California, how you doing?
Please read that in the Blake Pavey voice, from this tweet. I am not as cute, young, and clever as he is, but those are the breaks.
Seriously, though, Scout211 asked for a thread where the California peeps can check in and let us know how it’s going. *Hey you lurkers in California, that includes you.
I think we’d all like to know that (hopefully) you are all okay.
Update at 1:30
As long as we are all checking in with one another, BC in Illinois shared with us that he lost his brother to COVID yesterday. It’s in the David Anderson thread that has been up long enough that a lot of people won’t see it. Comment #41. BC in Illinois, our thoughts are with you.
Turgidson
East Bay here. Smoky air, ash on our cars when we woke up this morning. Pretty gross. Thankfully we still have the air purifiers we bought during the last couple rounds of wildfires and they’re on full blast. Grateful the fires are not particularly close to us, hoping everyone near the fires and in high risk areas can stay safe.
But egad, we didn’t need this right now to go with the heat and pandemic.
dlwchico
Chico here. We seem to be safe from fire at the moment but the AQI is 139 and the sky is orangey. Car was covered in ash this morning. At least the temperature is only supposed to go up to 102 today and PG&E hasn’t shut off our power yet.
Raven
I just talked to my buddy who lives on the Berkeley-Oakland line and he said it’s nasty but they are glad they had the masks in place.
dmsilev
LA area, not too bad. We’ve been alerted to the possibility of rolling blackouts in the afternoon/early evening, but so far things seem to be holding together.
Scout211
Thanks, WG.
Note: CalFire website is down right now. fire.ca.gov I tried to check the fire closest to us and couldn’t get through. Is it down right now? says it is getting a 404 error.
PG&E customers: Today’s rotating outage blocks (if needed) have been posted.
1K-1S 5:00 pm
2K-2S 6:00 pm
If you don’t know your zone, they have a look-up listed by your address.
Our closest fire is the Salt Fire, about 25 miles away, but the winds are pushing it farther away from us. We are currently safe from the fire but the air quality is really bad and ashes are falling from the sky. The last I checked, they reached 10% containment over night. Currently estimated to be 1500 acres, but the winds will pick up this afternoon.
Predicted high today is 109 again.
But air conditioner is working and now setting the thermostat at 79-80 feels really cool!
Roger Moore
I’m pretty much OK in the Pasadena area. The Ranch 2 fire in Azusa seems to be pretty well contained, and the smoke isn’t too bad. We haven’t been hit by rolling blackouts, either, though I got a warning they might be coming from my (municipal) power company. I think it’s supposed to cool off a little bit over the next couple of days, so we should be OK.
moops
East bay also. hazy smoke everywhere and still brutal heat wave. The air is dead calm. So, calm air keeps the fires in their place and gives the fighters a chance to get them under control. The CalFire website has been going down from traffic overload (and I suspect cyber attack, but more on that as I get better intel). We are far from any fires right now. I think the main evacuations are in the Vacaville area but they have lots of good road routes and no choke points so it should go smoothly.
But with this year….wife has an orthodontic appointment today in San Francisco and asked to get a wad of cash in her wallet. She thinks we’ll get a major earthquake. So, take that as our mental baseline.
namekarB
Lincoln CA (north of Sacramento) on the edge of the great valley heat sink. Ashes falling from the sky this morning and a great smoky cloud cover that looked like the apocalypse. Sun did not reveal itself until around 9am Pacific.. Clearing up now (10 a Pacific) but still an orangish hew to everything. And the heat continues along with warnings of rolling black-outs if we overuse our electricity.
Haydnseek
San Gabriel Valley here, just east of downtown Los Angeles. No fire danger, but strange tiny power interruptions. No longer than three or four seconds, just long enough to mess up the clocks and shut down the computer. Three of ’em day before yesterday, three yesterday, all in the early afternoon. Hope all my friends in the bay area are doing okay. I’m gonna call ’em later on just to check.
joel hanes
Bad air in Santa Clara starting last night. Smoky enough that my eyes are burning.
No fires close enough to make me think about a “go” bag, nor is it windy (thank god).
An acquaintance from the LGM comment section who lives near Grass Valley has stopped commenting — I suspect he’s evacuated.
Sad about the Sunol wilderness burning, and about the NE flank of Mount Hamilton. I hope it doesn’t reach the observatory.
Wine country threatened again … oldest continually-operating winery is on the flame front, fighting, but preparing to evacuate.
KithKanan
SLO here. Hit 105 yesterday and didn’t drop below 80 overnight. Likely about the same today. I’m lucky to have a portable A/C (dual hose, so not sucking in the outside air) that’s struggling to keep up.
Smoky air from a small nearby fire that’s almost completely contained and several large fires up in Monterey County, so no immediate (or likely) safety threat from that..
We’ve been alerted to the possibility of rolling blackouts hitting our county, but I live a block away from a hospital so I’m in “Outage Block 50” and won’t be affected by those, either.
The heat, smoke, and noise from my AC in my small apartment are putting a serious dent in my working-from-home productivity this week, but it is what it is.
joel hanes
@moops:
There are signs that could presage a major quake on the San Andreas, but those temblor clusters are all waaay south, down by the Mexican border.
