admitted President Donald Trump's suggestion about improving California forestry was correct and is now urging state lawmakers to loosen restrictive logging regulations put in place to appease environmentalists.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports that Brown is proposing one of the most significant changes to the state's logging rules in nearly half a century.

"Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing broad new changes to California’s logging rules that would allow landowners to cut larger trees and build temporary roads without obtaining a permit as a way to thin more forests across the state," the paper reports.

Environmentalists in California aren't on board. They've been pushing for years to make California's logging rules more restrictive, not less, but in the wake of the deadly forest fires that ripped through the state this month, prominent lawmakers believe a change must be made before more people die from a preventable situation.

"Under Brown’s proposal, private landowners would be able to cut trees up to 36 inches in diameter — up from the current 26 inches — on property 300 acres or less without getting a timber harvest permit from the state, as long as their purpose was to thin forests to reduce fire risk," the Sentinel reports. "They also would be able to build roads of up to 600 feet long without getting a permit, as long as they repaired and replanted them."

Forests, particularly in northern California, California lawmakers admit, have become dangerously overgrown. But there's currently little incentive for landowners to clear their trees — they are only allowed to clear dead and decaying wood and undergrowth and can't clear healthy tress. By allowing landowners to recover some money from the process — letting them create and sell lumber, for instance — it could incentivize them to make bigger changes.

Environmentalists say they're worried landowners will go way too far, cutting down ancient redwoods or clear-cutting property, but even the most ardent environmentalist admits that some thinning is needed.

This is a big change from two weeks ago, when Gov. Jerry Brown balked at President Donald Trump's suggestion that poor forestry and poor forest management might be to blame for the massive wildfires that ripped through northern and southern California earlier this month, claiming dozens of lives and tens of thousands of acres.

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” the president tweeted while he was in France observing the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

“Our focus is on the Californians impacted by these fires and the first responders and firefighters working around the clock to save lives and property — not on the president’s inane, uninformed tweets," Brown's office responded.

Instead, Brown blamed global warming for the uptick in fires.

The president may not have been wholly correct but it seems he was certainly on to something.

"Green Bay Packers QB Aaron Rodgers donates $1 million to Camp Fire victims"

(see link for story)

A childhood friend is there with a animal rescue team & veterinarians...