Back in 2010, I had to evacuate from Los Alamos mid-afternoon ahead of the Cerro Grande Fire. I went to a friend’s house in White Rock. My mother was in the residential care home, and they evacuated to the Presbyterian Church in White Rock. At 1:15 the next morning, we had to evacuate White Rock. A friend in Santa Fe took us in, but I had no idea where my mother was for a day or so. That convinced me of the utility of cellphones, which weren’t entirely general at that time.
The combined population of Los Alamos and White Rock was about 20,000. I have seen reports that 180,000 people have evacuated in northern California.
It’s a terrible feeling not to know if your home will be there when you are allowed to go back. I was lucky – my refrigerator wasn’t even ruined by spoiling food, as many people’s were with the power turned off.
My heart goes out to the people experiencing all this and worse.
Jackals in California, let us know what you’re seeing and if you’re out of harm’s way.
I am also wondering when the pitchforks come out for PG&E. Y’all have been very mild so far, at least from what I’ve seen on Twitter.
Photo from New York Review of Books – King Fire, Fresh Pond, California, September 2014
dr. bloor
Great photo.
Insert obligatory mention of Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire here. The technology and methods have changed, but the essential challenge is timeless.
Patricia Kayden
Another Scott
It’s horrible to have one’s home threatened, or (obviously worse) to have it destroyed. An online friend in Houston went through months and months and months of trying to get his home repaired and rebuilt after hurricane-induced flooding. :-(
Fingers crossed for California.
Cheers,
Scott.
Sebastian
So far everything is alright here in Tinseltown but the air quality is for shit.
I guess we didn’t rake enough.
Richard Fox
I’m in Vallejo, and the electricity is still on in my area. But the winds, yikes. It’s howling out there. I’m hunkered in.
J R in WV
A great photo. I was trained in fire fighting in the Navy, very different than fighting a forest fire, which I did once. A very low-grade fire around the ridge above our hollow, we fought with garden tools, as the leaves and brush burned around us.
With that raging fire, I wouldn’t have been resting, I would have been running away full tilt… well, maybe not actually. I have a cousin who worked for the Forest Service as a Hot Shot fire fighter for some time. After running up and over a ridge with the fire at her heels, finally stopping when safe to find her boot soles melted, so she gave up Hot Shot Team work, which is like Smoke Jumpers without the airplane, just buses and trucks carrying them into the teeth of the big fires.
Utmost respect for the people willing to fight forest fires out west. I was able to do it here in WV, where most fires are slow and low compared to crowning fires out west. Oaks and Hickories are less prone to explode than the Cedar and Pine forests of the mountain west.
Hope all the B-J Jackals are safe tonight!!
Steeplejack
Rep. Katie Hill (D-CA) resigns from Congress.
JPL
@Richard Fox: I have a friend in Petaluma and his power was shut off yesterday. It’s time for someone to look at PG&E. Take care.
JPL
@Steeplejack: That is really sad.
debbie
@Steeplejack:
The comments are not too kind to her.
chris
@Richard Fox: Terrifying video from the toll bridge. Stay safe.
debbie
@JPL:
Did I hear correctly that a spark from a PG&E wire set off the Tick fire?
Miss Bianca
@J R in WV:
Decker Fire here in CO now 100% contained, thanks to finally getting snow in the mountains. Just in time for all the hotshot teams to head to CA.
burnspbesq
@debbie:
Those commenters are assholes.
No Republican would have resigned over allegations of this type. Dems are often our own worst enemies.
MisterForkbeard
Reposting from the last thread: We’re in Petaluma. It’s a remarkably calm situation for something with such a huge evac footprint.
It’s less worrying than the 2017 fires, but it’s getting more attention and they’re evacuating more. From my friends in the sheriff and fire departments, it’s more that they just don’t know how bad this will get due to the wind and are erring far on the side of caution.
For example, we’re supposed to have seen the worst of the winds from yesterday to about an hour ago. The fire grew about 20-30% in that time, mostly out in the country and forested areas. There’s a fair amount of small fires popping up south and southwest of the main fire, and I’m not sure what’s going on there. It looks like those hot spots were fended off from Windsor for the moment – we hope they continue. It’s supposed to get EASIER to fight the fires now, but they’ll probably still lose some ground.
That said, my parents are right outside one of the Evac zones, and they’ve moved in with me. We still have power. I have other friends in the area who are without power or who also evac’ed to Petaluma. It looks like no one is really worried that the fire will travel down here – but they shut off a ton of power here and in Marin to keep brush fires from touching off.
