...
On the night of 30/31 July 2015, between about eleven and one, we had a bunch of fiendishly active thunderstorms, something over 300 lightning strikes in that window of time. It left the Six Rivers National Forest with fires dotting every one of its ranger districts. If I recall correctly, initially there were thirty-something fires and it took a couple of days to count them up, to find all the places the smoke was rising up out of the forest.
It's boiled down to thirteen fires now, from separate fires burning together and the smaller ones burning out. I would say "put out", but the national forest people's plan has not been to fight these fires, just to keep them within certain loose parameters, wildfire being a "natural phenomenon". Actual hand-to-hand combat between man and fire only takes place where structures are being threatened or the fires try to tiptoe off federally managed land.
I've mostly only been screaming about the Gasquet Complex, because it's nearest and impacting my life and health, but we've got Gasquet Complex, River Complex, Mad River Complex, Route Complex and Nickowitz Fire all blazing and smoldering along these thirty days later. In fact, if you have been paying attention, here, the Happy Camp Complex fires from August 2014, strictly speaking, aren't even out yet.
I think these well-intentioned fucknuts have been dreading the fuels loading for so long that this utter fiasco has seemed to them to be manna from heaven. There really is a good argument to be made from the let-it-burn camp. I stop thinking it's so good, though, when drought is this intense and when it is generally agreed we've got a whopper [Godzilla-like] El Niño coming. It spells stream devastation to me.
After we're dead, they will be saying that the great drought of the teens extinctified the salmon runs of Northern California, but that isn't going to be exactly true. Logging and letting nature remove this much stream shade, using the streams themselves for fucksakes as firebreaks, and then filling the slopes with burn debris and naked soil for Godzilla to deposit where fish eggs needed to hatch into something that could swim... well... there were things we could have done and refrained from doing to mitigate, to make sure it didn't get that bad.
Hell, they very well might be saying it's what turned another third of our state, or even our whole state, into desert, when that too won't be exactly true.
While last night's rain may have saved the remnant of my garden, it seems to have done almost nothing to affect these fires, but maybe we need another couple days to assess how much it might've dampened the conflagration.
always and any time....
