Hundreds, if not thousands, of homes have been lost, most of them in Oregon, where an estimated 40,000 people have been evacuated and as many as 500,000 live in evacuation alert zones, poised to flee with a change in the winds. Tens of thousands of people have sought refuge in shelters, with friends and in parking lots up and down Interstate 5 — with emergency responders struggling to create safe shelter for all of them in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. On the outskirts of Portland, a site set up to shelter evacuees had to be evacuated itself as the fire line continued expanding toward suburban towns south of the city. State fire officials said winds had pressed a 36-mile-wide wildfire front toward those outlying Portland suburbs on Thursday, with fire jumping over the community of Estacada and threatening others around the foothills of the Cascade Mountains.... As residents flee fire-ravaged communities, officials have struggled to manage a series of migrations reminiscent of a war zone, with distraught families showing up with little in hand beyond an overwhelming fear that their homes have been lost for good. Emergency responders have only begun to get a sense of how many victims they have and the grueling effort to rebuild that will lie ahead.... On Thursday night, about 2,300 people slept in emergency accommodations provided by the American Red Cross and its partners — 520 of them in traditional mass shelters. Tens of thousands more were crashing with friends or family members. Others were pitching tents in high school football fields or sleeping in shopping mall parking lots — many of them unsure whether they would be displaced for days, or weeks, or more.
September 12, 2020
"We are preparing for a mass fatality incident based on what we know and the numbers of structures that have been lost."
Said Andrew Phelps, director of the Oregon Office of Emergency Management, quoted in "A Line of Fire South of Portland and a Yearslong Recovery Ahead/Firefighters continued to battle blazes along the West Coast that have now charred nearly five million acres. At least 17 people are dead, with dozens still missing" (NYT).
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40 comments:
“100,000 homes burned, and 40,000 displaced”
Bullshit
@madAsHell What are you quoting? It's not in the linked article. You're calling "bullshit" on... what??
Please explain or I will delete. That's just confusing.
Are you reading "Hundreds, if not thousands, of homes have been lost" to mean hundreds of thousands???
Search for Umbrella Man continues
The math doesn't work. That would be 0.4 people per house. Unless a lot of people own more than I home.
Forest mis-management, not climate change. But acknowledging that would require sacrificing at least two sacred liberal cows - the infallibility of government, and their environmental policies. (Can we still say "sacred cow"?)
ArcGis has maps of the fires, also demonstrating why so many outfits have ditched Arc and are using google maps for their GIS.
"37 active fires, 861,076.685 acres burned."
Apparently the only way to turn off the gigantic labels on the Arc display is to turn of the "Current fires" layer; it's probably the clearest to display only the "Satellite (VIIRS) Thermal Hotspots and Fire Activity" layer.
All buildings matter.
Mostly peaceful fires.
"Gov. Gavin Newsom of California acknowledged that poor forest management over decades had contributed to the severity of the state’s wildfires in recent years. But he said that serious droughts and record-breaking heat waves were undeniable evidence that many of the most dire predictions about climate change had already arrived."
Guess which "cause" of the problem they're going to attack? And which one will be ignored? Climate change is like Trump - you can blame anything and everything on it/him, so you don't have to take responsibility for anything.
Authorities should start screaming about the worst possible outcome, right? That's what we've learned this past week.
Democrats letting their cities and states burn to own Trump.
Almost as if God has looked down at Kate Brown and Ted Wheeler and said, 'Screw you. I've seen enough. We're done here.'
For years I dreamed of getting a pace like my cousin has in the Rogue River OR area. Five acres of tall trees. Dense woods to wander around in.
I got over it.
While fires are common in the West this time of year, such conflagrations as we are seeing now are unusual. The high winds that drove the initial fires were out of the NE, driving the inferno west toward urban areas. Cars are covered with ash, as after post-eruption of Mt. St. Helens.
If Portland burns, then they can get federal aide to rebuild and wipe away all evidence of their riots.
We will see if Blackened Lives Matter
Hundreds, if not thousands, of homes have been lost, most of them in Oregon, where an estimated 40,000 people have been evacuated and as many as 500,000 live in evacuation alert zones, poised to flee with a change in the winds. Tens of thousands of people....
