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I will, but I need to fortify myself first. The losses are stupendous. I've heard of people who lost their homes and their businesses or jobs, everything but their bodies and what they were wearing when they had to flee the fire. Some of them, I'm sure, at this moment, are feeling as crushed as the families of the dead. Also people who worked at any of these razed businesses are now back on the job market.
Historic places we have loved our whole lives are piles of ash on the ground. Maybe only a placard can be raised to cover the historic buildings and people who made them special... maybe a museum with pictures. The losses of the vineyards, while the least of it, also may mean the death of or extremely long hiatus of some of the finest wines on earth.
The woodlands and their critters also decimated... and, while there is NO question they were in extremely bad shape from drought, sudden oak death syndrome and choked with weed species, like tan oak and scrub oak and eucalyptus and imported pine, understory of poison oak and berries and everything else, so thick you could not enter, completely beyond the beyond out of control, for decades easily seen while driving those roads, the remnant conifer and real oak species are going to be difficult to recover.
Tan/scrub oak, eucalyptus and pine all EXPLODE instead of burn because of the oils in them. They make any conflagration worse and make for little hope the fire went through SO fast there will be some trees it didn't kill.
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Meanwhile, the feds up here are still counting on the weather and their incident reports don't exactly match forecasts or observables on the ground. Don't exactly contradict them either, just walking that fine bureaucratic line for plausible deniability. This might even be entertaining, or good lesson material for youngsters we're trying to deprogram and teach to think, except, of course, for the fact that can so easily have lethal consequences for anyone relying on their balderdash.
Scuttlebutt is that all our big fires up here around me are quiescent and the perimeters are still burning, ready to turn back into blazing and crown running with proper temperature, humidity and wind. When that's going on, firebreaks are useless.
Yes, probably it will stay manageable until enough rain falls to put them all the way out, but there is a REAL chance this is just us dreaming our climate will act like it always has. Never mind there's no longer a solid basis for assuming that, and has not been for at least a decade, that's our plan and we're sticking to it. If it fails, our reports didn't outright deny that possibility.
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Southern northern fires 7pm update....
pipe up any time....
