We've got a wildfire again

By -

 Last week we had the start of another giant wildfire, which is why I haven't been posting.  It started with a guy, already a double felon, who seems to have set his mother's car on fire and then shoved it into a gully in the park, right in front of witnesses and while there were lots of people there.  He was 'heavily intoxicated' and wanted the insurance money or something.  None of it makes any sense.  Firefighters got right on it, but the blaze quickly got way out of control, ripping through miles of hot, dry foothills to the north.  It moved even faster than the Camp Fire, and within a few days was over twice the size.

The first night, fire all along the ridge above Chico

The scale of this fire is just unimaginably huge.  It stretches for miles, right up to Lassen Park.  Most of this area is not inhabited by humans, so there hasn't been the loss of life and structures that the Camp Fire entailed, but some of the tiny places up there have been hit.  Most of Cohasset is gone.  But the fire moved through underbrush so fast that it didn't necessarily get all the houses, or even all the trees.   It's all still ongoing -- current containment is at 14% -- and we don't know when people will be able to go up and see what's left of their homes.  The main thing has been to keep the eastern front out of the really mountainous area, where it will be impossible to fight, and the southern front away from towns.  That side has gotten right up to the Camp Fire burn scar and some people in Paradise had to evacuate, again.

A few days in, view from my porch

It's been surreal to see the giant plume of smoke build up every day, even as nearly all the smoke goes north, leaving us with clear skies and almost-fresh air.  Times like this, there's nothing to do except look at your phone for news, but it's only been ten minutes so there isn't any.  Nobody needs to worry about me; I'm totally unaffected except by smoke and seeing this yet again.  It's all the other folks, who are reliving the Camp Fire, or are evacuated out of their homes, or who now know that their homes are gone and they have a million problems to solve.

I just wanted to get this down to remember.  It's been almost a week, and today is actually the smokiest it's been, even though the bulk of the fire is now miles to the north.  I have a lot of friends to check on but not much else to do directly.

Current status of the fire, on 7/30.  

Comments

  1. reeseJuly 30, 2024 at 5:35 PM

    Glad to hear you're alright. Scary stuff. My brother's been fine, but he knows people who've had to evacuate on the far north side.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeanJuly 30, 2024 at 7:36 PM

      Oh dear. In Manton and Shingletown, someplace like that? The scope of the evacuations up there is just huge -- it keeps getting wider. I hope those places will be saved, but it's not looking good.

      Delete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more