All of his numbers are vague and exaggerative, and it's not clear in each sentence segment whether he's speaking of length-of-West-Coast numbers or those of Oregon alone.
Further, you don't go from "hundreds" right up to "thousands" and expect it to be understood as fact rather than blatant hyperbole.
Nature has a vote. But might it dawn on the evacuees that their states need better governance, especially in dealing with "the environment"?
God knows...
Emergency responders have only begun to get a sense of how many victims they have and the grueling effort to rebuild that will lie ahead....
Why in bloody Hell would anyone want to rebuild in Oregon? Last night commentator Mike (no relation), apparently a resident of the Pacific NW, wrote on a thread about the Oregon wildfires that the fire has been burning for four God-damned weeks with, until now, only a lackadaisical effort to deal with it on the part of the state government. Collect your insurance, get a new job and buy a house in a state where they are serious about providing basic services like police and fire control to the residents. Which apparently excludes blue states on either coast.
I could have sworn all of the democrat media outlets were telling us not to support the Red Cross. I guess it’s a lot like defund the police, until you need a cop.
Pelosi says 'Mother Nature' is mad at us (some 'science'!)
Well let Mother Nature take care of it. If Portland burns.. big deal and tough nuts.
At least the police won't be called, right Portland?
All up and down the West Coast, for decades state and local governments have allowed and encouraged people to build right next to semi-arid scrub lands, which they then do not manage properly, allowing dry tinder to accumulate for years. The inevitable spark eventually happens and the fire is fueled by many years of tinder that could and should have been cleared, threatening the homes and other buildings that should never have been built there in the first place.
Then, blame it on global warming, as if it is some global problem that nobody locally could possibly have known about or be held responsible for. They have been screaming about GW fro years, siusing it as a political club wgile never connecting tehd ots that if it isreal, their communities are at risk and they ned to act accordingly. Which tells me they have always been insioncere on the subject.
Even if it is in whole or in part due to global warming, the fundamental take-away is that local officials allowed building to take place and did not properly manage the nearby environment. If they truly believed it is due to gobal warming, why are those people and buldings still there, and why did the responsible officials not take extraordinary measures to address the heightened risk?
There is no way to parse this that does not place the onus back where it belongs--primarily the state and local governments, and secondarily people who built or bought in those zones.
“100,000 homes burned, and 40,000 displaced”
You shouldn't put quotes around text strings that you invented because that's what the U.K. MSM does just before they tell more lies.
Bullshit
Correct. Perhaps some remedial reading is in order.
I am no nature-boy, but I have seen the cause of these fires up close.
We used to vacation up on the Tuolumne (the next valley over from Yosimite) every summer. In most places it was difficult to impossible to walk through the woods other than in cleared trails, as the area was entirely covered with piles of deadfall limbs and fallen trees, that knee-deep tangle was covered and hidden by thick blankets of dry pine needles, which made finding ones footing difficult and dangerous. Just walking through those woods was exhausting as every step was a potential man-trap.
That area burned terribly in 2013 and I was not surprised. I understand that most California forests were in a much worse case.
The whirlwind has arrived.
“If Portland burns, then they can get federal aide to rebuild and wipe away all evidence of their riots.”
Keep that in mind. The west coast states have all adopted fairly brain dead fiscal policies. In places like Portland, they allowed their resident Marxists and Anarchists to burn down their big cities. On top of that, they have runaway pension costs, etc. Nancy Palsi has been trying to tie financial aid to these states, and their biggest cities to COVID-19 aid. Trump in particular, is saying NFW. You allowed, and even encouraged, your cities to burn. Don’t look at the rest of the country to bail you out.
What to do? The answer is to burn down you forests, and as long as most of the burning can be attributed to something besides arson, they can get designated as a disaster area, and receive disaster aid, and in the confusion, skim off a bit for rebuilding cities like Portland, and a bit for personal use at the same time.
1490 structures, residential and commercial, destroyed in my little area in Central Coast, CA. Mostly residential. Another 140 structures damaged. Fortunately as of this AM fire is 98% contained. Hasn't really gotten coverage in the media, so everything's OK here. I see another fire area in the Napa and Sonoma counties had a similar number of structures destroyed. This is the link for the CAL fire incidents page.
I guess Portland is more newsworthy because of everything else going on there. It does sound worse given the mass fatalities.