OTOH, this is exactly what my CA-native wife would have called “earthquake weather”, so there’s that.
moops
Was trippy last night seeing the glow of two different fires from our back deck. They may not be huge areas yet, but the fires must be huge and hot to put off enough light to look like a major cities over the horizon.
Tom Levenson
Ashes are falling in the yard of the house my brother just moved into (2 weeks ago) in Davis, CA. Probably from the fire burning near Lake Berryessa.
Just a hellscape.
RobertDSC-Work
Southeast LA County here. No issues other than the heat at home. I work out by LAX and it’s uncomfortably hot.
Sister Golden Bear
Palo Alto-area here. Very smoky with ash fall. I’m safe from the fires, but a number of friends have been evacuated from the various fires surrounding the Bay Area.
And while the air quality is better than last night, it’s still in the “unhealthy” to “very unhealthy” range thanks to all the smoke. In my neighborhood it’s been as bad as the 2018 fire season with the Camp Fire, etc. (AQI is in the mid-200s, was in the 300s last night.)
Thankfully I hadn’t yet been hit by the rotating blackout by Murdercorp (aka PG&E), crosses-fingers.
Nelle
My BIL in Fresno has been confined to a hospital bed for nearly two years since surgery complications (with assistance from two, can be lifted into wheel chair but not something my sister, in her 70’s, can do by herself). My other sister and I panicked about the rolling blackouts and offered to help them buy a generator. He says that the blackouts aren’t supposed to be happening in Fresno. I think he is on a list for home-bound and medical necessity for power. So it doesn’t sound like the blackouts are state wide.
WaterGirl
I just posted an update up top. Not related to the fire, but certainly related to looking out for one another.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
I’m about 4-5 miles from the ranch fire, due south, it’s not that bad but is hazy
James E Powell
SW Riverside County – the Temecula Metropolitan Area.
A week of 100+ temperatures. No nearby fires.
MisterForkbeard
North Bay here. We’re fine. Air quality sucks, but we’re about 20 miles from any of the fires and through several fire breaks, so we’re not worried. My parents are about 12 miles out, but well outside of the evacuation zones. We’re prepared to accept them at our house if needed.
Packing go-bags and so forth. It has been an interesting first day of remote-kindergarten for my oldest, too.
On another note, my Brother-In-Law is in the South Bay in a fairly wooded area about 9 miles from the fires there. He’s also pre-packed his car with everything they’d need except the dog and their work computers, so they can get out in a matter of minutes. I don’t think they have an evac-zone set up yet. I also have an aunt and cousin in Vacaville who were evacuated at 3am last night.
It’s very weird that this all seems… normal
EDIT: Some ash on our cars, but we’re at the edge of the cloud. I have partial blue skies to the east, though it’s a giant mess from the west. I’d love to post some of the pictures my dad took of the skies this morning, but I don’t really have a good place to do that.
MisterForkbeard
@WaterGirl: Oh no! BC, I feel for you. Best wishes from me and mine, and presumably from the rest of your Balloon Juice family.
Ninedragonspot
San Francisco. Air is smoky, but the temperatures are mild. My sister is in Carmel Valley – she’s not in immediate danger – the fire is moving in the opposite direction – but there’s ash everywhere and the air quality is dreadful.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Same with the rest in the SF Bay Area, disgustingly hot, muggy and smokey thanks to the Calaveras canyon fire on the other side of the hill.
Brachiator
No problems here. Far from the major fires and it is cooler than it was yesterday.
It was wild to get a message on my answering machine a couple of days ago alerting me that I could get a slice of rolling blackout of electricity. But so far, so good.
Sebastian
Venice Beach here. We are fine but we always keep a wary eye on the mountains towards Malibu and Ventura.
Martin
Its hot.
One interesting new twist is that our electricity grid planning wasn’t able to predict pandemic electricity usage very well, or, it wasn’t able to predict it early enough (pre-pandemic) to be able to respond to it.
So, we started doing rolling blackouts after everyone internalized that PG&E really would be held liable for all of the damage done by their lack of maintenance on elevated power lines, as a means for the utilities to reduce the likelihood of fires. Well, not really – because people are instead running generators in places which themselves cause fires – but at least the utility dodged the liability for that fire. So, we’re back in another Enron-like state of unintended consequences. These things suck, but they really are a sign of progress, just as Uber shutting down operations in CA will be.
The new twist here is that we’re not doing blackouts just due to fire danger, but now due to supply/demand imbalance. That’s due to a few things:
1) The pandemic has shifted power consumption in some odd ways. We’re doing a lot more low-efficiency residential air conditioning than high-efficiency commercial air conditioning. Across a state as large as CA, that really adds up. So you have the normal peak industrial power consumption married to the normal peak residential power consumption and we always kind of relied on those never hitting at the same time, but a pandemic means it happens at the same time.
