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California fire

D

Doug G

Veteran Member
Joined
Jun 16, 2012
Messages
541
Location
SoCal
This was the view from my driveway on the 8th

20180808_160740.jpg

Yep, it's a 747 in the picture.
 
That must be scary, hope your house is safe. I difficulty obtaining homeowner's insurance in SD county when I lived there up to '05 simply because I was located within 1/4 mile of a canyon.
 
The wildfire seasons are getting longer and more intense from what I heard. I guess prolonged drought killing 200+ year old trees, higher temperatures, and high winds means fires will be burning for a long time.

So what happens out west and down south when you guys run out of water?
 
Yup, I'm here in Oregon and the loggers are coming this week to remove dead trees and any that look to be problematic. Years of drought, then beetles are really taking their toll on the Doug firs.

It will look a lot different around here, but at least I'll have a "defensible space".
 
We've got bushfires here are the moment, and it's wintertime. In summer it's somewhat worse and we seem to having less of a 'season' nowadays. As Chuck said, welcome to the future.
There are a number of australian and New Zealand firefighters over in California and Canada right now helping out, and in return from you folks we often get the big Sikorsky water bombing helicopters ('Elvis' is one) shipped over here for summertime. They are awesome machines!: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_(helicopter)
 
Turn on your sprinklers. oh, drought.:huh: That is California for you. Looks grate on paper, but real life can be a bitch.
 
1944GPW said:
We've got bushfires here are the moment, and it's wintertime. In summer it's somewhat worse and we seem to having less of a 'season' nowadays. As Chuck said, welcome to the future.
There are a number of australian and New Zealand firefighters over in California and Canada right now helping out, and in return from you folks we often get the big Sikorsky water bombing helicopters ('Elvis' is one) shipped over here for summertime. They are awesome machines!: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_(helicopter)
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Yes, some of your mates are (or were) here enjoying the Southern California heat & smoke. I've been here 30 years or so, and watched the mountains burn a number of times. This particular area of the mountain hadn't burned in 40-50 years and was a fuel-rich environment.

I think I read that over a million dead or dying trees have been removed from the forests in SoCal over the last 10 years or so, but the forest is very big and people are very small. And no one wants to stop trying to put fires out, when one solution would be just to let fires burn and provide natural brush clearing. Historically, pre-firefighting, fires around here seldom killed the bigger trees, the oaks and ponderosa's and such, because fires kept the smaller growth in check.

Anyway, the view for the last few days has been pretty interesting. The firefighters, pilots, and air traffic controllers don't get paid enough. An extra thank you to all the out-of-towners that travel so far to work in such brutal conditions.

View on the evening of the 9th. Flames are about 2-1/2 miles from me FYI 20180809_200210.jpg
 
Yep that flaming hillside looks not too far away. Clear the leaves out of your gutters and trim long grass, but I'm sure you get told that anyway. I just googled for what a ponderosa is, looks like a regular pine tree. I recall the name from Bonanza long ago.
I've heard that California also has a lot of gum trees (eucalypts) we have a lot of them here wher they originated and they are pretty combustible. One summer I was out for a week camping in my WW2 army jeep and whilst driving along a backcountry track we went over a hill to find the hillside alight and flames just a few feet away from our wheels. Further along down the mountain we ran into the Fire Brigade guys and they ordered us to get off the tracks and back to the main road. The same trip a day or so later we could not get back to Sydney as the main highway was closed by the fires. We stopped at a McDonalds where they were starting to put people up for the night as a shelter until the police came along and told us to evacuate. We ended up camping overnight on a sports field, we were fine as we had been camping anyway but there were lots of people who had only been out for a day trip and had nothing with them apart from what they had in their cars.
 
Funny thing about the California eucalyptus. Originally, they were introduced as a tree for timber, but then someone noticed that the grain was corkscrew, not straight. But the things propagate like cockroaches in California's climate (don't even ask about how well Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) does). Eucalytus is messy (leaf litter) and burns like a torch.
 
I just googled for what a ponderosa is, looks like a regular pine tree. I recall the name from Bonanza long ago.
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They get pretty large around here. I lived in the San Bernardino mountains as a kid, near Big Bear, and the ponderosa in our back yard was big enough that I had to climb the bark to get to the first branch, which was maybe 15-20ft from the ground, and my guess is it was over 100' tall. A quick search pulled up this nice picture of a large ponderosa near here. The video in this blog post is worth a watch, you get a good idea of the scale and size of these magnificent trees.

http://timeless-environments.blogspot.com/2013/05/saturday-in-idyllwild-viewing-its-most.html
 
Yup, big trees--about the size of Doug firs--to 200'. Up here, we have east- and west-side varieties. Plant the wrong kind and the thing will curl up its toes and die after about 15 years. When green, the wood is very sappy and heavy--when dry it weighs very little. About 20 years ago, we planted about 4000 of the things and, to our suprise, most survived. The wood isn't as strong as Douglas-fir (not a fir at all), but if you've got a big clear log, it's great for window frames and such. They don't mind drought too much, and they'll probably be the survivors here.

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Nope, not me. That's Bill Schaupp, a USFS entomologist. I don't have a lot of photos of me. I used to be visible on a Google Streetview, before they edited me out. I used to get motorists stopping and saying "We saw you on Google".
 
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