Rookies.
Come to San Fran. General assistance money, free tents, maybe a free hotel with City employees delivering free food, alcohol, and drugs.
Part 2:
This entire program of controlled or prescribed fire is a near thing of the past.
ROADS/FIRE BREAKS:
When I started with the fire service in the 1970’s we had regularly scheduled building, repairing, cleaning, and maintaining fire breaks around rural housing areas and developments. We kept fire roads cleared and usable for large fire equipment. We had access to remote areas which allowed us to attack fires when they were small. Roads provided a place to start a safe backfire. Oh, backfires! Another art nearly lost today due to liability and excessive oversight by the media and radical enviro groups who have political power.
LOGGING/TIMBER MANAGEMENT:
If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you probably remember sawmills. They are all gone for the most part because the radical environmental rules have made logging a financial nightmare. You wonder why wood is so expensive these days? We cannot log; that’s why. Yes, there are still a few holdouts logging here and there. But the feds are hampered by so many regulations and restrictions that our timber stands either get bug infested or succumb to wildfires.
We used to thin forest stands regularly – fire crews, inmate crews, machines that munch up underbrush, and yes, even pesticides to keep the forests healthy. Now, you can pick about any state in the west with timber and you see more bug-killed trees than live ones!
In our western grasslands, the lack of proactive landscape management in desert states has resulted in vast acreages dominated by a cheatgrass-fire cycle that is ruining wildlife habitat and causing bigger and more damaging conflagrations. This invasive species needs to be managed or these western deserts will never be the same – nor will our wildlife species.
In timber areas, for the most part, we no longer control pests and bugs; we no longer do any substantial thinning of the underbrush; logging is kaput, and forest management is a façade. It is not the fault of our public land managers; it is the imposition of radical regulation. It is politics.
SUMMARY:
Public land management is no longer based on science but rather politics. The same goes for wildlife management. Radical enviro groups lobby politicians (and raise untold dollars in support) to STOP all the things that will make our forests, brushlands, and deserts safe and healthy. It is ironic (and pathetic) because for all their efforts to “save the world” they are destroying our world, piece by piece.
To see fires in California reach half a million acres is beyond belief!
What can we do? We must STOP the silliness and over-regulation and allow sound public land management, never forgetting that public lands are FOR the public. Help good politicians get elected and stay in office. Recall bad politicians. Do everything in your power to negate, refute, or STOP the radical movement that has stagnated management of our resources.
Part 1:
Posted on facebook by a retired firefighter friend of mine (who was a USN Reserve helo pilot in one of my squadrons):
Welcome to the (Unnecessary) Mega Fire Generation!
By Del Albright, Fire Chief (retired)
25-30 years ago, a 10,000 – 15,000-acre fire was a huge conflagration. Now we are experiencing 100,000 - 400,000-acre fires regularly.
I would like to offer an explanation based on over 30 years of government service including 26 years with the fire service, as well as beginning my fire career with a Master’s Degree in Prescribed Burning.
NO! It is not just global warming (climate change).
NO! It is not understaffed or ill-trained firefighters.
NO! It is not Mamma Nature getting even with our urban sprawl.
NO! It is not careless campers or hunters.
NO! It is not kids with matches.
YES! It is a combination of many things but more importantly, it is the LACK of forest/brushland/grassland management caused by wacko, radical enviro groups imposing excessive regulations, and restrictions on our ability to keep the west safe from wildfire.
Here are the key takeaways from this article:
· The lack of controlled burning/prescribed fire is directly responsible for the huge build-ups of flammable fuels.
· The end of maintaining fire breaks (roads) in forested areas leaves firefighters with inadequate access.
· The end of logging and good timber management as we used to know it is directly responsible for forests that are now tinderboxes.
Let us take a deeper look at these reasons.
CONTROLLED BURNS:
Going back to Native Americans in America, controlled burning (later called Prescribed Fire) have saved the west from huge conflagrations. By burning large brush fields and using fire to thin understory brush in the forest, we kept the big boomers at bay. We had programs designed to reduce “chaparral” in the west, thus limiting the ability for fires to get ragingly out of control.
In the early days of settling the west, ranchers regularly burned brush fields to make way for grazing and wildlife habitat.