2) As much progress as CA has made on renewables, the real costs are in upgrading the grid (that thing that Obama guy kept advocating for). So, we threw solar on top of damn near every commercial building and school to provide local power generation for those businesses and institutions, which are now all closed and don’t need that power. But the grid doesn’t always allow them to safely dump all of their production on the grid – at least not in a sufficiently granular way. An example, on Sunday we got notice of possible rolling blackouts, and I checked my solar setup. We were running at least a 1kW surplus at all times – even with the AC going. At times it was over 4kW. That power was going on the grid and helping power my neighbors. But, the grid doesn’t allow my utility enough control over it. I’d gladly pay for the equipment to give the utility more control, but they haven’t upgraded my neighborhood to support it. That’s true for a lot of the solar sitting on schools and such as well. So if conditions cause them to need to cut demand through a rolling blackout, they also end up turning off some of their supply. When my power went out Sunday, that extra 1kW-4kW of generation also got cut off – because it’s not safe when they think our bit of the grid is dark, but my roof has lit it back up. So in the case of my house, the blackout made the imbalance slightly worse, but the problem was my non-solar neighbors and I don’t produce enough to make the whole neighborhood positive, so my few kW had to be sacrificed to cut many more kW of demand from my neighbors. Well, expand that across the entire complexity of the state with thousands of GW sitting in parts of the grid that can’t be managed with sufficient granularity.
So once that cascade starts with some portion falling below production, in the effort to take consumption offline, you also invariably take some production offline, which means you need to expand that effort further.
3) Because CA is so large, we can usually get away with some parts of the state being blazing hot while other places aren’t. Remember, the CA/OR border is the exact same latitude as the NY/PA border (42N), so NYC is at a lower latitude than parts of CA, and we generally don’t assume that NYC and Florida are enjoying the same weather. But the whole goddamn state is blazing right now. We have heat warnings from Redding to San Diego – almost 700 miles. Humbolt is probably the only place that doesn’t have their ACs running continuously right now.
It’s so hot that I have to siesta mid-day from my outdoor office because my laptop is overheating just doing email, let alone big computational models. So I’m soon going to head inside, adding to the cooling demand, just so I can keep getting work done.
Paul T
Long Beach….very humid. If you are a dew point watcher: the dewpoint now at 10:30 am is 70, the air temp is 82. (No fog, no marine layer.) That dew point is a bizarre number for Southern California. Back in my aviation weather briefer days a dew point of 60 would mean we certainly would see thunderstorms in the summer…but high dew points are just the new climate change normal the last few years here. By comparison, back in the hot, humid South Carolina where I lived as a kid: the dew point at Charleston AFB right now ( 1:30 in the afternoon there) is 72. In other words, the relative humidity in Sunny Socal is basically the same as Humid, Muggy, South Carolina.
moops
this fire map appears to be working
https://ucanr.edu/sites/fire/Safety/Current/
but if it is right, then we are in for a lot more pain. the number of fires can’t be right.
Sebastian
@KithKanan:
A 10,000 BTU LG AC is $375 at Home Depot. I bought two.
TEL
North Bay here. Still in the middle of a heat wave with no AC (normally we don’t need it), and the air quality sucks. Smokey sky, ash everywhere. Sigh.
Martin
@Haydnseek: They are really struggling to keep the grid balanced.
Martin
@moops: It’s correct. They had hundreds of new fires due to lightning strikes the other day. Many in places they can’t justify prioritizing given other fires.
Yutsano
@Tom Levenson: That reminded me of how most of the Northwest looked after Mt. St. Helens blew up.
Flanders' Other Neighbor
Having grown up in WI, I laughed at the idea of getting A/C for my home in the Berkeley hills, but these yearly fires are tough on the eyes/throat/lungs. I’m *this* close to calling for a quote.
Of course, the rotating outages due to the heatwave or fire concerns might make that money wasted..
Scout211
@moops:
Thank you for posting that link. The red flag warning area for today is humongous! Oh my.
A Ghost to Most
?BillinGlendaleCA
@joel hanes: There’s a school of thought that the plate boundry may be shifting from the San Andres to what’s known as the Walker Lane complex along the eastern Sierra. Of course, that evolution will take millions of years.
Haydnseek
@Martin: That makes sense. Power failures here are rare. These little blips were something new. I figured they were related to the rolling blackouts.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ruckus: I could smell some smoke this morning, but not much.
Immanentize
BC in Ill. I am so sorry to hear this. The deaths keep getting closer and closer. I hope you are able to keep yourself and the rest of your family safe.
Brachiator
@Martin:
Very interesting point that the pandemic and subsequent economic slowdown has changed the way that electricity is used in ways that could not easily be anticipated.
Darkrose
Sacramento is hazy, but I just went out and it’s not too awful right now. I’m currently staying in a hotel because our central AC is still out–the contractor can’t come out until tomorrow. I had asthma trouble over the weekend, and with the fires and my air purifier being in the upstairs bedroom which is now a literal sauna, we decided that I should stay somewhere else for a while. My wife is home with the cat; she just emailed to say that she could smell smoke last night, and she’s glad I wasn’t there. We’re also lucky that we get our power through the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) so we haven’t had any outages. Fuck PG&E with a rusty chainsaw.
I recently started my new job, back at good old UC Not An Ag School, only in the library this time. I just got an email from administration that the Air Quality Index in Davis is in the red “unhealthy” range. Fortunately the librarians are almost all working from home due to COVID, but there are still folks who are considered essential who are on campus.
Tulip
Bay Area, East Oakland here… looks like it’s foggy. Im in a “sensetive” group so my lung are hurting a little. Smells like fire when go outside. I pulled in the bins from the street and it was eerily silent. Finally heard some bird song and squirrel chattering. No blackouts yet. WFH is utterly shot so far today.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Oh it is, all from the lighting storms we had Sunday and Monday.
catclub
I learned about the epa.gov airnow web feature. I assume that large parts of California are just very very bad, but I found it useful when there was an air quality alert for my area.
