Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

You are here: Home / Climate Change / Wildfire Check-in: Wednesday Edition

Wildfire Check-in: Wednesday Edition

by | 105 Comments

This post is in: ,

This is a picture from the Puget Sound from a couple of days ago, sent in by Dan B.

They say the smoke is over 6,000 feet deep, which my math says is more than a mile.

Wildfire Check-in (Exploding Trees (?) Edition

I read that the smoke from fires in California, Oregon and Washington is nearing Europe.  We truly are all connected, and the world needs to start acting like it.  Starting with the U.S.

Are people still under evacuation orders, or at levels one and two?

Evacuation Levels

Level 1: READY – Level 1 evacuations are an Alert. Residents should be aware of a danger that exists. …
Level 2: SET – Level 2 evacuations indicate there is a significant risk to your area. Now is the time to be set for immediate evacuation.
Level 3: GO! – Level 3 means there is immediate danger.

Stay safe, and let us know how you are doing.

Update: What’s the story of “exploding trees”?

 

 

Reader Interactions

105Comments

  4. 4.

    way2blue

    Light drizzle / heavy fog drip overnight in my area on the San Francisco peninsula. AQI of closest monitor reads 0 this morning! (Yesterday it read ~185.) Looking forward to seeing blue sky once the fog clears…

  5. 5.

    Geoduck

    Down at the base of Puget Sound, the smoke continues to look like heavy fog. Not personally suffering any health issues, but I don’t have to be out in it every day.

  6. 6.

    MobiusKlein

    Bay area nicer.
    I have had Dr appointments, and they alway ask the screening questions, and I kid that EVERYONE has a cough or runny nose now, and folks who answer no are liars.

  10. 10.

    Martin

    Here’s a really important Atlantic piece to help people understand why the fires are so bad.

    “In the summer, in California and across most of the West, as long as there’s fuel to burn, then the climate variable that tends to matter most is the vapor-pressure deficit,” Park Williams, a research professor at Columbia University, told me. “In California this year, the vapor-pressure deficit has been record-breakingly high.”

    The vapor-pressure deficit indexes two other measurements: the air temperature and the relative humidity. Both measurements affect the air’s sponginess. Hotter air is more likely to bump water into a gas state, while drier air can hold more water vapor overall. The vapor-pressure deficit measures the overlap. “It’s the difference between the amount of water vapor that’s in the air and the amount of water vapor that the air can possibly hold,” Williams said.

    When the vapor-pressure deficit is high, it means the atmosphere has become an immense, six-mile-high sponge. The arid air will induce water to evaporate from wherever it’s hiding—the soil, the wooden boards of houses, the limbs and leaves of trees and underbrush.

    This is why climate change makes it hard to understand what the effects will be on a given region. Hot air can hold more water. In a dry place like CA, this can have the effect of making it dryer because the atmosphere can draw out more water from trees, etc. In a wet place like Florida, the opposite happens, storms can now hold more water when they arrive and dump more on land.

    That’s what’s been happening here. The west has gotten about 3 degrees warmer. The coastal ranges which coax moisture out of the air (pushing the air up  cools it and it can’t hold moisture as well) may get wetter – so more rain right along the coast. But the inland valleys and inland ranges which tend to be dry because the coastal ranges removed the moisture from the air get dryer, so trees dry out, farms need more irrigation, brush dries out, etc. Fires become easier to start because everything is dryer, and they burn better and spread faster. Brush clearance and controlled burns help (most of the land out here is federally owned, so the feds are the ones that have been negligent on that – mostly  due to budget cutting) but even if you do that, it doesn’t completely mitigate the underlying problem that trees burn more easily now.

    We’ve seen it locally in a different way. When our city built out they planted various oak and pine trees to act as sound buffers between intermediate roadways and homes. But now they are routinely  dropping large branches on homes, fences, into roads, etc. because the city can’t irrigate them enough to keep the trees from drying out – and water is an important part of a trees structural strength. So the dry trees are brittle and in windstorms they simply break. The trees eventually will get replaced with highly drought tolerant species.

