Lousy geography classes and the California fires.

I'm a native Rust Belter who has only been as far west as Arkansas since infancy. (Well, I was born in Oakland, but left there when I was 2 months old!) I have a terrible time understanding the fires in California because I have no real idea of what "Los Angeles" or "San Diego" means. I know that they are cities, but I have no feel for how large an area is involved or how far apart they are. I might be able to place them on a map, but I couldn't tell you the distances involved.

All those years of taking geography classes, and I really have only a vague concept of what suburban California is like. I probably learned more from the film ET than anything else. Even then, I couldn't figure out how the bare mountain side lots in one scene related to the woods of another scene.


All together, I can't really fathom a forest fire or grass fire that threatens houses. It's wet here, so I have trouble fathoming dry lands. When I visited San Antonio, I was amazed to see bare patches of dirt between plants. Here, there is always some kind of weed that covers the ground.

I guess my point is that a lot of Americans can't understand what Californians are going through because they have no reference for the situation.

the opening credits are the kind of terrain we're talking about. Imagine instead of the camp, you've got a couple houses there.

Thanks for checking in. :)

From our house it takes about 1/2 hour, in traffic, to get to Malibu.

That is not a lot of miles with the wind blowing.

Our prayers are with the families.

After all, just find a TV station in those areas, such as:

http://www.knbc.com/index.html

When I was in Arkasas, I couldn't get over the cotton fields that ran right up to the edge of the road and ran on forever. Here, farms are broken up by wood lots and hedgerows.

Can someone who has been born and raised in the LA basin really comprehend 36" of snow? Overnight? How about two solid months of at least a foot of snow on the ground. (Generally we do have a mid-winter thaw, but not always!)

I may know there is a fire out there, but that doesn't mean I really understand it.

I've had enough snow thank you. I could always smell it coming too.

I have no reference for a photo showing a suburban street with a huge fire in the background. It's like a picture photo-shopping a polar bear next to a palm tree.

BTW - One photo did show a house that I could see around here sitting in the middle of a green lawn. The only abnormal element was the huge wall of smoke behind the house. I can't tell if the house is threatened or if the fire is 5, 10, or 20 miles away. It also bothers me to see the green lawn. In that location, having a green lawn is as unnatural as if I put heat cables under my lawn to keep the snow melted off all winter so I could see green grass year round.

That is a good way to understand the areas and get a better perspective.

A picture of one or two houses burning doesn't tell the story.


It's the same with the 9th Ward of New Orleans. The during and after pictures just don't explain what happened.

I believe there are some fire sites with access to live satellite images. Will hunt sites up and post this evening when I get home from work

www.wikimapia.com

Uses the same sat photos as google earth, for the most part.

Gotta tell ya, TV news does a piss poor job of actually explaining anything. They do a bang up job sensationalizing though.

these fires. The actual "city" parts filled up years ago, so now people are living in areas that absolutely will have these fires from time to time. They will also have mudslides at other times. If it weren't for your and my insurance premiums, they could not live there.

Is that all you can think about when peoples' lives are in danger??? :eyes:

Maybe 120 miles north to south.

The populated coastal areas are backed up to some high mountains.

It is a semi-arid climate, we get 12 inches to 18 inches of rain in a good year. The last few years have not been good.

The native vegetation is drought resistant. That means it is high in oils that are very combustible, or annual wildflowers that bloom briefly then turn to dry straw. The perfect fuel for a fire.

People like to live adjacent to wilderness, and in exurban areas near wilderness. Partly cost, partly not wanting to live in a big bad city.

It is politically difficult to restrict development in these areas. The state has long been on an anti-tax rampage (thanks for nothing, Jarvis & Gann), so emergency services and public prevention are done on the cheap.

Dry fuel plus no rain plus exploding exurban development plus no fire prevention = big destructive fires

Now imagine that stretching on for a hundred miles, occasionnally interspersed it strip malls, parking lots, amusement parks, and dry bits of scrub land.

That said, it's not as bad as it sounds.

It's a lot to cover, and I agree schools should do a better job teaching us when we are kids -- I don't know half what I should about the other 49 states. I returned here as an adult (28 years ago this month) and usually stick to my own small region which has a Mediterranean climate, sunny and dry.

