Off Topic Forest Fires Thread

I will try to send Hurricane Bill in your direction ellewoods.

 

Send me some rain sir, a dry lightning storm just came through and there are 3 small fires now on my street. I think the wind is blowing east and I am about a mile west of them so I should be fine unless something changes.

 

The amazing thing is that there are still trees on my street.

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the 2nd fire, no decent photos of the third one right now

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The wind is really starting to pick up so this might turn into a big fire and its in a canyon so it will be hard to put out.

 

Here is a good photo from one of my neighbors.

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Hope the latest threats from the fires are dealt with quickly Elles. Stay safe.

 

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Dramatic picture of the fires in California Ellewood.

 

Looks like it might be the Wragg Fire, there are a bunch right now. It smells like smoke outside and the sky has a brown color to it. The closest fire to me right now is the Lowell fire.

 

Bloody Hell - that looks more like a 19th century painting rather than a photo. Spectacular. Looks like London during the years of the smog.

 

If it's the one I think it is a firefighter died there yesterday.

 

That's rough news. Hopefully no local residents bought it ?

 

Yea residents just about never die it's almost always hot shot firefighters (which is a real term) that get it and plane and helicopter crashes. The prisoners get injured the most as they have less training. It gets confusing bc there are like a dozen going right now but I think that one in the photo is 22,000 acres and Its a good distance from me. The Lowell fire is still going I think and that's 2,000 acres and it's about 25 miles from me. Our fire season doesn't peak until the beginning of next month so that's when you will see 100,000 acre fires.

 

Wow. It's a hell of a job being a firefighter - I've know a few over the years, in fact played football with them here in Toronto. Of course, pretty well building fires in the city & suburbs, nothing like the highly unpredictable nature of forest & brush fires you experience in California, and indeed Oz. Hope it all subsides and you don't have to go through what happened to you a couple of years ago again.

 

At the moment we have one 5 mins away from us which started last Friday evening and became very serious yesterday with over 30 fire- fighting units deployed in a nearby street. Made worse as homes(including ours) lost power for over 10 hours. Helicopters have been water bombing for 2 days now. No threat to us because the very strong winds blew the right way although a couple of residents packed up and left .Great footage for the TV news channels.

Also reported in our local paper a fire -fighting specialist left our suburb last week to fight the latest fires in Canada!

 

Stay safe mate.

 

Oak Road playing fields?

 

This year, we have had a pretty bad forest fire season in western Canada with Saskatchewan the hardest hit, with 115 fires raging in July. Fifty-eight of these were over 100 hectares in size and some as large as 26,000 hectares. We have had 582 wildfires this year, compared to a total of 210 last year.

54 communities were evacuated, forcing 13,000 people to flee their homes without many of their belongings or animals. Evacuees were moved like refugees to shelters in Prince Albert, Saskatoon, Regina and Cold Lake. Some 600 firefighters, the Canadian army and 200 support workers have battled the fires for weeks using 40 helicopters and 19 planes.

Although the fires were 600 km to the north of Regina, we were under smokey grey skies for days and the smell was pretty disgusting. God knows what it was like for the poor buggers in the north. Fortuneately, things are now more or less back to normal and the evacuees have returned home.

 

You need this guy, Elle.

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You've got more to worry about than forest fires, Kellen...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one