Interesting times. We’re keeping an eye out and have offered our home to many of our friends who live a little further north. Our kids think it’s a pretty grand adventure.
JPL
@debbie: It wouldn’t surprise me. Although they cut off customers, it’s possible that a transformer started the Kincaid fire. My friend mentioned that he didn’t have a problem with the power being shut off, but it took days to turn it back on.
Richard Fox
@chris: yeah, that’s so discouraging The bridge fire.. 15 Minutes from my place. I’m told the fire has been contained. But these winds are just unrelenting. That’s driving this thing. Truly scary stuff. Thanks for the kind thoughts. It’s appreciated!
Honus
Don’t worry. Some republican congressperson will throw a snowball this winter and it will prove there’s bo climate problem.
debbie
@burnspbesq:
Seconded. It’s the downside of being decent.
JPL
@MisterForkbeard: My friend was complaining because he felt where he is shouldn’t be shut off, but it was. He lost power yesterday at 5:30.
dr. bloor
Meaning what, exactly, in this particular instance?
Richard Fox
@JPL: completely agree. Having this utility in private hands.. and they had a part in the Enron mess if memory serves. Regardless, one day at a time. I’m just waiting for the winds to die down. Hard to concentrate on anything else today..
The Dangerman
The tar is being warmed up and feathers purchased.
Central Coaster turned Central Valleyer this weekend (Visalia); fairly quiet all around in my areas…
…but I heard someplace (am on road, so I could be wrong) that the Kincade fire has connections to PG&E as well. Turning off power and still burning down the state won’t play well. If the Kincade jumps the 101 and the winds stay up, it’ll burn all the way to that big fire break that’s called the Pacific Ocean.
tomtofa
Mid SF East Bay. Just outside the power shutoff boundaries, high winds, strong smoke smell.
Debbie: it’s the Kincade fire. PG&E cut off the distribution lines (power to homes/businesses), but not the long distance transmission lines. One of those malfunctioned a few minutes before the fire started, and may have been the cause.
The State says PG&E could fix their outdated equipment in 3 years (PG&E says decades). The State says they will take charge, tell them how to do it, watch them, and make sure they pay for the work.
NotMax
Rude, thoughtless people. Grrrr.
Ducked out to mow the streetside portion of the lawn. Had to stop multiple times to get off and pick up tiny empty plastic bottles of fruit flavored booze some idjits must have tossed from their car.
/rant
Patricia Kayden
@Steeplejack:
dlwchico
PG&E isn’t getting a pass as far as the people that live here. I live in Chico and you can’t mention PG&E without somebody spitting. I’m surprised PG&E doesn’t need security when traveling through this area.
Mike in NC
Hoping all of you on the West Coast stay safe and out of harm’s way.
Manxome Bromide
Checking in from Silicon Valley. We’re seeing power loss around the edges but so far nothing major. Our primary concerns right now are whether the wind patterns are going to put a choking miasma over us that makes it dangerous to go outdoors. (I had breathing problems as a child, but they basically went away once I moved out here; last year they came back with the fires.) So far it hasn’t.
As for PG&E… we’ve already fined them into bankruptcy. Violence, even worryingly creative violence, against the persons of PG&E personnel will not actually extinguish any fires nor repair any infrastructure, and would only make competent administration flee the task on the grounds that the downside of failure was too high. Sacramento is already pretty understaffed when it comes to running stuff and nationalizing PG&E doesn’t actually increase the amount of equipment or personnel available to do the work.
banditqueen
@burnspbesq: @debbie: Mr Duncan Hunter would recommend using campaign funds to manage affairs with staffers–and he’s still at it (congress crittering and affairing, no doubt).
And I hope that the house dems look into tightening up revenge porn penalties. I am sorry she had to go through all this and wish her well.
Take care all of you in CA–evac if needed!
Mary G
I am fine in my little corner of So. Cal. – overcast/cloudy, humidity 68%, no wind to speak of. There was a fire on Camp Pendleton south of me, but I’m sure it’s already out. But forecasters are speaking in apocalyptic terms about record low humidity and high winds, and something like 3 million people have no power. There is a video on the front page of the LA Times where someone is driving on a road surrounded by fire and can’t see two feet in front of them for the smoke. I hope everyone is safe.
Here is a LAT article titled “California utilities — not lawmakers — are calling the shots on power outages to prevent wildfires:
The utilities themselves, not CPUC (the state regulatory body) or the legislators have the only right to decide when power is shut off. They are supposed to report to the CPUC after the emergency is over, but some of the reports are sketchy. The legislature doesn’t meet until January, and I think they’re scared of taking control over anything, because there’s just no way to prevent fires completely and they’re afraid of being burned.
