Vacation at the Wildfire. *short*

[bhskittykatt]

And OMG, how do they get parking tickets? It's dead easy to find parking here, and even if you park illegally, it takes a while to get a ticket. I've never had any kind of ticket. (knock on wood!)

Depends on where you park. I was downtown near the library and parked on a major street; my BFF parked on a side-street next to a truck with an expired meter. We came back to our cars a mere 5 minutes late. I had a ticket, BFF did not, and the truck with the expired meter still didn't have a ticket either! I was pissed.

At the school next door, a car was recently towed after being abandoned for 9 months (since mid-December). There's a nice patch of moss outlining where it was parked. The first parking citation didn't actually show up until June. Parking enforcement here is weird.

[notalwaysright]

Depends on where you park. I was downtown near the library and parked on a major street; my BFF parked on a side-street next to a truck with an expired meter. We came back to our cars a mere 5 minutes late. I had a ticket, BFF did not, and the truck with the expired meter still didn't have a ticket either! I was pissed.

At the school next door, a car was recently towed after being abandoned for 9 months (since mid-December). There's a nice patch of moss outlining where it was parked. The first parking citation didn't actually show up until June. Parking enforcement here is weird.

Have you used the library meters lately? They are weirdly hard to use. And that's stupid about the other truck who didn't get ticketed... Most of the time I'm downtown it's when parking is free. Actually these family don't live in the same town. It's a small town, less than 10K people. I lived there for years and I don't think there are any parking meters in the whole place. So they must be parking particularly horrible to repeatedly get tickets. Unless the tickets are all from Tacoma, which of course has meters.

[Seshat]

Vacationing is one thing. How about living? I've been suffering from sinus infections for weeks because of that fire. It's the very air we breathe--and I live in a valley nearby, which kinda sucks the fire down, where it stays. Just--nowhere to go this time.

As you know, I live in Australia. The 'recent' (several years ago now) fires which caused our fire-danger categories to include 'catastrophic' were in my state. North of me, the firebreaks (controlled burns) were so close they were only one suburb north of me: we passed them to get to our doctor, and they were placed to protect (among other things) the closest hospital.

SMOKE!
Smoke is a killer, even if you're some distance from the fire. You don't even have to be 'downwind' if the fire is bad enough; the smoke and ash can be carried on higher level winds, which might be travelling in different directions, and which then drop the smoke and ash particles.
And the dry, dry air is painful and wrecks your sight and your sinuses and everything else that relies on being moist. Your skin becomes dry and more prone to cracking. Your mouth is dry. Your eyes are dry and painful. You dehydrate so easily.
And that's a 'safe' distance from the fire.
If it's a catastrophic fire danger day, it's all of that and it's HOT. Hot enough that your skin feels like a bad sunburn, even when you're in the shade and the skin is 'fine'. Or as 'fine' as it can be when it's this dry and hot.
Hot enough that the ambient air is hotter than human body temperature.
Hot enough that even without the smoke, infants, the elderly and the disabled are at risk of heatstroke. And so are healthy people in the prime of life, if they're not careful.

[DGoddessChardonnay]

Shit, you can see the smoke from the regional wildfires even here and it's been all over the local news.

Morons.

I'm on the other side of the country and I've heard about the ongoing wildfires. It's not that big of a secret, as unlike some folks around here, I DO watch the news daily to see what's going on.

Morons like that deserve what they get, IMHO.

[Pagan]

Shit, you can see the smoke from the regional wildfires even here and it's been all over the local news.

Morons.

We had the smoke from them where I live...in New Mexico.

Fire particularly scares me, though I wouldn't mess with a hurricane either.

I was evacuated from a forest fire over at my step-grandmother's in AZ when I was little. It burned to within a 1/4 mile of her house. I blocked a lot of it until the Cerro Grande fire that burned through Los Alamos. There's been fires down in the Bosque close to me. One was caused by cottonwood fuzz spontaneously combusting because we were so hot and dry (that was 2 years ago, went over 6 months without measurable precip).

I've learned that, if I have to, I can be out of here in 15 minutes.