TaMara (HFG)
@A Ghost to Most: Making for some spectacular sunsets and sunrises. Just awful breathing conditions – I’m hoping the rain forecasts pan out this week. I can’t imagine fighting fires during the season of Covid-19.
hotshoe
Ash on the car windshield. Not much.
Am about 20 miles as the crow flies from the nearest fire — over a small range of mountains into the other valley — so am in no immediate danger here; am in one of the flat-valley small towns which is unlikely to be overrun even in a big fire because surrounded by ag fields, not too flammable, not chaparral …
but as everyone has noted, air quality is terrible.
Family, friends and former co-workers elsewhere are in danger zones of one or the other of these fires. I worry. How could ya not worry!
gbbalto
BC, so sorry to hear about your loss.
CA people – keep safe!
Dread
I’m pretty far from the fires, so I’m okay.
Honestly, a part of me wonders if we’re going to have to permanently evacuate some of these areas in the future as Climate Change gets worse.
Don’t know how that would work or where the folks would go though.
Fucking hell, I wish we had a conservative party that wasn’t full of batshit conspiracy theorists, greedy motherfuckers, and religious nuts that jerk off at the thought of the apocalypse, so we could have done something about Climate Change 20 years ago.
Anotherlurker
East Bay here. Sunny with some haze and the unmistakable smell of burning.
Martin
@Darkrose: Did you folks manage to shift the AG designation to Merced? Riverside tried arguing that Merced was ‘socal’ which didn’t really survive the fit of laughing that erupted as soon as they said it.
(UC is required by its land grants to operate two AG schools – one north and one south)
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
I work in Duarte, so we’re definitely getting more of it there than in Pasadena, and it’s manageable. I’m worried about the humidity. Higher humidity is supposed to help with the fires, but it’s keeping it from cooling off as much at night, and it makes the heat less tolerable.
moops
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
thank god there is no real wind. those hundreds of small fires would scorch us if they could whip up. I don’t know how this gets any better in the next few days. Most of those fires have no response right now.
Marcopolo
As a person who has lived though a massive wildfire burning to within about a mile of where I lived outside of Fairbanks, AK in 2004 if you are in harms way and they tell you you need to go, then go ASAP. I can’t imagine what it is like with your current temps & rolling black outs on top of all that. Hoping everyone stays safe. And let’s all remember, while there are some short term ways to lessen the impact of fires like this our only hope over the long term is remake our economy green.
hotshoe
@moops:
Yeah, I get that feeling.
Feels like “earthquake weather”. Remember how it felt right before the Loma Prieta quake in 1989?
Okay, I know there is no such thing as “earthquake weather” but — I dunno — I wonder if humans are smart enough to intuit when something big is coming.
Or if it’s just our overly-big brains seeing connections where there aren’t any, really.
joel hanes
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I am a member of that school of thought.
Darkrose
@Martin: I should stop calling Davis UC Not an Ag School. The provost that insisted we weren’t is gone, and between the wine and brewing programs and the vet school, they’ve started to just lean into it.
Merced will always be “Surprise UC” to me, though. Applicants are still surprised to learn that they were accepted, because they don’t realize their applications are automatically sent to Merced and Riverside.
Miss Bianca
Good thoughts for all of you staying safe out there – we’re grappling with four major wildfires here in CO right now, so I definitely feel your pain.
And now they’re talking about dry thunderstorms for our area. Yay-ee! : (
Martin
@Flanders’ Other Neighbor: We added it 2 years ago when we needed to replace the furnace and could add it relatively inexpensively. Went with a high efficiency AC unit. Went 20 years without AC. I insisted we add solar to power the AC at the same time. So even though the AC is kicking on quite a bit today, we never need to draw from the grid during the day.
JOHN MANCHESTER
We just moved to San Rafael from Oakland. Friday it was 102 when without warning the power went off. No AC to begin with, but now no fans. Hard to sleep.
Now the smoke is getting bad. We’re running air purifiers with the windows closed, but it’s getting hot. And if the power goes out no air purifiers. Two falls ago in Oakland the smoke affected my health for months.
Jinchi
An ironic perk of living in fire country is that a lot of us had a stash of N95 masks months before covid broke out.
Two days ago we were all woken up around 4 a.m. by a series of loud thunder strikes. We were already suffering through 105+ dry weather and there was virtually no rain accompanying the lightning.
So we had lots of small fires within 10 miles of us. The smoke is bad enough that we haven’t spent much time outside, but otherwise we’re safe here.
MisterForkbeard
@moops: There were over 60 fires started in the North Bay during the lightning storms this weekend. The West in general is high-heat low-rain, so I’m not surprised at the number of fires.
Martin
@Darkrose: Riverside isn’t getting many of those any more, btw. They’re getting properly selective, and their campus has been getting quite nice with the growth.
We could easily fill two more Davis sized campuses with CA resident demand. It’s getting quite dire, actually. Davis’s applications to new enrollment ratio is roughly the same as MITs. The only reason you and we aren’t as selective is that students don’t take the offer at the same rate as MIT admits. But it’s a troubling sign of the state’s ability to keep up with student demand.
