We have 2 big air purifiers, and are very glad to have them. Outside smells like a smoker’s convention. Inside is fairly nice.
We’re not in danger here in WA, but some of our small towns are, and CA and OR are hard hit. Good wishes to all in the affected zonmes. Stay safe, and take care.
We had a half week of straight smoke here in Vegas last week and when I drove to northern Utah, I drove through the plume of a nearby wildfire. There were Highway Patrol signs indicating that they did indeed know about the fires so there was no need to phone them in. It was not very amusing to see they had to try and stop people from doing a good but unnecessary turn.
I remember SmoKon and so does my phone…last month when the fires were blazing, the sky was orange and the air was full of ash and smoke my phone beeped. It was a note that said “Five years ago today…” and showed a picture of the smoke filled sky of Spokane.
On a happier note the next picture was of you and Jane.
Ahhhhh, (deep breath) blue skies the last two days and I could even see stars at night!
Here in L.A. it’s actually slightly improved – still bad, but the really bad areas are along the San Gabriel Mountains, where there’s a fire they’re trying to steer into areas that burned last year.
The smoke has gone way way out to sea, where it caught a ride on the jet stream and is now traveling. (See NASA’s DSCOVR EPIC, a million miles out, and NOAA’s GOES, much closer.)
@P.J.Evans, that high altitude smoke plume has reached Europe, making sunsets extra colorful. We can’t smell it, it’s too high, but it’ll come down in the raindrops somewhere halfway round the world from where it started.
What happens locally still affects the world.
CJ, glad to hear your air purifiers are working. Please stay safe, everyone.
My nephew lives in Portland, OR and he texted me a picture of the sky from the building downtown where he works. It looked exactly like Spokane did the year we had Shejicon and WorldCon. I heard that Oregon at least has rain predicted.
Down here on the southern OR coast we’re seeing a moderate level of smoke, its middling to dense at higher altitudes and we can smell some at ground level, but its not nearly as bad as it was 3 yrs ago when we had the Chetco Bar fire burning 5 miles outside town. However, falling fine ash + marine layer fog = concrete…. urgh.
Comment – Here in Scotland, there was a mention of Trumps latest comments regarding the current fire, on the BBC News. Apparently it’s all down to poor forest management !!! Any Lie will do !
No, it’s not a lie, but beyond that, he’s no forest manager.
There was “a” huge burn across the West in 1910, q.v., which led to the creation of the USFS, but unfortunately 100 years of fire-supression, “Out by 10AM!” That doesn’t work, the West _WILL_ burn! All it did is create thicker stands and accumulations of flammable duff on the ground. What we have now is UNNATURAL!
All we can do is influence when and how bad, if we have the intelligence and will. What we _MUST_ do is more logging with emphasis on thinning, and adding prescribed burns at the appropriate time and location, as often as we can. We have a century of mismanagement to make up for.
It’s NOT a partisan issue! The public doesn’t want prescribed burning. “If nothing is burning, leave it, everything’s fine.” Wrong! Never gonna be right!
The Native Americans here in Oregon, just as the Native Australians, understood the nature of fire in the environment and both used it the same way: often and effectively. When the whites came to western Oregon’s Cascade Mountains and Willamette Valley, they DIDN’T find a natural environment! They found a managed one. But they “knew better”. Now people die.
The state of California only owns 3% of CA forestland. Most is owned by the Feds and is out of state control. Good news: sequoias, both kinds, are very fire resistance except as saplings.
South of LA, I’ve been able to do my usual thing of flooding the house with cool air at night. I just have to keep an eye out for which way the wind is blowing. Off the ocean is fine.
Some years ago, fire burned to the top of the ridge across the valley from me. Since then, that city recruited goats to munch the undergrowth. The mountains do have mountain goats, but I don’t know if they’re as voracious and indiscriminate as domestic goats.
I think they could use the right of Eminent Domain to manage a “clear and present danger” to the public.
I live in San Rafael, just north of San Francisco, and woke up to the orange sky. It was the strangest day I have ever experienced. The sky was orange, it was dark, and ash was falling. Sadly this is, I fear, the new normal here in The Orange, formerly Golden, State. There have been about 5 or 6 years of atypical weather. For instance, bark beetles, usually kept in check by the wet winters, are not in check anymore because only one of the past few winters has been wet. So the state is full of dead trees, killed by bark beetles. A friend has a house in the Sierras and about half the trees are dead. I could go on but you get the idea.
Warmer winters, too, so the beetles don’t get killed off.
I checked the satellite view from GOES-West a few minutes ago, and the smoke that went out to sea last week is coming in, plus the smoke from the fires in northern and central CA is being blown nearly straight north.
(Apologies to all for our non-exploding dead trees.)
For a sort-of idea about fire management, about 8 years ago, our last sugarcane operation on Maui ended. The sugarcane life cycle goes something like: plant cane runners, water and grow them for 18 months, let them dry out for 1 or 2 months, burn off the now dry leaves and other rubbish, and haul the cane stalks to the mill for processing into sugar. The fields were constantly being rotated through the cycle, and at least once a week, controlled burns prepared a field for harvest. Towards the end of sugarcane’s tenure on Maui, the growers used a different harvest method, using a giant mower to cut the cane without the dry and burn part, but eventually it all shut down because of economics.
Fast forward 6 years. The fields have not been harvested, and are getting overgrown with scrub trees and weeds. We had a couple of good wet seasons, then very dry. Then the brush fires… last year about this time Maui’s entire central valley was on fire, 25000 acres plus a few other fires elsewhere on the island. Normally we have 2-3000 acres on fire during a typical dry.
People hated the cane fires because they made big polluting smoke plumes and ashfall, but uncontrolled brush fires are worse.