  11. 11.

    Kent

    Here in the Portland metro the AQI has very slowly been improving.  We are now down to an AQI of 224 this morning which is only “Very Unhealthy” instead of “Extremely Unhealthy”.  By the weekend the weather is supposed to shift and bring us some offshore breezes to clear this stuff out. But that was the forecast for earlier this week and that didn’t happen.

    My parents were on the edge of the evac zone in Canby OR in Clackamas County but that has been dialed back to Level 1.  While the fires aren’t contained, they aren’t spreading west anymore.  It was the extreme winds a week ago that were the huge problem.  We had over 50 mph winds across the region for 2 days which is what set all this off.

  12. 12.

    Old School

     

    https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-falsely-claimed-exploding-trees-started-california-wildfires-2020-9

    While speaking during a televised briefing in Sacramento on Monday, he said dry trees can “just explode,” as part of a longtime argument that wildfires would be eliminated if forests were cleared of dead trees and debris.

    “You can knock this down to nothing,” Trump said. “You go to Europe … They’re very, very strong on management, and they don’t have a problem. With — as they say — more explosive trees than we have in California.”

    He doubled down on the statement when calling into “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday morning, saying: “In Europe they have forest cities … they don’t have fires like this, and they have more explosive trees. They have trees that will catch easier, but they maintain their fire … They thin the fuel. The fuel is what’s on the ground, the leaves.”

  13. 13.

    Tenar Arha

    @Gin & Tonic: Yeah, it’s weird. The sky is a cloudless milky-blue-gray in the Boston area, yet it feels like a perfect just a bit cool fall day that really should have that perfect blue sky.

  14. 14.

    Penty

    @cleek: Not a myth. The whole story comes from when California planted a lot of Eucalyptus trees as a status symbol. That tree will explode since it is highly flammable. The bark alone tends to hold embers a long time so when they get blown away it spreads the fire.  Here is a good article. https://www.kqed.org/science/4209/eucalyptus-california-icon-fire-hazard-and-invasive-species

    Here is another article from the Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/16/california-eucalyptus-trees-environment-comic

  15. 15.

    Manxome Bromide

    @WaterGirl: Yes. The AQI is basically measuring the amounts of various pollutants with each set against a standard scale of “how much will it hurt you”. You then pick the maximum off the list.

    Back in the days before catalytic converters, Ozone was the major pollutant. In wildfire times (and when I was growing up in the southwestern deserts), PM2.5 (“particulate matter, >= 2.5 micron in size”) is.

    And if there isn’t any in the air, then the index is zero.

    There’s been a shift in the winds for the moment, and the SF Peninsula is getting essentially no smoke at all from the fires for now. Santa Cruz and the San Joaquin valley are not so lucky, but I’m rejoicing where I can; if the wind shifts again we’ll be back into “Unhealthy” within the hour.

    Also interesting: COVID-19 cases in Santa Clara county have been plummeting. We’ve been pretty good about masking and staying indoors here, comparatively, but the wildfires may have just shown us the difference between “pretty good” and “really good”.

  16. 16.

    Martin

    @Zzyzx: Similar here. AQI of 180 again today. It doesn’t look bad out, but eyes/throat starts burning after a while. Every day I’ve gotten headaches (unusual for me) and go and take a nap next to the air cleaner to clear it up. This is annoying.

    For those unfamiliar, local air quality problems from fires isn’t unusual – even if the fire is 50 miles away. As the wind patterns shift, you end up being downwind from some fire and you get smoke/ash/etc. But then a few hours or a day later the winds  change direction and it all clears up. But there are so many fires that it’s gone from local to global – we’re not downwind from the El Dorado fire any more, or from the Valley fire, or from the Bobcat fire. But the smoke layer from all the fires is so massive that even with the wind blowing in from the ocean, it’s still pulling in smoke from a week ago. We’ve never seen anything like this before.

  17. 17.

    Louise B.