PG&E better watch out for the torches and pitchforks if they don’t shape up.
MisterForkbeard
@JPL: Yeah. Western Petaluma is off because it shares some power lines with forested areas outside of town to the west and north.
In the last round of power outages, we lost power because our grid also fed the farms north of town. Apparently they’re not worried about that this time.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@debbie: Tick fire is in Southern CA, we have SoCal Edison down here.
Sister Golden Bear
I-80 and the Carquinez Bridge reopened, but it looked scary earlier today.
Down on the Peninsula (south of SF), it definitely smells like smoke and we’re getting winds of 25-40 mph. Thankfully I’ve got power, but there’s lots of areas nearby that don’t — even though there not in the hilly areas.
Evacuations are up to 200,000 people statewide. As mentioned downstairs, in the North Bay, they’ve evacuated a huge area west of the Kincade Fire, 30 miles west all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
There’s also lots of smaller fires that aren’t making the national news. 101 just south of SF was closed earlier today due to a brush fire near where Candlestick Park used to be.
Power has been cut off to 3 million+ including many urban areas.
Forget pitchforks, I want live just long enough to be there when they cut off the heads of Murdercorp’s executives and stick them on pikes, as a warning to the next ten generations that some bonus and shareholder dividends come with too high a price. I want to look up into their lifeless eyes and wave like this. *wingles fingers*
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
The winds have diminished a bit here in San Francisco in the past couple of hours – the forecast says they’ll rise again around sunset and then die down considerably overnight, and I hope that’s true. All last night and well into the afternoon it was blowing so hard I could feel my little house shaking. I can’t imagine what it’s like up in the fire area. Here in the city the wind, while otherwise a curse, has greatly improved the air quality, which was dreadful Friday and Saturday – I have asthma, so I was trapped in my house with the air purifier. PG&E won’t shut off power in SF itself unless there’s something truly catastrophic going on right here.
My pitchfork is right by the back door. (OK, that’s mostly in case the local coyote comes into my yard again.) I know there’s no point in taking it out on the employees, but CPUC – which is its own special shitshow – needs to take the profiteering motherfuckers over.
dr. bloor
@Patricia Kayden: Call me crazy, but I prefer congressional reps with better judgment than Duncan Hunter. YMMV.
debbie
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Thanks. I was hoping I had misheard.
mrmoshpotato
@burnspbesq:
Not even if the Russthuglican banged a porn star on 5th avenue, then shot the porn star.
FlyingToaster
FWIW, power companies can be forced to maintain their lines.
Years ago, when I lived in Somerville, MA, lines came down during wind (no storm, might have been a tree limb IIRC). Standard practice on the anthill was to have Somerville FD come stand over the live wires until NStar Electric got there to turn off the power, re-string the lines, and turn it back on.
NStar decided not to show up for 5 hours. The FD spent the whole time keeping the sparks from going up. Somerville is ~20K/sq.mi, with trees and woodframe houses in every tiny lot. Fire from live wires is inevitable. Somerville sued NStar for both not showing up and for neglecting their infrastructure. Somerville won. Then 30 other municipalities sued. So NStar merged to become Eversource, and then systematically began upgrading their wiring/substations/transformers, and having 24-hour response teams so that they show up to downed live wires within an hour. Eversource sends out treecutters with each municipal tree warden and marks limbs for clearing to prevent lines from falling.
Lines still fall, transformers still blow up (though our last local one involved an exploding squirrel), but the rampant neglect ended. We weather the storms better because when a wind storm takes down a block of poles, everybody knows what they have to do.
Eversource not only stopped getting sued, they have gotten a good enough reputation to be put in charge of the Columbia Gas mess up in/around Lowell.
PG&E should be quaking in their damn boots.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
Balloon Juice: come for the poem stars, stay for the exploding squirrels.
ETA: Damn, moshpotato fixed it. I liked “poem star” better.
khead
The Joe Biden rollout on 60 Minutes is going badly.
feebog
North San Fernando Valley here. The Tick fire is not yet full contained. Overcast and cool here right now. Santa Ana winds predicted to pick up overnight and into Monday. Hopefully the firefighters have most of the hot spots out and will be able to contain the rest.
Aleta
craig philpott’s twitter says he’s a landscape photogr. and a fire reporter. Short videos last night and today seem to document some time he spent near firefighters.
Skepticat
I wish I didn’t know how horrible. Much as having only splinters left is awful, I’m grateful they aren’t ashes—I may be able to salvage things, which fire doesn’t allow. At the moment, a friend of mine who lives in the fire area already had headed to Bahamas to save what’s left of his house there, and I just hope that survives too.