Mary G
KithKanan
@Sebastian: I’m “good” on A/C. I’ll probably swap my 12,000 BTU Whynter for a 14,000 BTU in the off-season, but I don’t have the cash flow to deal with that right now because EDD is 8 weeks behind on work-share partial unemployment payments.
The real issue is both neighboring units are vacant right now – students moved in, but now are back home until Poly “starts up” (whatever that means) in September – so my A/C is fighting not only to cool my unit but to deal with the heat from their closed-up likely 90+ degree interior temperatures coming through the walls.
Alice
Just over the border in Nevada, near Tahoe. Very smokey with that eerie, post-apocalypse yellow light. The utilities are starting to mention rolling blackouts, almost unheard of in northern Nevada.
misterpuff
We good here in Cerritos.
Undogly hot but that is transient.
Stay Safe all.
Roger Moore
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
You could plausibly argue that the plate boundary is not a neat line but is actually a zone extending all the way through the basin and range province, i.e. into western Utah and Arizona. The basin and range province is the way it is because it’s being stretched by the Pacific plate pulling on the North American plate.
John Smallberries
Lurking deep in the heart of the built up LA / Long Beach / South Bay Area we are seeing the smoke plumes and pyrocumulus but nothing else.
The Dark Avenger
107 today in the 559. Air quality is suffering from fires around us, so we stay inside and am glad the A/C unit was upgraded recently. It was overcast so the humidity goes up and makes things worse.
Benw
My fam in San Diego lost power for an hour over the weekend. My little brother and his fam move into their new house on the street we grew up on this weekend. Hang in there nor/central CAers!
Gin & Tonic
Open thread, so popping in to say that news from the Belarusian state TV/radio station is that Belarusian employees have been replaced with Russians brought in overnight.
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: I assume a dry thunderstorm = lightning? Not helpful.
mrmoshpotato
Sorry to be off topic on this post but someone’s lying about destroying the USPS. Article inside. I hope all of our CA jackals are safe.
Martin
Look at the bright side, folks, we shouldn’t see any more 130F temps in CA the rest of this week.
You know it’s hot when you can cook your medium rare prime rib by leaving it outside in the shade.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: I am not following as closely as I should, but that strikes me as distinctly not good.
Origuy
East San Jose here. Air quality is bad. I’m in the flatlands, but the hills aren’t far away. I haven’t been out to look for visible flames in the foothills, but the maps are showing red blotches all over. Friends in Boulder Creek have evacuated.
mrmoshpotato
@mrmoshpotato: *Details inside
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: True, but I think the idea of Walker Lane is that most of the movement that has occurred on the San Andres will shift over there. One reason is the San Andres has a pretty good sized kink in it(or a couple) between the Carrizo Plain and Frazier Park.
Cowgirl in the Sandi
Brentwood here (East Bay – not OJ Brentwood). It’s really hazy but I don’t smell smoke anymore. It’s 92 degrees at 11:30 which feels pretty balmy compared to the triple digit temps we’ve had recently. Hope it stays that way. The sky is really cloudy looking – very eerie.
TEL
@JOHN MANCHESTER:
Hey neighbor! Also in San Rafael. Ended up hanging out in the pool Friday night to cope with the heat when the power went out. At least the air quality wasn’t bad on Friday.
Martin
@WaterGirl: Yeah, lightning with no rain. Pretty common in the mountain west during heatwaves. Very counterproductive. It used to be the biggest source of wildfires. Probably still is, not sure.
Miss Bianca
@WaterGirl: yep – thunder, lightning, very very frightening because little to no rain. : (
ETA: Or what Martin said. I swear it wasn’t there before I started!
Scout211
Just a quick reminder. Ash is falling everywhere. My garden veggies look like they are covered with a light snow.
Don’t dry wipe the ashes off of your vehicles. That can harm the paint. Rinse all the ash off with a hose first and then you can wash it and wipe it dry.
Martin
@Miss Bianca: You can imagine how many comments I miss that way with how much I tend to write. :)
Jaysails
BC in Illinois,I’m so sorry for your loss.
Alameda here. Very smoky. Ash everywhere. Orange light. It’s enough to make a girl want to move back to Maryland.
Interstadial
East Bay here. Nothing to add to what others have said except a link that shows the extent of the smoke this morning in CA:
https://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/?sat=goes-17&z=4&im=12&ts=1&st=0&et=0&speed=130&motion=loop&map=1&lat=0&opacity%5B0%5D=1&hidden%5B0%5D=0&pause=0&slider=-1&hide_controls=0&mouse_draw=0&follow_feature=0&follow_hide=0&s=rammb-slider&sec=full_disk&p%5B0%5D=geocolor&x=13204&y=3466
As the day goes by the link to this location will be off more and more due to the earth’s rotation, but it should be possible to recenter the image on the state.
HumboldtBlue
All good up north, we had some severe high temperatures inland over the weekend but fire activity is minimal and no rolling blackouts although alerts have been issued.
Regularly cool on the coast and very hot 15 miles east.
Stacib
@BC
I lost my brother last week, too. I’m devastated. My sincerest thoughts heading your way.
?BillinGlendaleCA
This site looks pretty good for tracking both the fires and smoke.
Fair Economist
Orange County. Quite hot by local standards, but not all that bad. No large fires near me, although the haze had an orange tinge last night, as it often does with smoke. SCE is a lot better than PG&E so we are not having many rolling blackouts so far. I think the Bay Area is getting it much worse than Socal at present, between the lightning storm, being less used to high heat, and of course PG&E. The state really needs to take over that disaster of a company.