    In Oregon, there are no new evacuation orders in the western part of the state – at least not that I’m aware of.  The areas that have burned are still largely not safe to go back to – crews are still clearing roads.  There is a new evacuation order in the south central part of the state due to a new fire burning there, but it is quite far away from the big population centers.  The air quality in much of the state continues to be wretched.  Particulate levels have decreased slightly (to merely “very unhealthy”) in some places, but continue to be hazardous in others.  The forecast is for conditions to improve very, very slowly, and it may be another week before the air is not unhealthy.

    My home in Portland is old, with no insulation and no way to shut off air flow from a very well ventilated attic.  Although I have no particular health issues, I started feeling physically unwell Monday afternoon, so on the spur of the moment I made reservations for a place I have previously stayed on the northern Oregon coast, where the air quality is actually good.  I drove down late Monday evening and am here through Friday.  Very grateful I have the means to take this step, and feel horrible about the effects this is having on those with asthma and other similar health problems.

  18. 18.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Rained today in the SF Bay Area and the air quality is decent.

    Worth noting the SCU Fire Complex, which was the previous big one before the August Fire Complex, is all on ranch land.  Livestock was eating all the brush and it still burned.

  19. 19.

    Martin

    @Old School: Reminder that ⅔ of the forests in California and Oregon and Washington are owned and managed by the federal government.

    We can’t clear them or do controlled burns on that land. Only Trump and his hires can.

    So even if that was the problem (it’s part of it) it’s mainly a federal responsibility, and therefore Trump’s responsibility. That’s why all of the national forests here are closed.

  20. 20.

    CaseyL

    We had a tiny sprinkle of rain in Seattle’s north end last night that briefly cleared the air.

    Back to smoky fog this morning.

  21. 21.

    trollhattan

    Bliss. An AQI of 13 in Sac and no zero(s) tagged on. Visible smoke but aloft, so not impacting we ground-dwellers. IDK what changed but assuredly will take it. We still have dozens of active fires in the state, including one creeping towards the million-acre mark that is already the largest in recorded history.

  22. 22.

    laura

    The air quality was listed as excellent this morning in Sacramento. Grabbed the weinie dog and went for a walk with a friend for an hour. Got home, blew my nose and it looked like a crime scene. Still, the sky was blue, a brisk walk was had and the depression I’ve felt since Labor Day has abated. Also, exploding trees – the president is a moran and ignores the fact that he’s responsible for federal lands. Fuck that guy.

  24. 24.

    opiejeanne

    @cleek: In 2003 the Old Fire raced through an area of the San Bernardino Mountains that had a lot of bark beetle-damaged trees, many of which were dead. Those trees were described by observers as exploding after catching fire because they were so dry. The explosion of these trees sent burning material into the air, spreading the fire in this way.

    It was a firestorm creating its own wind. I wasn’t standing there, I just know what I read and heard at the time. The exploding bark beetle trees may have been a unique event.

  25. 25.

    opiejeanne

    @Geoduck: It looks like heavy fog on the East Side too. And there’s a faint familiar chemical smell that I can’t identify, almost a bleach smell, with a hint of turpentine. The turpentine smell may be from the pine trees along the fence line but I’ve never noticed it before, not here nor in the SoCal mountains among the pines.

  28. 28.

    Aleta

    LA Times story about George Atiyeh, who worked to preserve the Opal Creek Wilderness in Oregon and helped found the Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center.

    On Tuesday, a sheriff’s spokeswoman said authorities were still working with the Atiyeh family to find him.

    Atiyeh was an unlikely environmental activist, scion of a Syrian American mining family, nephew of a former Republican governor.    He grew up hiking, swimming and fishing for rainbow trout in the turquoise-colored Opal Creek that spilled over 30-foot waterfalls and rushed past Douglas fir, hemlock, cedar and yew, some up to 330 feet high and thousands of years old.

    He served stateside in the Army during the Vietnam War, but that didn’t spare him from the trauma of losing friends in battle. Eventually he retreated to Opal Creek.  “It healed him,” said Andy Kerr, 65, a fellow Oregonian environmentalist who met Atiyeh in the 1970s.