Aleta
@Mary G: Thanks for that. Take care.
burnspbesq
@dr. bloor:
Meaning the allegations are bullshit, and she folded far too easily.
mrmoshpotato
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: LOL Sorry!
Sister Golden Bear
National Weather Service satellite imagery shows how quickly the Kincade Fire spread during a 6-hour period last night.
West of the Rockies
@dlwchico:
I’m in Chico, too. I went up to Paradise last week for a look. My folks old home, my sister’s and a niece’s homes are now just flattened lots.
Cheryl Rofer
C Stars
@MisterForkbeard: just responded to you on the previous thread.
Where we are in the East Bay the air quality is actually great–I’ve checked a few different sensors. But there is a prediction that it will go downhill tomorrow. It seems the wind is blowing the smoke away from us for the time being. Another windy night is predicted so I’m guessing the Kincade fire may grow overnight and there may be some new flare-ups. But I’ve heard from Mister Forkbeard and elsewhere that the huge evacuation zone is for precaution rather than because they believe the fire will spread to all of those spots.
And we have another wind event predicted on Tuesday/Wednesday. When I was a kid, the last week of October was usually when the rains and cool weather started. Now we just have hot, hot winds. And a sense of apocalypse.
Cheryl Rofer
@Sister Golden Bear:
Another Scott
@burnspbesq: OTOH, serving in Congress (or in any office under the United States) is a privilege. We’re all human, but we really do need to expect that people we send to Congress (and elsewhere) follow the rules. Too much of our form of government depends on voluntary compliance by the rest of us to jeopardize that.
Repost – George Washington had a few ideas about decorum:
That’s an extreme example, but if we want our government to be trusted by the people, then the people we elect really do need to do their best to uphold the highest standards.
(Relatedly, this is what I found so bone-headingly stupid about Clinton’s behavior with Lewinsky. He was giving his opponents ammunition when he knew they had been looking for decades for anything to discredit him with.)
Here’s hoping that Rep. Hill lands on her feet and either runs again or finds some other way to contribute to the common good. She’s shown that she’s willing to accept consequences and learn from her mistakes. Her district would be well served if they elected her again sometime in the future.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
MisterForkbeard
@C Stars: Interestingly, the air quality here is mostly fine. All of last night it actually smelled like manure – one of the local farmers had decided that so long as the air quality was going to suck ANYWAY, he’d just manure his fields.
You can smell it a bit more today. When I helped my parents evac today, it was bright and sunny when we got there with just a smoky haze on the horizon. About an hour later, it was rolling in like fog. I snapped this on the way out, and a minute or two later that big copse of trees was enveloped.
https://imgur.com/a/ImYGBEy
Aleta
Beautiful California
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax:
Mixing liquids is too hard for idiots.
C Stars
@MisterForkbeard: Ugh, I hate seeing that smoke rolling in. I remember it rolling in through our city streets last year like a monster.
Scout211
Power out here in Calaveras County. We do have a generator, which helps but we only run it twice a day. They announced our “all clear” is tonight at midnight. But then at daylight they have to inspect the wires which could take 24/48 hours. So another 2 days for some.
But they just announced ANOTHER shutoff coming Tuesday, warning that for many it means a continuous shutoff with no breaks.
I’m tired of this.
Dan B
I’m amazed that PG&E is not yet publicly owned. Seattle has owned Seattle City Light since its founding. There have been a few hiccups but they’ve been great – low rates, few outages, rapid response to storm damage, etc. Gavin Newsome should send a delegation when (if?) things calm down.
The elephant in the room is California seems to be turning into Baja California. Oregon and Washington, plus B.C. will turn into California, with fits of flooding in odd years. How do we adapt? First we need to acknowledge the long term forecast and the need for leadership.
Dan B
We have a refugee here from Paradise. The family lost three homes. Fortunately a friend has a four bedroom house and is the sole occupant.
We had a wet year with no heat wave – high himidity from the great Pacific heat blob. The previous.two summers had toxic levels of smoke from fires in B.C., eastern Washington and Oregon. The entire west is going up in smoke.
Steve in the ATL
Speaking of the California fires and Rep. Hill, can anyone tell me why my cat has started eating green peppers?
TIA
oatler.
@mrmoshpotato: Those might be the “nip” bottles that vagrants buy from panhandling profits. They’re all over the vacant lot in my neighborhood.
mrmoshpotato
@oatler.: I stand by their existence being stupid.