WaterGirl
@Stacib: I’m so very sorry. I can only imagine how awful that would be.
HumboldtBlue
@Stacib:
Have some love from the Lost Coast. So sorry for you and your family.
Ladyraxterinok
@Sister Golden Bear:
Thanks for Palo Alto info
In grad school at Stanford fall 61 to summer 65. Then back to finish dissertationfall 66 to August 68
Very exciting time to be in area!
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Sister Golden Bear: Hi there. I grew up in Palo Alto and went to Berkeley (love your nym). My mother’s house (sold in 2015 after she died) is between N. California and Embarcadero down by 101. I expected flooding problems with the house but hadn’t considered fire danger :-(
A couple of years ago we were staying in Berkeley during fire season and came out to find ash on the car. Very creepy.
susanna
From SF mid-peninsula, which is next to Sister Golden Bear’s Palo Alto, so it’s as she described. Hazy, blue foliage, too warm. Some of the (closed) large tech companies are opening their buildings for employees and families to chill with air-conditioning and racing around hallways.
Unfortunately, the redwood forests that abound in the Santa Cruz Mts. are in the way of fire and one of the small villages, parts or all of Boulder Creek, was given evacuation orders. A postcard-picture, outdoor adventure area with Santa Cruz close by, so I’m hoping for better updates.
Stay safe everyone.
Interstadial
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Looks like it doesn’t reflect updated heat signatures on some of the Bay Area fires so it severely understates their growth. I’d try this one for fires: https://maps.nwcg.gov/sa/#/%3F/EditLayerActiveIncidents/37.3122/-121.7013/10 .
This is what I use for smoke: https://www.purpleair.com/map?opt=1/mAQI/a10/cC0#7/37.717/-122.091
Clicking on any one station will bring up popups including a history of air quality over the last 24 hours at that station.
Both maps make take a little while to fully load, even after your browser says that loading is finished.
sacrablue
Ash settled on my veggie garden and car in northern Sacramento County. Not as smoky as it was a couple of hours ago but the heat is miserable. The cats don’t want to go out (ew mom, let me in!) Yuk! At least we get electricity from SMUD so hopefully we won’t lose power.
mrmoshpotato
@Dread:
And done something about so much more as well.
Ladyraxterinok
@hotshoe:
That 89 earthquake was super scary. Our son was a senior st Stanford—long wait for contact.
Still lots of damage visible at 1990 graduation
Orson
Santa Rosa,CA, here. Walked out to my car this morning. It was covered in little flecks of ash. My spouse and I had a prep meeting to discuss what if we have to evacuate: things like 1 car or both cars? where do we go? probably to the east, like maybe Sacramento. And of course WHAT we will we take if we realize our house could burn down? I feel there’s actually low probability we’ll be told to evacuate. The current fires in our area are 15 or 20 miles north, but things can change quickly.
Hoodie
@Martin: Recalling from the days when I almost went to work for PG&E, even on regular days, the grid topology in CA is a challenge because you don’t have a lot of peak gen capacity in the area. Now they have a lot of solar they can’t effectively use because of stability issues. They are trying to rectify that by creating giant battery installations in old power plants (Moss Landing). Crazy stuff with thousands of lithium ion cells, client is working on some of the control software.
Nelle
@Stacib: I’m so sorry.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
Here in Ukiah no fires locally except in Covelo, which is northern Mendocino County, and it sounds like they are hitting it hard. Last week it got up to 109 for several days (with high 60s at night), and the thunderstorms Sunday night and all day Monday actually gave us some measurable rain with several cloud bursts, and lowered the temp down to the mid 80s as a high. It was actually 59 as a low last night. Such a blessing for us locally, but the lightning strikes from the storm has caused a lot of fires elsewhere, so overall, not helpful.
The other news in Ukiah is a local arsonist (!!) was caught and arrested a couple of days ago after starting several small fires in town in one day. He is now in jail with a million-dollar bail.
Sister Golden Bear
@joel hanes: Yeah, in addition to the fires it definitely feels like earthquake weather. Given 2020, I suppose I should just start bolting/tying things down now…
UncleEbeneezer
@Roger Moore: There was a short blackout up here in Altadena (only an hour or so) the other day, but fortunately it didn’t effect our block.
SFBayAreaGal
@Martin: just think we still have September and October.
UncleEbeneezer
@joel hanes: Dr. Lucy Jones, one of the world’s experts on quakes explained that there is no such thing as earthquake weather, at a talk we went to at the Natural History Museum a couple years ago. But this is definitely “wildfire weather.”
Hungry Joe
San Diego here. So far, so lucky: nothing anywhere near us. Everybody’s nervous, though, and on alert. Only about 90 degrees right now, five miles from the ocean, but we’ve got another couple of days before its supposed to cool off. I did my usual tut-tutting morning walk with Alice the Dog, muttering through the mask at houses with too much vegetation: “Trim away those dry palm fronds — they’re kindling! … Hello, ever hear of clearing the brush back there? … You realize that the branches on that fir tree enveloping your house are TORCHES, right?”
UncleEbeneezer
Altadena here. Safe from fires, smoke isn’t TOO bad, but air is definitely not great. Yesterday was miserable, hitting 108 here. Today will only be about 98 and feels downright reasonable by comparison.