     

    But as the timber industry encroached on Opal Creek, Atiyeh sold his stake in the logging company and took a stand that turned him into a local pariah. “Opal Creek saved him,” Kerr said. “And it became time to save Opal Creek.”

    During the ensuing “timber wars,” which involved efforts to save the endangered spotted owl, environmental activists descended on the canyon, chaining themselves to trees. Timber advocates fought back, with help from state politicians long beholden to the industry.

    “Opal Creek was ground zero for the timber wars and he was at the center of it,” said David Seideman, who wrote a book about the conflict, “Showdown at Opal Creek: The Battle for America’s Last Wilderness.”  Atiyeh received so many death threats that he took to keeping a .357 Magnum in his bedroom dresser and recorded a new answering machine message: “If you’re calling to leave a death threat, please leave your name and number.”

    People threatened to shoot down Atiyeh’s two-seater Cessna airplane, bullied his daughter, tried to run his son off the road, slashed his wife’s tires and refused to sit with him at football games. At pro-logging rallies, Atiyeh’s opponents brought banners that said: “Kiss my ax, George!”

    A feisty charmer with a contagious laugh, Atiyeh remained determined to save one of the few remaining temperate rainforests in the northern Cascades.

    “He almost reveled in it,” Seideman said. “He had a bumper sticker on his car that said, ‘Environmentalist from hell.’”

    In addition to leveraging his family’s political connections to save Opal Creek, Atiyeh testified before Congress, held local public meetings to win over neighbors and used his plane to show politicians and reporters such as Seideman the toll of logging. …
    “When you went up in the air, you could see all the destruction, this awful patchwork quilt,” Seideman said. “Opal Creek was an island in a sea of clear-cuts.”

    Ultimately, Atiyeh and his allies won the Northwest forest wars. In 1996, Congress passed legislation preserving the 20,454-acre Opal Creek Wilderness, in part through mining patents.   “The only way we could conserve it was to use the old mining laws to our advantage,” recalled his cousin, Tom Atiyeh.

    Recently, Atiyeh contacted Seideman to say he was working on a memoir about his battle to save the forest.

    Seideman followed news of the fires and was not surprised to hear Atiyeh had refused to evacuate. Atiyeh had once told him, “I’d be willing to sacrifice myself for that piece of forest.”

  29. 29.

    opiejeanne

    @WaterGirl: I don’t know. I do know that when I first checked the AQI on both my iPhone and the WA Air Quality site, it was either 225 or 269, but right now my phone says it’s 22 here and the WA site says 225. It’s a heavy fog outside, 98% humidity.

  30. 30.

    JDM

    The exploding trees thing is an example of what Bertrand Russell said, “A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.” Trump no doubt heard someone talking about how in severe fires, combustion of new areas can involve trees, brush (houses, cars, paper, anything flammable) simply heating up so much that the last straw causes an all-over explosion of fire. Then Trump tries to repeat what he’s heard, but since Trump is very, very stupid, he simply can’t do so accurately.

    We’ve been in our RV on the Oregon coast (Coos Bay Area now) for a while to get away from the smoke.  Even here it was bad until a few days ago (AQI around 150-200, while along I5 inland it’s more like 450-500+).  Yesterday we actually had bright sunlight here much of the day, which was wonderful and unexpected.  Supposedly we might get some rain the next few days, which if they just get that inland might help enormously.

  32. 32.

    Martin

    @Old School: I know, but every time Trump talks about forest management – the problem is primarily federal forests. Forests he is responsible for.

    That’s the point.

  33. 33.

    opiejeanne

    @Old School: What the hell are forest cities?

    The Feds need to get busy raking the forests that they manage, which is at least 58% of the forest lands in California.

  34. 34.

    Jay

    Still at a 10 , ( the worst, AQI) in Vancouver,

    added to by the railroad trestle fire in New Westminster. Creosote piers and timbers, will smoulder for weeks.