Somebody still owns the land! Doesn’t Maui/Hawaii have laws that can force landowners to maintain their land, or the county will do it and send them the landowner the bill covered with a lien?
In ’14 I took the cruise with a friend, and we went through the valley from Kahului down to Wailea. (Wasn’t very impressed, maybe should’ve gone to Lahaina? I haven’t been to the Either/Or bookstore, albeit in Hermosa Beach, in 30 years!) I noticed the overgrown fields bordered with some trees. Didn’t look good, even then.
Wish I’d known you were on the island; we make a habit of taking visiting friends to dinner! Agricultural zoned land is treated differently than industrial or residential land; a lot of it tends to lay fallow until needed, and it is allowed to get rather messy.
Likewise, wish I’d known you were on the island. I might’ve come away with a better impression. We also took the ride up Haleakala, but I got a brief glimpse of a couple observatory buildings from the visitors center below then it socked in tight. I’m planning to go back to Kauai for a week. When it’s open and my friend can get away, which doesn’t look to be very soon.
My folks are returning today from a central Montana vacation, and they say the photos they took are all hazy from the smoke out of the south-west. Now, back in ’88, my unit was activated from Ft. Lewis to fight the Yellowstone fire, and we dug several miles of firebreak along the base of the ridge along the northeast corner of the park… We lost a couple of the 25-or-so homes along the road leading into the place from Cooke City, but saved most of them (or at least, so my memory tells me…)
https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/1988-fires.htm
G
I just looked in on the Old Faithful Webcam, and yep, it’s smoggy. It didn’t dawn on me until now that the haze was due to forest fires; it’s dense enough that at about 10:30 a.m. local time, it looks closer to dawn, light-quality wise.
Smoke is as effective as cloud in reflecting insolation. Around Portland the last few days we never got out of the 60’s! Paradoxically, the warmest part of the day was the middle of the night. I turned on my furnace–earliest ever.
Wet cotton mask (same one you’re using for Covid) works fairly well against smoke. (And against pollen, for you allergic types.)
The sky here just north of Boston, MA has been hazy all day and now well into the night. Apparently the smoke from the West Coast has arrived in our upper atmosphere. I can’t see Jupiter, Saturn and —further off— Mars the way I have been able to for nights & nights (as I’m teaching astronomy again this semester; the planets have been a pleasure, especially
knowing that Pluto lurks in the darkness between Jupiter & Saturn). Last night we could smell smoke on the wind as we were doing a late afternoon walk (no classes to prep instead) and my spouse thought it was the smoke arriving but I have doubts that we would smell it so sharply down here “on the ground.” Tonight’s walk —after my evening Zoom Astronomy class had ended produced no smoke on the breeze in addition to no planets. We walked up to a high, volcanic hill (I’m teaching Geology Friday evenings) and could see the lights of Boston clearly some 7 miles away.
Let’s see, IIRC, Smocon was in 2015. I remember coming in through western Montana and hitting fires on I-90, and on the way home, same thing on the way home.
I know WoW was miserable during that time, and we didn’t get to spend as much time out on the patio as we had in previous years.
There’d been a little low spinning off the coast for a while that finally came closer, but shunted off straight north. We were looking to it. Lightning began about 8PM PDT and carried on for a few hours. I’m disappointed I didn’t anticipate it! 🙁 All the smoke particles in the air, being pushed past each other, of course they’d generate static electricity–just like a volcanic eruption! But the body of the storm has pushed past us, still offshore for the most part, and I’d not a drop of rain at 11PM. The lightning returned about 3AM 🙁 , and this time brought a quarter inch of rain. Not enough to do much of anything, and thankfully that includes cause erosion. It’s major effect is most likely to restore normal air circulation.
Liquid? At Mars’s south pole?
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54337779
Well- hot damn! Very useful info my my astronomy class. In a few weeks, we start examining planets and at the end of the course wrap up with… might life exist in other places. Thanks!
Can’t find any details, but my sister tells me her godson-in-law just foiled a robbery in Spokane, because “fortunately, he had a gun”. Yeah, and bullets didn’t start flying!
That’s a scary thought!
Had to submit to a COVID test yesterday, as I had lost my sense of smell and taste Thursday night. Got a call back from the Family Health Clinic, the test came back positive. I’m now quarantined for 10 days.
Oh no! Take care of yourself and may the next 10 days be easy on you and your body.
Joe, I hope you get no more than the mild symtoms! Wishing you well!
Sorry to hear it. Losing the taste and smell must make eating an obligation rather than a pleasure.
Yikes, Joe!! Very best wishes for a light case, and please keep us informed.
Amen on the wish for a negligible dose of COVID. If possible, keep us posted. We prefer salads NOT in the hospital!
Good luck, Joe-nadi! You’re included in our prayers.
Indeed, best of luck, Joe. Take care of yourself, and be pro-active about calling/getting to the hospital if your symptoms START down the road! Don’t wait! This thing won’t be dictated to.
Thank you, all, nadiin. The Public Health office from the base hospital called me this morning and we discussed when I first started the symptoms (September 26), and where I could possibly have been, with whom I was in contact, etc. He said that since my symptoms started back then, the actual quarantine will end on October 8. I’ll take that to mean that I still don’t go out until October 9, just as a precaution.
Right now, I just have a nagging headache, some coughing, and runny nose, and of course, general fatigue. No fever, no chills, no diarrhea, no chest pains, so maybe the medications I’ve been taking for the rheumatoid arthritis (hydroxychloroquine) helped keep it mild. As for monitoring myself, yes. I’m 5 minutes from the emergency room of the local hospital, and if I need to go, I will get myself transported via ambulance (as the PHO recommended).
Take good care my salad. Your kittehs wouldn’t appreciate doing without you even for a few days.
good to hear you’re doing well Joe!