One of the most impressive experiences I ever had, in terms of learning about California's geography, is when I attended a gathering of the secretaries of County Public Works Directors (as I was then, 20+ years ago) and learned how extremely diverse in size and nature the 50+ counties of the state are. Some of those small northern inland counties spend over half their annual budget on __snow removal__. We have an impressive set of county buildings, some of them architecturally famous, but I talked to a woman whose public works building had a screened-in front porch on a small wooden building....

"Los Angeles" and "San Diego" are shorthand for huge regions whose counties are named for their chief cities.

I visted the East Coast with my kids nearly 20 years ago and drove from New Jersey to Virginia. One thing that astonished me was the rapidity with which we crossed state lines, the way I would cross county lines here in SoCal as I drive down the coast from Santa Barbara County to San Diego County; in SoCal we have geographically huge counties, so I didn't realize just how small the original 13 states are. And wet, and green. It rains in the summer, by gods. Who'd'a thunk it? My sis's yard in NJ was about buried in the lushest grass ("Oh I'm so embarrassed we didn't get it mowed," she said as I ran my hands through it in admiration), while we were water rationing in a drought.

Enough rambling. You made a good point, and I wish the news media would do a better job of locating disasters on a map that makes sense and is actually informative.

Hekate

In Syracuse, we're right on track for average rainfall! People think it's been dry because it's been warm. The grass stopped growing and plants dried out a little because the extra heat meant extra evaporation. The water level is so high that some people live on a 10' dug well!

California has every geographic element EXCEPT glaciers.

It's a big, very diverse, place.

I believe the southernmost glacier in North America is located in the Sierra Nevada mountains to the west of Big Pine. That is if Global Warming hasn't taken it.

One thing that makes California a bad place for forest fires is the fire suppression methods themselves. Firefighters have been actively suppressing fires for years, and in some places, there is 50 years worth of underbrush waiting to burn. When I would walk through the Los Padres National Forest and see chapparral 12 to 18 feet high instead of the normal 2-4 feet, I knew it was a disaster waiting to happen.

With all these fires in San Diego county, what do you think the threat is in the area of Mexico just right over the border? It's a different world, because south of the border, the chapparral is the normal 2-4 feet and the only time the Mexicans send out firefighters is when homes are threatened and then, only to try and save the home and let the fire burn past it. The frequency of fires in Mexico is greater and they are of longer duration and lower intensity. A brush fire in the coastal mountains of Northern Baja can smolder on for a weeks or more, clearing out brush as has happened over millenia. The fire season is also shifted in time and are earlier in the year. The sparser Mexican vegetation dries out earlier in the dry season and fires peak in the late spring and early summer, instead of well into the fall as is now the pattern on the US side of the border. The fire that occurred on Santa Catalina earlier in the year was more typical of the Mexican pattern. But there, the island has been heavily grazed and the fuel not allowed to build up for years.

The Mexicans have done a better job of learning to live with their environment. (It also helps that many of them are descended from tribes indigenous to the area.) Fire is a necessary element of renewal in California, just as hurricanes provide an element of renewal to the wetlands of the southeastern US. But Americans are just beginning to learn how to build smart to survive the inevitable brush fire or hurricane. I suppose the thought of lots of goats munching on the vegetation and lots of low grade brush fires just doesn't fit in with the aesthetics of gated communities and manicured lawns.

camped at the foot of the Clyde a couple years ago. Welcome to DU.

And welcome to DU. Have to admit, that old teacher was a bit of a hot house orchid and not given to much alpine hiking. I was still an asphalt-locked city kid at the time.

I have known old fire jumpers up here in Montana who have pulled off stunts that just defy survival. A couple went off a sheer bluff and into the Missouri river to save their hides from the 'fire monster'. Most had many jumps where no one expected to see them hack their way back to camp. Sheer climbs out of areas too steep for any sane person after days on fire with nothing but an ax and a shovel, no sleep, maybe a meal or two from a can and one canteen. Tough, really rugged men. To a one, they said they would NEVER take on the job of fighting wildfire in California. "Those plants will just explode from the heat. You can be just walking by a plant and it can burst into flame. That's just plain crazy to be in the middle of!" was what one old guy told me.

