Fire Season

It is fire season. This being California, it stops raining in May and doesn't rain again until October, on a normal year. Right now there are two major fires burning near Redding, producing heavy smoke across the north end of the Sacramento valley. There is also a large wildfire near Plymouth, which is just south of El Dorado County border in the foothills, around 80 miles away. And there's another fire just Southwest of Yosemite in El Portal. We even have a website to keep track of the fires, because fires are the thing we care about, almost as much as rain. We don't give a damn about New York City. We care about fires. You may have seen some of these on TV, especially the big fires in Eastern Washington and Idaho.

 

After the fires go out, the roots of the vegetation that held the hillsides together are burned up, so when the rains come, the hills slide and erode. The fire heat is so intense it actually makes the surfaces of exposed rock pop loose, called Spalling. The additional eroded sediments are carried into streams and rivers, filling up reservoirs so they don't hold as much water as before. Eventually the reservoir turns into a meadow with a concrete waterfall on one end, otherwise useless. The people who counted on the dam to catch big rainstorms will see the surges of water flood downstream and wash away the levees and their fields, flood their homes, destroy things.

 

If we had a beneficial govt, they would clear the sediment behind the dams and maintain the levees using our tax dollars, but instead they funnel it elsewhere. Corruption always hurts California. We have expensive natural disasters which require work to prevent, and we need our taxes paying for that work, not Eastern social experiments. Very important.

 

This morning the smoke was heavy on the ground, visible between houses and across the narrow valleys. Above it were clouds, not raining, just there, grey, and apparently responsible for the lightning strike fires in Yosemite. These may be more lighting fires this afternoon. We'll see.