One of my tennis students in Arcadia told me that her family found a bear in their pool.
a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio
@Stacib: I’m so sorry. That’s hard.
SFBayAreaGal
South of San Francisco, north of San Mateo here. A lot cooler. Can see fog on the coastal hills. Wind from the coast has picked up. Can see blue skies looking west, looking east is hazy. Smell of smoke is strong. Found ashes on my car.
moops
@SFBayAreaGal:
ah crap. You are right. This is still way early for fire season to kick off.
SFBayAreaGal
@Stacib: My condolences on the loss of your beloved brother.
SFBayAreaGal
@moops: I am not looking forward to next couple of months
Ruckus
@Martin:
East San Gabriel Valley here, as I said earlier, due south of the fire just north of Azusa. A little cooler than yesterday, it’s 100 right now. My apt stayed under 80 yesterday when it was 105, so the air only runs sporadically.
Sister Golden Bear
@SFBayAreaGal: Not to mention November. The Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise started early in that month.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Smoke was much worse at lunch than this morning, visibility maybe a mile at the most.
WaterGirl
@Hungry Joe:
I love your tut-tutting description. I did that for nearly 2 years after the huge tree fell on my house. I would be walking or driving and see a tree and think, “that doesn’t look healthy, they should take that down!”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@UncleEbeneezer: That’s a fine looking Bruin.
Ol Nat
In Oakland. The air is so thick you could use a sieve as a mask! We’re safe enough, but definitely know people who are in danger and/or have been displaced. It definitely adds a layer of extra pain to the present horrible situation(s).
Kent
@Martin:
Almost half the student population at the University of Oregon is now CA residents because of the overflow from CA. I think this year or last was the first year in which a majority of students are from out of state. The lion’s share from CA.
I hear it is similar at places like Arizona and Arizona State.
Roger Moore
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
The really big kink in the San Andres is here in Southern California; it gives us the transverse ranges. If the San Andreas really shifts, it will because of that kink.
Ruckus
Just looked up the Ranch fire, the one closest to me, and it’s now listed as possible arson. I’ve never understood people that set fires.
I wonder how many of the ones going now are arson?
Kent
@Ruckus: Sociopaths. Just like the folks who are trying to repeal the ACA.
Interstadial
@Ruckus: Nearly all lightning caused. It did take some a day or two to become noticeable after smoldering at first. One definite arson fire that I’m aware of in Big Sur.
SectionH
We’re getting off pretty easy in “uptown” San Diego compared to you guys farther north. We’re about 2 miles inland – it’s 80º, humidity 69% which is bad enough – we’re running the swamp cooler. Temps are much worse in north and east county of course. It’s 100º in Esco where my aunt’s house was. There’s a lot of haze, though, and Mr S noticed a smell of smoke when he opened the balcony door. Not heavy, but distinct. I didn’t smell smoke, but his sense of smell is a good deal better than mine. Not seeing any reports from Cal Fire SD of active fires since August 16th, could have been structure or something in one of the canyons.
The sun’s about to get around to our west-facing windows, so it’s time to put up the insulation. Did you know 1/2″ foam core is excellent for that? ;->
Take care, good luck everyone.
Darkrose
@Martin: What impact has the current administration’s attempts to restrict international students had on admissions? Are the UC’s seeing fewer overseas applicants because people are understandably leery of coming to the US?
BC in Illinois
@Stacib:
I’m so sorry to hear of your loss. It’s still the first 24 hours for me, and I’m hundreds of miles away from his family. The feeling — that he’s gone — is still coming and going. Peace.
Ruckus
@UncleEbeneezer:
Usually a one hour blackout is a rotating shutdown. SCE has set up areas of its service and gives notice of which segment is next on its website. They also show how to tell what number your area is.
laura
This gal is having a tough day. It’s raining ash, the evacuations around Vacaville have several of my coworkers at home packing up and preparing for the word to get out. My Members at the Vet’s home in Yountville are keeping a close eye accross hwy 128 and the Silverado Trail – at the same time CV19 is making inroads in staff and Home Members. The Water District just west of Guerneville – along the Russian River is providing emergency services and repairing outages as the area is under evacuation. My shop steward had to get through cordons to get to work. The District Manager took the position after his house burnt down in Paradise.
It’s hot, humid and breezy. I feel existential dread.
Opened my newspaper to learn that a women I’ve known since about 1995 was a victim of the Golden State Killer – she and her sister. I cant even today.
Annie
San Francisco here, though late to the party. Yesterday when I went for my walk I saw a long plume of smoke over the ocean, moving south from Marin County – turned out to be from the Point Reyes fire.
Today, air quality is lousy and there was ash on the seats at my bus stop this morning. It almost makes me glad I have to wear a mask. The Alert SF system has sent this out:
Air Quality-Unhealthy: Active youth/adults/people with respiratory diseases should avoid prolonged outdoor
exertion. Everyone else, especially children, should limit outdoor exertion.
Darkrose
@Ladyraxterinok: Loma Prieta was my junior year at Stanford, and the first earthquake I noticed. The building I was in at the time was condemned, and didn’t reopen until 1991.
I remember taking my mattress down off the loft and sleeping on the floor for the remainder of that school year.
Darkrose
@BC in Illinois: I’m so sorry, BC. Will be keeping you in my thoughts.