    Same trestle that burned down 20 years ago, instead of rebuilding with concrete, they rebuilt with creosote timbers, because “you arn’t the boss of me”, f’n morons.

    saw the sun yesterday, blue sky and full sun for all of 15 minutes, because of a wind shift.

  35. 35.

    Kelly

    On the Oregon Coast at least until Monday morning. Emergency trip to the hardware store to to buy drop cloths to protect a couple hotel chairs from 1 year old cat Martin.

  38. 38.

    Roger Moore

    Things are still pretty awful in the San Gabriel Valley in SoCal.  We have a ton of smoke from the Bobcat Fire, and the evacuation warning still hasn’t been lifted for the foothill neighborhoods.  There is some good news, though.  The fire has been burning away from the cities, and it looks like they’ll be able to save the Mt. Wilson observatory.

  39. 39.

    currants

    @JDM: …in severe fires, combustion of new areas can involve trees, brush (houses, cars, paper, anything flammable) simply heating up so much that the last straw causes an all-over explosion of fire.

    Yes–and isn’t it also connected to the sap in the trees? I seem to remember (from a friend who was a Forest Service firefighter some time ago) that when the sap is heated to (or past?) the boiling point, the steam can explode the trunk.

    But your main point–T = M where T is the current prez and M = moron–stands.

  41. 41.

    Aleta

    A few people stayed to fight fires and save some of the buildings at Breitenbush.

    One of Oregon’s most beloved resorts is still standing, even as the surrounding forest and roughly half of its buildings were burned to the ground in the wildfires that have torn across Oregon.
    …
    That’s thanks to two community members who stayed behind to protect Breitenbush, even as everyone else evacuated, as well as a group of three local firefighters who joined in their efforts…. Together, the small band of men spent two tireless days protecting what they could.

    The Breitenbush Fire Department … is a small, remote, nonprofit fire company of about 20 people that serves an area about nines miles northeast of Detroit. The department serves the hot springs resort and neighboring Breitenbush and Devil’s Creek summer homes community of about 80 residents, only a handful of which are occupied full time…

    “Lionshead fire came in from Warm Springs reservation, came around Mount Jefferson, and in one afternoon, ran 12 miles and basically took out our two communities. We were in the path,” (Fire Chief Jordan) Pollack said.  Pollack evacuated nearly everyone from the two communities Monday night.

    “We left 6 to 8 of our firefighters there to protect, and at 11 p.m. that night they all departed but one because it was getting too tenuous to be in there,” he said. “One firefighter stayed, who was joined by another summer homes owner who previously ran emergency services for the Hot Springs for many years, and the two worked closely together.”

    Three more firefighters cut their way through massive fallen trees to reach Breitenbush midday Tuesday. “And when we got there we realized conditions were a lot worse than we thought,” said firefighter Neil Clasen.

    A number of resort buildings were fully involved in fire when they arrived, and the footbridge that connects the hot springs and summer homes over the Breitenbush River was partially ablaze. The men went to work.

    “Day and night, we’re hearing propane tanks exploding every five or 10 minutes,” Pollack said. “There was one night where I was up and saw the sky turn red at about 4 in the morning and thought, ‘Oh good, the sun’s finally coming up, oh wait, that’s not the sun, that’s the fire making more runs.’ And then I’d hear the roar of a freight train of a fire making a run up the hill through timber.”

    Fighting the blaze for days on end, without cell reception or electricity, the men didn’t realize how devastating the fire had been to other communities until they came down from Breitenbush.

  42. 42.

    opiejeanne

    @Roger Moore: Is Mt Wilson still used by tv and radio stations for broadcasting purposes?

    I remember KFI going off the air  for several hours in the middle of a broadcast, maybe in the 70s? Lohmann and Barkley’s show? Because a rat got into an electrical box and chewed through a cable.

  43. 43.

    E.

    Brand new fire here on the CA/OR border, heading down the slope fast into Callahan. They have a lot of air support so I am hopeful it won’t get to the town. I am so ready for all of this to be over.

  46. 46.