Off to by some soda which I will mix with rum myself.
trollhattan
Soccer Girl reporting from lovely Lemoore, CA in the San Joaquin Valley, where the AQI was a scintillating 500 this a.m.: “We lost 0-2, the air quality is ass. Why did I not take up smoking, again?”
Winds today were off the chart. Surprised the house is still in its original spot. Our not-PG&E electricity utility managed to keep us with power.
NB When PG&E says they’re cutting power to 960k customers, that’s 960k hookups and more than 2M humans. I don’t see how they survive this.
Ohio Mom
@Another Scott: Jerry Springer was a promising young Cincinnati City Councilman when a bust of a prostitution ring found a personal check of his for um, services.
He resigned, and after a time, ran again, winning his seat back. He was a very popular and effective Councilmember for a number of years, and then went on to become an anchor on the local six o’clock news. That led to his own afternoon show, the less said about, the better.
So there is definitely a precedent for Hill to follow if she wants to run again.
mrmoshpotato
@Ohio Mom:
After a second successful run in Congress, she needs to start a trashy daytime talk show? :)
Sorry, I have a special hate in my heart for Jerry. Tons of fun many years ago when a newscaster or two resigned from NBC 5 because he was given a segment to voice his thoughts. (Yes, on the 10pm nightly news.)
Boussinesque
Just smoke out here in the southwest portion of the Bay Area, but I’m still righteously pissed at PG&E and don’t get why there isn’t more call for their disbanding/placement under public control. They have guaranteed profits, but they still can’t be arsed to properly maintain or upgrade the grid, somehow. I do remember reading that the state doesn’t currently have the employees or expertise to really effectively take over the utility at this time, but I know that movement in that direction (hiring/training people for that eventuality) is something I’ll be contacting my state legislators about over the next few weeks.
susanna
From Menlo Park, safe but smokey with howlin’ winds earlier today. Bizarre weather from 50-year resident. No complaints til my house lights up the neighborhood, and hopes of relief for those in affected areas.
hotshoe
Big power plants, 70o-ft tall dams generating electric power, high voltage transmission lines, these constitute a natural monopoly. It never made sense for this essential monopoly to be in the hands of private stock investors — the only reason that electric utilities are private corporations is the historic worship of capitalism and fear of “socialism” (such as local or state-owned utilities actually serving the citizens).
I’m pretty sure it’s too late to make a sane collective decision about who gets control of PGE’s assets.
I know i can’t trust the cowboys who basically run this small valley town (ask me about the sewer capacity debacle), so who could run a public utility here? But there must be a better answer than leaving it up to the raider capitalists.
mapghimagsik
@tomtofa: just wait until California finds out how badly gas is mismanaged.
Spider-Dan
Take a look at this affected area outage map:
https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/californiaoutages.jpg?v=at&w=815&h=458
See that donut hole in the middle? Most of that is Sacramento County, which has its own publicly-owned electric utility (SMUD).
SMUD has announced zero planned outages.
PG&E is not long for this world. If their executives thought that rolling blackouts would create a Gray Davis-style blowback against Newsom, they’re wrong. I predict the emergence of a state-run utility in the next 5 years.
Heywood J.
I live near Chico as well, and as dlwchico notes, PG&E is about as popular as syphilis around here. Locals were snapping up generators in June, anticipating power outages due to excessive heat. We were lucky and had a relatively mild summer, however, so it’s only been the last few weeks with the threats of fire and high winds that the outages have started taking place. Fortunately we’re out of that zone — for now.
My in-laws live in Sonoma County, as do some close friends. The friends have been evacuated since Saturday, packing up thier cats and getting the hell out. The in-laws are further north toward Cloverdale, so they’ve “only” had their power out since Saturday afternoon, and with another “wind event” coming tomorrow, will probably end up with a full week down by the time this is all said and done. (The winds Saturday night were no joke — it sounded like a freight train right outside all night, and it was impossible to get any sleep.)
This is why everyone hates PG&E right now, because they have said and done absolutely nothing at all to indicate what sorts of actions they might take going forward to start managing unruly weather events. People understand that it may not be cost-effective to start burying thousands of miles of power lines in sparsely populated areas. But they’re not doing anything, they’re just hedging their bets and being overly cautious, and promising only to shut people down for days at a time from now on whenever the weather gets inconvenient. This is not a solution for the world’s sixth-largest economy, more like something you’d hear about a third-world backwater or a war zone.
Heywood J.
Forgot to mention, because of the worsening power situation and the worsening fire and flood issues, we’re basically looking to get out of California within the next year or so. It’s only going to get worse, and no one’s going to do anything about it. Looking at New Mexico and Oregon so far.