Too much suppression is a problem. The plants are already dangerous enough. And lots of people just don't have any idea how rugged some of the terrain is.

LOL about the gated communities. Yeah, the well heeled don't often have to deal with the realities of nature. Some of them just don't register that nature does not care how important they think they are. Seems a big chunk of the population just won't understand life outside of the artificial conditions they think are reality.

Ignoring nature will always bite one in the ass.

people on the East Coast really feel California is about as big as Ohio or Pennsylvania. They may know differently, but that's how they feel it.

The Canyon Country area, and many more like it, like the hills of Malibu away from the beach, the areas around Lake Castaic and down near San Diego away from the beaches are semi-desert zones. Much of the shrubs and grasses live short seasonal lives, and are completely dry by the time the yearly Santa Ana winds start. The Santa Anas are very dry desert winds rushing off-shore.

The winds are very powerful, like hurrricane winds. The humidity drops to 10 or less percent. Leaves, twigs and even branches are ripped off of plants and hurtled sometimes hundreds of feet.

Think of this: Think of a big box full of packing peanuts. Go to the top of a hill in strong winds with gusts up to 80 mph. Open the box. The peanuts will scatter far and wide. They will shower all about. They will flow on the ground like water.

Imagine the peanuts are embers. Imagine that the embers are often attached to parts of dried flora that has not been burned yet. Rising into the air and falling like rain, cresting hills and drifting for hundreds of feet.

Imagine your house is near a hill or a wash (creek bed, usually dry except for when it rains). Your house is not surounded by brush because you have a yard with green grass. You have a stucco exterior. You have a composite shingle or clay roof. Are you safe? A shower of embers with un-burned fuel is blown down and against your house. Many embers are extinguished but some lodge into small crevices in your eaves near the attic vents or between the eaves and the gutters. The wind is blowing them to a bright orange glow. They burn through your Luxe exterior latex paint and into your wood like a DU round through tank armour. 15 minutes later, nothing left inside will be alive.

That's how this shit works. It's fast and intense and nothing can stop it. It went around us last night, but not by very much.

I don't live in a fancy home, I don't live in a box canyon or cantilevered out over a cliff, but my suburb is at risk when the hills are alight. We all feel it, and with exceedingly good reason. California evolved to burn.

Right now one of the news stations is saying one of the current fires may march to the sea -- that happened here in 1990 when the Painted Cave Fire roared out of the hills and jumped every freeway and fire line. It got damn close to meeting the waves at the beach. I packed the car and told the kids to stay close. A friend showed up on our porch with her cats in the middle of the night.

And aside from the foul air, it's why this summer's Zaca Fire affected us so much. The fire fighters herded that monster into the wilderness where it burned off over 250,000 acres of century-old fuel, but a shift in the wind would have sent it right at the towns on the other side of the mountains, which is where I live. Hundreds of thousands of people at the edges of that fire kept our fingers crossed against sundowners and Santa Anas.

And now the Santa Ana winds are blowing.

If I lived in Tornado Alley I would no doubt have the same feelings about sky that turns green and starts to show a funnel cloud. Each region has its own Nature to live with, and we all remember the Big Ones that come to call.

Hekate

Upstate New York is the most underrated part of the country, I think. We talk about the snow just to keep the place uncrowded!

the demographics of the sierra foothills and gold rush country. I lived in a tiny town in Nevada county called Rough and Ready. Pictures taken in the late 1800's show a town as big as the two larger towns in Nevada co; Grass Valley and Nevada City. Rough and Ready is geographically far more prone to fire tho, being a bit dyer and further down the mountain than either of then other two. It burned several times between about 1900 and 1930. When we moved in, there was damage close by of fires within the last twenty years (Our house was in an area left untouched by the fires...). Rough and Ready is now an unknown hamlet of 1200 or so people, Grass Valley and Nevada City are pretty well-known and have populations of around 15 thousand or so.

The places most at risk tend to be the more recent houses flung up on the outskirts of towns.

I am originally from the midwest. And ,yeah, the size of CA and it's weather amazed me for a good number of years.

I agree, it is hard to have a frame of reference.


edit for grammar.