    Sister Golden Bear

    SF Peninsula here. Gray, cool, and overcast, with a little misty rain, with the first day of clean air a month, thanks to a “Pineapple Express” that’s blowing in from the Pacific.

    The downside for me, is that tropical air really aggravates my allergies, so I’m pretty zombied today.

    My brother texted me yesterday, amazed that the smoke had reached him in Rhode Island.

    As far as exploding trees, that’s a figment of Velveetamort’s imagination. We do have an issue with eucalyptus, which is actually an invasive species, and quite flammable, both because they drop lots of litter and because they have lots of volatile oils, which can ignite into a fireball. But they’re nowhere near any of the major fires in CA, since they only grow at lower elevations.

  47. 47.

    WaterGirl

    @Old School:

    “It’s too bad that my party, the Republicans – the party of small government – keeps cutting the budget of the GOVERNMENT entities that are responsible for maintaining these areas.”

    –Trump should have stated.

  48. 48.

    WaterGirl

    @Manxome Bromide:

    Also interesting: COVID-19 cases in Santa Clara county have been plummeting. We’ve been pretty good about masking and staying indoors here, comparatively, but the wildfires may have just shown us the difference between “pretty good” and “really good”.

    Really interesting.

  57. 57.

    Matt McIrvin

    I suspect the smoke from the West Coast is contributing to allergy season even here in Massachusetts. The haze is visibly affecting the sunset.

  59. 59.

    Roger Moore

    @opiejeanne:

    Is Mt Wilson still used by tv and radio stations for broadcasting purposes?

    Yes; there’s a huge antenna farm up there that the firefighters are also working to protect.  But I’m more worried about the observatory.

  60. 60.

    WaterGirl

    So, you guys, are these threads still helpful every few days at this point?   Or are we past that now?

    (Assuming they have been helpful at all!)

  63. 63.

    arrieve

    I slept with the windows open last night in NYC because it was such lovely cool weather, and woke up to the smell of smoke. I’m not sure if it’s connected to the fires — it’s definitely hazy here — but can the smell really travel 3000 miles? But every time I’ve convinced myself it’s my imagination I smell it again.

  64. 64.

    opiejeanne

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: And California also planted eucalyptus trees, or rather the railroad companies did, because they thought they’d have a ready supply of wood for ties, not understanding the tree at all.

  69. 69.

    opiejeanne

    @WaterGirl: Helpful, and I saw someone else on one of these threads a couple of days ago who lives in y neighborhood. I don’t know if I know her, but I will try to get in touch with her later, when it’s safe to go outside.

    We just spent half an hour outside and I had to come back inside because I feel like my lungs are full of gunk.

  71. 71.

    theturtlemoves

    Had a very good afternoon a couple days ago and seeing some improvement again today west of Eugene. Seeing the sun and stars on Monday was a horrible tease, though. And Exploding Trees was a grunge band from Tacoma back in the 90s, I believe. Really angst-ridden. Wore lots of flannel.

  73. 73.

    trollhattan

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    In the 1850s, Eucalyptus trees were introduced to California by Australians during the California Gold Rush. Much of California is similar in climate to parts of Australia. By the early 1900s, thousands of acres of eucalypts were planted with the encouragement of the state government. It was hoped that they would provide a renewable source of timber for construction, furniture making and railway sleepers. It was soon found that for the latter purpose eucalyptus was particularly unsuitable, as the ties made from eucalyptus had a tendency to twist while drying, and the dried ties were so tough that it was nearly impossible to hammer rail spikes into them.

    They went on to note that the promise of eucalyptus in California was based on the old virgin forests of Australia. This was a mistake, as the young trees being harvested in California could not compare in quality to the centuries-old eucalyptus timber of Australia. It reacted differently to harvest. The older trees didn’t split or warp as the infant California crop did. There was a vast difference between the two, and this would doom the California eucalyptus industry.

    Call them a get-rich-not-so-quick scheme.

  74. 74.

    chopper

    @opiejeanne:

    i had that same issue this morning. my phone said 22, stepped outside and was all nah. checked and epa’s website says 22, everybody else says like 200. because of course the epa can’t get it right because trump has poisoned everything.

