It's Snowing in San Diego
Well, not quite, but there was definitely white/grey stuff falling on me when I went outside this morning. The air and sky are an eerie orange-grey, and the sun is neon red. The fires are 150 miles from here, but the ashes have been blowing even this far south.
Whenever there's a fire in SoCal, someone inevitably screams, "Arson!" In fact, fewer than one in eight such fires is arson-related. Having a scapegoat, however, is useful if you wish to avoid questioning SoCal's ignorant official policies on fire "prevention" (since 1919). Raging infernos were extraordinarily rare when the Chumash Indians burned brush annually. A little food for thought from Mike Davis' Ecology of Fear:
Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: "Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he'll never be arrested." [. . .] A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that "the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age." Indeed, half-century-old chaparral--heavily laden with dead mass--is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil. Expanding these calculations even further, a great Malibu firestorm could generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.
Over 200 houses were incinerated last night. What a horrible tragedy. I pray that these fires come to an end. The most tragic part is that unless the backwards policies are changed, this is doomed to happen over and over - a Sisyphusian nightmare.
Edit: Holy shit. No wonder it's raining ash. This is from (yet another) fire 5 miles away in the Miramar area!
Whenever there's a fire in SoCal, someone inevitably screams, "Arson!" In fact, fewer than one in eight such fires is arson-related. Having a scapegoat, however, is useful if you wish to avoid questioning SoCal's ignorant official policies on fire "prevention" (since 1919). Raging infernos were extraordinarily rare when the Chumash Indians burned brush annually. A little food for thought from Mike Davis' Ecology of Fear:
Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: "Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he'll never be arrested." [. . .] A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that "the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age." Indeed, half-century-old chaparral--heavily laden with dead mass--is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil. Expanding these calculations even further, a great Malibu firestorm could generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.
Over 200 houses were incinerated last night. What a horrible tragedy. I pray that these fires come to an end. The most tragic part is that unless the backwards policies are changed, this is doomed to happen over and over - a Sisyphusian nightmare.
Edit: Holy shit. No wonder it's raining ash. This is from (yet another) fire 5 miles away in the Miramar area!