Darkrose
@Stacib: My condolences, StaciB.
Interstadial
@Interstadial: I may be mistaken. The fire heat map I linked may be picking up hot smoke clouds and overstating fire boundaries on the downwind side.
Roger Moore
@UncleEbeneezer:
Was that part of a rolling blackout, though, or just an ordinary “something went wrong with the system and a few blocks lost power” kind of blackout.
Interstadial
Condolences BC, StaciB, and laura.
Roger Moore
@UncleEbeneezer:
That’s because it’s summer. In the winter, the bear would be in the hot tub. Bears are just part of the neighborhood color if you live close to the mountains.
WaterGirl
@laura: That all sounds beyond awful. All those things at once, exponential, not additive.
I am confused about the Golden State Killer, wasn’t that a long time ago?
John manchester
@TEL: Hi! Actually San Rafael has some of the best air quality in the area today- 57 ain’t bad
Roger Moore
@WaterGirl:
They’re in the penalty phase of his trial right now.
KSinMA
@BC in Illinois: I’m so sorry, BC.
Brian
@catclub: also available as a smartphone app
UncleEbeneezer
@Roger Moore: Oh I know. They come to Altadena all the time. I see pics of sightings from Loma Alta (just beneath the foothills) pretty regularly.
TJWeston
Pretty miserable up here in Topanga Cyn. but we ‘aint on fire yet !
TJWeston
@SFBayAreaGal: Ditto
Dan B
@BC in Illinois: Sorry to hear about the loss of your brother.
grumbles
San Francisco calling in a bit late.
The smoke is unfortunate, but so far not nearly as bad as last year.
I still maintain that this burn-down-the-state-every-August thing is a terrible tradition, maybe we should maybe try skipping it once and see what happens, but nobody listens to me.
Lolinator
Checking in from San Mateo County on the ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains — our fire is apparently called CZU August Lightning Complex. The closest evacuation area is about 10 miles southwest of us so we’re keeping a verrrrry close watch. Have some basic Go! bags packed in the cars. The wind seems to be going in the other direction at this point, so although we have smoke it’s not too horrible. The mountain communities outside of Santa Cruz are getting the brunt of it so far, and we have numerous friends who have evacuated.
I’m sending good thoughts for the CalFire and local firefighters, for the residents who will lose their mountain homes, and also for the beautiful redwoods and wildlife that we are surrounded by.
Fuck climate change.
WaterGirl
@Roger Moore: Thank you. How awful to find out that someone you knew died, and in a horrific way.
WaterGirl
@grumbles: Good that you still have your sense of humor.
Sister Golden Bear
Thankfully the wind shifted, and the sky is now bluish again, instead of orange like it was this morning. Air quality is still very unhealthy.
But visibility cleared up enough that I was able to see the smoke coming up from the CZU August Lightning Complex fire in the Santa Cruz mountains. Looked like a thunderhead coming off the ground. Rather impressive and terrifying. Still 0% containment, and a huge evacuation zone.
Apparently there’s an even bigger fire east of San Jose.
Poe Larity
Thought we might luck out last night, but have probably lost a year or two of hobby work in the Lightning Complex fire. But can’t complain as the locals got escorted in a couple of hours ago and there’s nothing left of their homes but ashes.
wmd
I’ve evacuated. Sprayed water on everything in yard. I have 17 chicks that are a month old; they have 2-3 days of food and water in their portion of the coop. Hens have food and water in chicken yard; all the livestock will have to fend for themselves against predators.
My cat and I along with valuables are at my girlfriend’s house for at least a night, probably 2. Will be doing a check up on Friday; possibly going home if the fire line stabilizes far enough from my house.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@wmd: Oh no! (Roughly) where are you? Hope it veers away and you’re OK.
Smoky but AQ not too bad in San Francisco. I’m so tired of this already, and all we have to deal with is the air. I can’t even imagine how scary actual fire nearby is. Actually, I can imagine, because we had to evacuate for a fire in San Diego when I was a teenager and it was surreally terrifying, like a horror movie had suddenly flowed out of the TV screen and surrounded us. Best to all who are in harm’s way.
wmd
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: @Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
Most recent NASA imaging shows hot spots 2 miles from my house.
Friends are saying that sheriff is refusing entry to people; one that didn’t evacuate last night (his girlfriend insisted they save their chickens; I look at losing livestock as unfortunate but acceptable). said he heard propane tanks exploding all night.
My cat Buzzy is stressed, but alive. Being confined to a strange room is tough.
Serendiptously I had already received approval to work from the office today – I need to reset a computer (I think due to DHCP giving it a new IP address). I was already going in to pick up a late prototype device, and was told that the county requires tracking if I was going to do anything more than that (a 5 minute fix at my desk needs director level approval).
It’s going to be a challenge to work from my girlfriend’s house – 30 down/ 6 up Mbps… at my house I’ve got 450 down/9 up. Given a need to download 18 GB OS images this will be problematic. I probably should go into the office until this is over.
wmd
Saved 17 baby chicks (month old). Road block about a mile before my house. CHP saw my medical emergency response team badge from work, ask me about it and waved me in. I’d called sheriff earlier, called both livestock rescue numbers they gave me and was told they couldn’t help.
also saved a motorcycle and some potable valuables. Got back and enjoyed a dram.