  75. 75.

    kindness

    Middle of the Central Valley, CA here.  Our sky is starting to clear up.  I still can’t see blue but I can see the horizon now.

  76. 76.

    Roger Moore

    @opiejeanne:

    if that antenna farm is destroyed couldn’t it cause a news blackout for a few days.?

    TV and radio are still important, but they’re by no means the only way of transmitting information these days.

  77. 77.

    trollhattan

    @WaterGirl:

    Relevant and helpful, because we’re still in the middle of this mess and the farther south one is, the longer the fires are going to last. SoCal must be wondering what happens if the Santa Anas show up before the current fires are completely put out. Will they get a break at all?

    In north and central California, first big winter storm can come anytime between October and December and only then are the big fires truly extinguished. Oregon and Washington will get nature’s help sooner.

  78. 78.

    Scout211

    @WaterGirl:

    Yes, I think these check-ins are very helpful. You have to dig pretty deeply into online news sites for updates on what is actually happening on the ground with the western fires that are STILL  BURNING. The national news is pretty much over the fires in the west right now and what Trump said five minutes ago is so much more important, you know. ?

    It’s good to hear from jackals who are there and can report what’s actually happening. Every few days is fine.

  79. 79.

    Hob

    @opiejeanne: “What the hell are forest cities?”

    I take it you haven’t seen The Fellowship of the Ring. Europe is largely populated by wood-elves. Trump may not approve of Galadriel’s socialist policies and may have called her a “nasty woman” in the past, but here he’s graciously acknowledging that her forest management strategy is effective.

  80. 80.

    Hob

    @chopper: “epa’s website says 22, everybody else says like 200. because of course the epa can’t get it right because trump has poisoned everything.”

    That sounds to me like a temporary software glitch, not “the EPA can’t get it right”. The AirNow site doesn’t have any numbers lower than 200 listed for Portland today, and I haven’t seen anything to indicate that their methods of calculating AQI have been corrupted by Trump; “everyone else” is using basically the same data except for PurpleAir. My wild guess would be that for some reason the ozone number briefly appeared in the main position where the PM2.5 number would normally be; ozone has been pretty low.

  81. 81.

    HumboldtBlue

    We’ve had two clear and beautiful days on the coast but the fires burning to the north, east and south are still forcing evacuations and in general making life miserable for thousands of people.

  82. 82.

    Nora Lenderbee

    So eucalyptus were planted in CA for lumber, and windbreaks, and decoration. We’re all right.

    Some tree plantings end up badly because the planters didn’t know how big they’d get. We had an immense incense cedar in the backyard that was probably planted in 1929, when the house was built. It was ~30 feet tall when we moved in, and about 12 feet from the house. We had to take it out, with much regret, after the third time it dropped a gigantic limb in the yard, damaging both our roof and the neighbor’s. Fortunately, the damage was minor, but the branch would have killed any person or cat it fell on.

  83. 83.

    Llelldorin

    Hayward, CA here—Echoing others from the Bay Area, last night’s drizzle left us with genuinely good air quality for the first time since the lightning complexes really got going.

  84. 84.

    Dan B

    @WaterGirl: These posts on west coast fires are still helpful. We have friends and relatives in Oregon and California who are not e-mailing us so it’s good to have this bit of information.

  85. 85.

    greenergood

    It’s astonishing – seeing reports about smoke and smell of smoke in NY, and now even here in the UK. To me the reason it’s astonishing is because the general trend of wind is from east to west – i.e. if you were going to set off on a cross-country bicycle trip in the US, you’d go from NY to CA, and not the other way round, because you’d have the wind (and the whole E-to-W rotation of the PLANET) to help you along. So the fact that the smoke has arrived on the East coast is pretty terrifying as a testimony to how fierce are these fires. And the million+ bird deaths in New Mexico/Colo/Ariz/ etc. are just heartbreaking – bird corpses that are nothing but feathers and bone – no chance to fatten up before migration due to the fires, lungs damaged, no insects to feed on – we have desecrated not just ourselves, but every other living being on the planet.