Fire isn't something our area (at least Western Washington) is really used to. I mean, yeah some dry summers we'll get smallish fires, but this is really unusual.

Half of New Mexico routinely burns down. It hasn't been bad this year because we've gotten a lot of rain. Last big fire was the Whitewater-Baldy Complex in 2012 down in the Gila (two fires that merged, both lightning strikes). It burned 465 square miles.

[raudf]

I live next to a gas pipeline.. a huge one. Fires aren't allowed to burn long in our area because of it. The last one was a small fire that got a wee bit out of hand and burned down part of the woods across the road from our driveway. The volunteer fire department came out PDQ to keep it in check and decided that as long as they were there, they'd use it as an exercise in building firebreaks in a potentially hazardous situation.

A lumber yard caught fire about 30.. 40 miles from us and the smoke from it was so bad it was reaching our area! You could track the smoke on the satellite. Neti pots and no open windows for a few days while that settled down.

[notalwaysright]

Well I'm happy the dry spell seems to be over. This is what it looked like a little over a week ago. I'm not sure how dramatic it looks, but normally this would be clear blue sky.

[Seshat]

I live next to a gas pipeline.. a huge one. Fires aren't allowed to burn long in our area because of it.

Please don't count on that always being the case.

In the Black Saturday disaster, we - hopefully the whole world - learned that no matter what humans do, some fires cannot be prevented, contained, or defended against.
That's the fire event that I mentioned upthread, where there was a firebreak burned one suburb north of me, to protect the hospital there.

(For the curious, the south-western section of the Kinglake area fire complex was the one which would have threatened (or burned down) the hospital, had the wind changed the right (wrong?) way.)


Anyway, my point is that while your firefighters will do all they can to avoid the gas line being heated to the point that it ruptures - well, sometimes 'all they can' isn't enough.

Please, no matter how safe you think your home is, everyone everywhere should have an evacuation plan, and an emergency radio which is independant of mains power.

[catcul]

Here in Greensboro, a tank holding 20,000 barrels of gasoline in the nearby tank farm was set on fire when it was struck by lightning. Colonial pumped as much gas as they safely could out of the tank. The Greensboro responded immediately to the call. They had to ask for help from crews as far away as Charlotte and Raleigh for help. It took 5 fire crews 6 hours to extinguish the fire. The only tank that was destroyed was the tank that was struck by lightning.

[catcul]

I forgot to mention.

The beaches get people go towards places that are predicted to be hit by a hurricane just for fun. A reporter asked one of these morons if he was concerned about his safety.

He responded, "It only going to be a little flooding."

I would hate to break it to him, but more people die in hurricanes from drowning than high winds or lightning.

[dalesys]

... He responded, "It only going to be a little flooding."...

How long can you tread water?

[catcul]

How long can you tread water?

You don't know how to breathe water? You better learn fast.

[Ironclad Alibi]

How long can you tread water?

A wonderful skit for those that are not familiar with it. The above lines happens at about 4:30.

[DGoddessChardonnay]

Here in Greensboro, a tank holding 20,000 barrels of gasoline in the nearby tank farm was set on fire when it was struck by lightning. Colonial pumped as much gas as they safely could out of the tank. The Greensboro responded immediately to the call. They had to ask for help from crews as far away as Charlotte and Raleigh for help. It took 5 fire crews 6 hours to extinguish the fire. The only tank that was destroyed was the tank that was struck by lightning.

I remember that pretty well . . . the GFD were recognized w/an award of some sort for their prompt handling of what could have been a MAJOR disaster.

I'd say my house is a good 15 miles from the tank farm and we could see and smell the smoke that far away. The air IIRC had a hazy, dark look to it - similar to the fire that occurred at Eastern Guilford HS back in 2006.

[catcul]

I remember that pretty well . . . the GFD were recognized w/an award of some sort for their prompt handling of what could have been a MAJOR disaster.

I'd say my house is a good 15 miles from the tank farm and we could see and smell the smoke that far away. The air IIRC had a hazy, dark look to it - similar to the fire that occurred at Eastern Guilford HS back in 2006.

I only live 5 miles from that place. I'm glad I didn't have to evacuate that night.