smackaholic wrote: ↑Tue Jan 21, 2025 2:20 pm
Mikey wrote: ↑Tue Jan 21, 2025 10:10 am
Fuck. Now there’s a third fire at the north end of town. It’s almost like someone’s running around starting these.
Now why would anyone want to start more fires?
Might it be to get more support for their "it's the climate, stupid" position?
Nahhhhhh, couldn't possibly be that.
The I15 is one of two major north/south routes through the area (the other one being on the coast). Lots of traffic even late at night, and the route in that area is through a valley that can be like a wind tunnel when the wind is blowing in that direction. One of the first things I noticed last night is that the Pala Fire started in almost the exact same spot as a major destructive fire that destroyed several hundred homes in 2007. Likewise, the Lilac fire started probably within a few hundred yards of the fire in 2017 that forced us to evacuate as it burned through the San Luis Rey River valley (Hwy 76). There have been several other fires along that same stretch, though none of them got so big. The wind makes a huge difference.
The winds have died down since early morning. If fact it's dead calm here right now. The Lilac fire perimeter seems to have stabilized and they are reporting 10% containment and "good progress as the fire activity has decreased significantly." Obviously the wind makes a huge difference but I think having daylight helps the crews on the ground as well as the air support. I actually got a few hours of sleep and not quite as worried, but still monitoring things closely. I can't see any smoke on the horizon but there's a faint smell of it. I'll be driving right past there in a couple of hours on the way to getting a bone density scan.
I know that LAFD has taken a lot of, probably deserved, criticism lately but the response and capabilities in our area have improved by orders of magnitude in the past 15 years or so. We have North County Fire Prevention District (NCFPD - the local agency) and CalFire (the state agency) and their efforts are completely RACKable. In the 2007 fire there was no air support at all, that I noticed. The 2017 fire was pretty destructive but could have been a lot worse. I was standing there watching for a while from a few hundred yards away across the highway as the large aircraft were flying a few hundred feet off the ground dropping their pink loads.
The dissemination of information has also made huge improvements. This Watch Duty app (on smartphones and desktop) gives up to the minute updates, plus alerts if you have them turned on, and include images and video from dozens of mountaintop cameras, and detailed maps of evacuation zones. Even the evil SDGE has spent millions of their ratepayer's money on an incredibly efficient weather monitoring system where you can log on and get data and visuals for temperatures, wind speed and direction, weather radar superimposed on satellite images, etc.