The silver lining is that all this burning now is natures own rather rapid catch-up for all that deferred maintenance. It will be quite a while before those places burn again this way.
exhelodrvr1 said...
Part 2:
This entire program of controlled or prescribed fire is a near thing of the past.
ROADS/FIRE BREAKS:
When I started with the fire service in the 1970’s we had regularly scheduled building, repairing, cleaning, and maintaining fire breaks around rural housing areas and developments. We kept fire roads cleared and usable for large fire equipment. We had access to remote areas which allowed us to attack fires when they were small.
We've still got a logging industry in Oregon, though almost entirely on private lands.
To reinforce a couple of your points.Those evil loggers make the forests safer in a number of ways.
- we used to talk about "logging roads" that the evil men cleared into the forests. Where logging trucks can come out of a forest, fire trucks can go in. Also logging companies have the gear and the incentive to serve as auxiliary fire support. Bulldozers? check! tanker trucks? check! helos? check! graders? check! forest crews with leaders in place? check! Well those same roads are the access method for firefighters and make those firebreaks. no loggers, no way to attack fires early.
- diseased or bug infested trees. Loggers used to salvage those trees out of the forest before they died and became the kindling for the next big one. A win win for the loggers and the Forest service. The enviros won't permit it because it destroys habitat.
Pelosi says 'Mother Nature' is mad at us (some 'science'!)
So, it's Her Choice? Yeah, Mother Nature is the philosopher of the Pro-Choice quasi-religion (quasi with respect to humane principles), and the Goddess of the diverse sects of the Progressive Church.
Sez the NY Times:
Hundreds, if not thousands, of homes have been lost, most of them in Oregon…
If they're unsure as to whether it's hundreds or thousands of homes, then the following phrase — “most of them in Oregon” — cannot be true. Because (just as a single for instance), the huge fire in California's Santa Cruz County (70 miles south of San Francisco: the county, as it happens, I'm in the process of moving from, after more than 40 years), itself during the last two weeks of August burned more than 125 square miles — including more than 1,400 buildings, nearly 1,000 of which were residences.
While my partner's and my home (plus e.g. my ex's house also in the county) turned out to be not directly threatened by the conflagration, we all were forced to evacuate (only a week before our home was due to go on sale!).
There's no question that Antifi or BLM might have set this fire — because after 10 days or so of 100+ degree weather, it began with a bang with a 3 a.m. lightning storm. Literally a bang, since it started with a great blast of wind, which actually blew one of our windows (awaiting repair) out of its frame, which fell with a great crash onto the bathtub, necessitating its repair for the house's upcoming sale, and jerking my partner and me awake — only to be entertained by hours of lightning, thunder, and a considerable amount of rain (in August! remarkable for central Calif.).
The lightning started fires across a broad arc which proceeded to consolidate and burn across the western mountains of the county like nothing ever seen before there.
All three of us (my partner, me, and my ex) took refuge in Siskiyou County (the county, in the far north of California — straddling I-5 — that my partner and I are moving to) — all of us staying in the RV trailer that she and I had acquired to facilitate construction of our new home. It was tight — with my ex also living in the trailer with us for a week or so — let me tell you!
My partner together with my ex have now gone back to their respective homes in Santa Cruz County; I myself returned for a while. Our house there is now on the market and being shown.
Now, though, I'm back north in Siskiyou County — among other things, awaiting installation of our new well, as step 1 in our prospective home's construction project. (Since it's to be located in a forest, the house may well be built out of steel!)
Meanwhile, the nearby town of Happy Camp — pop. 1,190, with 525 households according to Wikipedia, some miles away on the Klamath River here in Siskiyou County — just the other day got burnt to a crisp by a sudden wildfire (which has now proceeded north to ravage Oregon). The town's residents, I'm sure, are not happy campers.
Such is life in California these days.
Buwaya remarks: The silver lining is that all this burning now is natures own rather rapid catch-up for all that deferred maintenance. It will be quite a while before those places burn again this way.
The pine beetle infestation can only be checked by fire. For all its horrors, forest fires are a necessary part of natural regeneration. As most people know, there is a species of pine whose seeds are only released from the cone during a fire.
It's those goddam plastic straws.
Buwaya: Deadfall is wildlife habitat, doncha know? It must be left alone.
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