  87. 87.

    Lokahi

    Air quality here in Portland, which had improved overnight, is steadily worsening again. Up to a 371 reading now per Oregon Dept. of Environmental Quality.

    Meanwhile, my cousin’s house in the evacuation zone east of Springfield, OR, was ransacked and looted yesterday. Luckily, an eagle-eyed observer spotted the perps dumping unwanted loot at a gas station, and arrests were made and recovery of stolen goods is in progress.

    The two were part of those gangs Trump warns about, driving down from urban areas to victimize innocent suburban and rural residents, and…uh, wait, ohhhhh…nope. Two white folks as it turns out.

  89. 89.

    greenergood

    Looters are gonna loot – colour of skin is NOT the defining element. But, BUT, I’m also wondering, how much of this is because people are feeling desperate, penniless and lawless – just wondering. No more paycheck supplements, no more securities against evictions, a completely unstable health insurance system, curtailment of SNAP. Esp as their government doesn’t seem to have a problem with lawlessness if it’s in their interest, i.e. only the little people pay taxes.  Looting’s not a good image, but the rich guys have been looting for years: they just destroy your bank accounts and life savings, not the windows of mom-and-pop stores.

  90. 90.

    JaneE

    Bishop here.  AirNow AQI is 516 = hazardous.  That is an improvement from this morning when the display said something like exceeds scale maximum.  I have seen them display numbers in the thousands before, so what counts as off the scale may be 5 digits.   Even the trees in the back yard of the house across the street have a haze obscuring them a little, and this morning trees about 3/4 mile off the highway were only partially visible.  Every once in a while there is a smell of smoke, but that may be a figment of my imagination.

  91. 91.

    WaterGirl

    @greenergood: I could be wrong, but I don’t see local people who have been evacuated looting other people’s homes.  So at best, if what you are suggesting is true, it’s good people who are strapped for funds coming from elsewhere to steal from people who are already suffering.

    I just don’t see it.  Plus, dumping what they can’t sell like that.  I don’t think that fits, either.

  97. 97.

    greenergood

    @WaterGirl:  Yes, you’re right WaterGirl – I just meant that if/when people ARE looting, well it might not be looting in the sense of looters enriching themselves as much as terrifically frightened people seeing a chance to help themselves survive. I think this happened a lot during Katrina and was characterised as rampant looting by people who weren’t white, when what it really was turned out to be people who were desperate. I don’t think that the US gov’t services understand the word ‘desperate’ because the American image for so long, well since the 1950s, has been one of a prosperous, milk-and-honey nation. The US national ethos has no framework for dealing with desperation – which has been the pattern recently between climate change weather disasters and COVID … And thus we get the Trump messages, and no constructive ways to deal with the climate threats that threaten us every day

  98. 98.

    Mj_Oregon

    From a promising start this morning the air quality has deteriorated all day.   The south end of the Willamette Valley continues to catch and hold whatever smoke rolls into it.  We started the morning at 212 at 6 am but are now back up to a hazardous AQI of 407 and steadily climbing.

    I was appalled this morning when I asked my UPS driver why he wasn’t wearing a N95 mask and he told me his depot manager hadn’t ordered any for the drivers early on and when he finally tried to get some, they were out of stock.  So my driver has been delivering packages in this toxic soup for over a week without any protection whatsoever.   I’ve been close to tears ever since for some reason but I know if I start crying over all this mess, from politics to pandemic to wildfires, I’ll never stop.

    I hate 2020.

  99. 99.

    Skepticat

    The morning sun in the other Portland (Maine) is bright orange but hazy and casts an orange track on the water. Beautiful sight, ugly reason.

  100. 100.

    Spanky

    Here in Maryland we’ve also had partly cloudy to “clear” skies, with a high, high haze. No smell of smoke. Night sky extinction of all stars dimmer than second magnitude – much like I remember the skies in Pittsburgh during the 60’s with the mills going full bore.

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