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The US has great fire fighting capabilities but the problem is the weather pattern on the West coast where you get significant winter rain for tree growth and then no rain (I mean none) for months of summer and Fall with much greater expanses of land with little population....compounded by changes in environmental policies to not thin the forest has created a towering inferno.
This right here nails it. California's weather patterns are different than most other places. The climate here essentially switches. In winter, it becomes basically oceanic/marine like the Pacific Northwest in many places with a lot of rain. Unlike other places that get between 20 and 40 inches of rain spread throughout the year, in California, it occurs from October to April. The rest of the year, it is dry, not a drop falls so the vegetation that has grown nice and dense, dries out. Trees however remain green year-round but they're often surrounded by dry brush. Autumn here is frequently hotter than summer often with extremely dry air and high winds. Any rain that may fall at this time, and it does happen, isn't enough to ease the dryness. Anything that sparks in vegetation will set a blaze which is driven by bone dry winds that blow up to 70 miles per hour. There's absolutely no way to stop that at its peak.
We also haven't been getting our normal winter rains like we should. Usually by November, fire season would be over as the rains would normally start to become the norm and the air mass changes to a cool north pacific air mass. The rainy season can be punctuated with dry periods but with normal rains the vegetation has turned green and the ground is damp so no fires would occur until the end of the next dry season (September and October). Unfortunately, this pattern has been broken.
I'm a lifelong resident of Southern California. Anyone who thinks the recent wildfires were so destructive because the state of California and/or the USA lacks adequate firefighting capability just does not understand the geography and climatic conditions.
My sister-in-law's sister (that is, my brother's wife's sister) has lived for many years in Paradise, CA. The fire came suddenly and almost without warning. She and her husband had no time to save anything, and barely made it out alive. They had to drive though the flames to escape.
Unfortunately, many people were unable to escape and died in the flames. "Stubbornly refusing to evacuate" was not part of the scenario for most. You have far more warning of a hurricane than such a fire.
It's shameful how quick people from other countries are to blame a severe natural disaster on flaws in the American character.
Exactly. Same thing happened in Santa Rosa last year. The fire came so fast that people woke up with the house already on fire! They didn't even have time to get dressed, let alone grab anything.
People really don't get the climate and topography of California and how that impacts the weather, especially near the coast and in the interior mountains.
Considering it's a natural phenomena (yes, since dinosaurs age, forests have always coped with fires) happening almost yearly, i think the only way to preserve lives would be perhaps better legislation on real estate development, specially on those areas neighbouring forests, such as...creating a dead zone between woods and houses where all trees are to be cut down intentionally in order to prevent a fire from reaching neighourhoods.
Most people don't realize just how dry much of California is, especially the southern part.
People are surprised to learn it is almost desert-like.
That's because this dryness is relatively new. 40% of CA's area is actually forest. The lack of rain over the past couple of decades has dried the state out in a way it wasn't before. With normal rain patterns, only 1/4 of CA would be desert.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by American Expat
The US has great fire fighting capabilities but the problem is the weather pattern on the West coast where you get significant winter rain for tree growth and then no rain (I mean none) for months of summer and Fall with much greater expanses of land with little population....compounded by changes in environmental policies to not thin the forest has created a towering inferno.
Quote:
Originally Posted by saibot
I'm a lifelong resident of Southern California. Anyone who thinks the recent wildfires were so destructive because the state of California and/or the USA lacks adequate firefighting capability just does not understand the geography and climatic conditions.
My sister-in-law's sister (that is, my brother's wife's sister) has lived for many years in Paradise, CA. The fire came suddenly and almost without warning. She and her husband had no time to save anything, and barely made it out alive. They had to drive though the flames to escape.
Unfortunately, many people were unable to escape and died in the flames. "Stubbornly refusing to evacuate" was not part of the scenario for most. You have far more warning of a hurricane than such a fire.
It's shameful how quick people from other countries are to blame a severe natural disaster on flaws in the American character.
The problem as I see it is that we shouldn't have millions of people living in what amounts to a desert. There is a reason that most of Southern California and Arizona was sparsely populated until massive water transfers were engineered. As a Northeasterner I resent the subsidies for those projects, and for the funding of an Interstate Highway network on our dime.
New York and New Jersey got remarkably little aid for Hurricane Sandy, and that was a very rare natural disaster for this area. In general, much of the Northeast has very few natural disasters, which is why it was among the first thickly settled parts of the U.S.
The problem as I see it is that we shouldn't have millions of people living in what amounts to a desert. There is a reason that most of Southern California and Arizona was sparsely populated until massive water transfers were engineered. As a Northeasterner I resent the subsidies for those projects, and for the funding of an Interstate Highway network on our dime.
Paradise, CA is not in the desert nor is it in Southern California. It's over 100 miles north of San Francisco and gets an average of 58 inches of rain a year.
Again, try to understand that in California, no matter how much rain may fall in a certain location annually, there is a very prolonged dry season. There is normally plenty of water in Northern California for the needs of people, but the vegetation dries out over the summer.
6750 km^2 burned in Cali this season...2018
750 km^2 in Spain in 2017 (worst in Europe this year)
I'm sorry, these data are strongly biased because 2018 was devastating for Cali, 2017 for Spain seems to be quite a bad year, still 'normal' (nothing like the delta in Cali between 2018 and other years). Average seems to be around 900/1000 km^2 in Cali (last 5 years average) an order of magnitude similar to Spain. I'd like to remind OP that we also usually never hear about American wildfires, because they are well controlled and without victims, like Spain.
But 2018, is 2018. Nearly 10 times worst than the 2017 season in Spain. If this happens in Spain, Spain will happily call the help of USA, and people will die, a lot (like in Cali).
The point is just to show why recent Wildfires in Cali are terrible, a Boeing 747 in the air and thousand of firefighters, that's just not enough at this point. These fires are also as fast as a car, when it's in front of you, pray.
6.75*10^3 km²
7.5*10^2 km²
That's indeed one order of magnitude of difference.
Last edited by Pokitobounto; 11-19-2018 at 01:02 PM..
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