Active Fires today
 

Lower 48 only - other fires are burning in Alaska and in the arctic



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This is a bad year. Fire season here used to end in October but now goes into November. My fire insurance went up to over $3000. That’s just fire. Contents and liability are extra.

I've been watching the "Creek Fire" burn my childhood stomping grounds around Huntington Lake, Shaver Lake, etc. The old cabin is still not burned by some big miracle. So is Lakeshore Village. Can't give enough props to the fire fighters out there. Our local police also headed up to the mountains. Very horrible and very sad.

"Fireproofing" homes or cabins helps a lot.

and it may lower insurance costs too

By "That’s just fire," do you mean just the structure?

I don't know how you would do that. I have two friends with cabins at Huntington Lake and the cabins are surrounded by big pine trees. If they had a fire like what's right next door, nothing would survive. I think the only protection is to clear the areas of brush and dead branches - that is everywhere.

The fires east of Salem and Eugene blew up practically overnight. Bad structure and death toll, and they’ve just started. The smoke plume is insane. I was thinking a week ago that we (Oregon) might just make it through this fire season without getting clobbered. I guess, 2020.

Your local fire dept. (RFD) or the state has detailed info for you.

Two sets of things:
1. the house - use a fire resistant siding (oiled lumber is worst)
- metal roof best (cedar shakes are worst)
- clean patios, walks, roof of debris
- no plants next to house
- no firewood stored next to house

2. surroundings
- no overhanging branches
- yes, clean up that litter (pull it into piles and burn during the winter/fall or use branches for kindling in the fireplace/stove)
- remove brush
- remove any trees that could fall on the house - house should be in a forest clearing

#2 is a lot of work - I've helped friends several times - you can make it a party or can hire it out

the one up the McKenzie went 30 miles in a few hours - they are now starting to evacuate Springfield - a city of about 50,000 (but only the east part of it so far)

My insurance went from $1,300 / yr ( 2015 ), to $4,000.00. Now have two policies, 1 - wildfire only & 2 - all the other stuff, liability etc.

Also, It really makes no difference as to the amount of "fire proofing" you might do ( IMO ), Insurance company underwriters simply look at where your house is and then that area's rating and thats that.

No regular Insurance company would even consider my house ( Grass Valley )...i'm with Cal Fair plan.

Steve

We had a fire outside our plant last week. Just over the perimeter fence is a large (50 acre) field and nowhere near any roads or people. It was plowed about 2 months ago but has grown to 1-1.5 feet. It seems to have caught on fire for no obvious reason (i.e., cigarettes, sparks from trailer chains, etc).

While waiting for the fire department, which took about 10 min, I was shocked as how fast it spread. It was 100x100' in a matter of just a few min.

For commercial insurance "protection class" is used to evaluate fire risk plus construction type and and safeguards- like sprinklers.

FYI, rural BFE is protection class 9. Most cities are protection class 2. Mostly due to fire hydrants.

There is nothing you can do in a forest fire except run, early and far.

A "wildfire" such as a grass fire on flat land will literally spread faster than you can run on foot. You blink once, and it's 50 feet away. Blink twice and it's 100 feet away.

https://atascaderonews.com/news/cal-fire-reports-creek-fire-north-of-shaver-lake-0-contained/

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Considering how much antifa and blm folks love fire....well, I gotta wonder?

stay in PARF if you can't control yourself

Yes, just the house and garage. Contents,flood and liability are covered by another policy. About $1100 additional.
I’m lucky in that there is a hydrant less then 500 feet away and a fire house within 5 miles. My friend that lives on 25 acres with much less house then mine pays over $5000. That’s just fire insurance. The California Fair plan. Only place most people can get fire insurance from.

The town of Berry Creek in NorCal was wiped off the map today. https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...77e15b01c6.jpg

^^^^ I feel really bad for those people who lost everything. We have a fire locally that's been going on for four days - rough terrain, dry & hot conditions, winds, etc. This is the first time I've had that uneasy feeling about my house, considering the season is just starting. Everybody around here is on the CA Fair Plan with a supplementary policy. It's not very good coverage. At least my property got reclassified from a class 9 to a class 3 (it's a State fire rating thing) last year which got me a premium return of $1,200. I have friends east of Fresno who are keeping eyes on the fire situation.

Reports that the Oregon towns of Detroit, Talent, Phoenix have been burned. These are not big towns but we may still be talking hundreds of buildings. Some deaths known, may find more. Fires moved fast, narrow mountain roads. Fires are nearing larger towns like Estacada, Springfield, Klamath. Looking at the fire maps, I see more towns at risk. Some state parks have burned or are threatened. Fires are moving west toward actual cities like Salem and Eugene, though winds may not be westerly as they approach urbanization.

Thankfully we just have hurricanes to deal with and I say that sincerely.
Some of the pics of the fires burning are unreal.

Why so many?
It seems like the last few years have been really bad for the west.
I may not care for their politics but man I feel for their losses.
I can’t imagine entire towns burned off the map and it continues daily.
Is there more we can do other than pray for rain? Lots of it.
I hope everyone on here is safe and stays out of harms way.
Tony

The smoke was so thick at 1 PM today in Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco, that it was like it was 1 AM. Totally dark. I've never seen anything like it.

If that happened where I live we'd be scrubbed clean. We have no resource capable of dealing with that.

Years of fire suppression, years of drought, insect infiltration killing trees, naturally occuring lightning and stupid people starting fires. Fall brings warm easterly winds that make any small fire huge.

For emphasis.

One fire was started by an RV towing a car. Not sure about the others.

fify

I did a little research on the history of fires in CA and found two diametrically opposed articles with charts of wild fire acreage over the years. Once again, we have to decide for ourselves, I guess.

The Breitbart chart is for the whole country and is the only chart I could find that goes back more than about 20 years. Wild fires were far more widespread in the 20s and 30s, I suspect due to a lack of fire-fighting efforts. But the chart shows that wild fires are generally very commonplace and a normal part of the ecosystem.

The grist chart doesn't go back far enough to make their conclusion about global warming, IMO.

You can't make a direct comparison between the two charts, but it's something.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2017/10/19/delingpole-what-the-greenies-dont-want-you-to-know-about-the-california-wildfires/

https://grist.org/climate/how-apocalyptic-this-california-western-fire-season-is-in-1-flaming-chart/

Wow. I had no idea. This must be devastating for the people involved.

The news & some politicians will immediately state that this is due to global warming. While I do not completely agree with the man-made portion of this problem, I will concede that there is global warming and that contributes to this.

That said, California has reduced forest management significantly and from what I've seen on various news/documentaries, CA is doing 1/10th the amount of controlled burns and thinning of the forest that used to be done. This has happened over the last 10 years. Much of this has been driven by the Sierra Club.

I guess we must accept that instead of losing tiny sections of the forest each year due to forest management, we have to accept total devastation instead. And, we are ok with importing lumber and cutting down other people's trees but not our own.

^ I would suggest they change their name to "Cascades Club" and move to their own 'country'. Disasters like these tend to bring out the silent majority. This is when elected leadership realizes that it should not be about special interests, but rather about the vast numbers of ordinary people.

The shortfall in controlled burns has been due to many causes. Manpower, budget, liability, air quality, etc. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-using-more-prescribed-burns-to-reduce-fire-risk/

I think the fundamental problem is that a controlled burn costs money and brings no immediate financial benefit.

Sun is blood red and sky is brown, in Portland right now.

Scanning news reports, looks like hundreds of structures burned and half a million acres.

On the positive side, wind not as strong, weather cooling a little, possible rain next week.

Western forests have been quite affected by climate change. Heat and drought and less subfreezing periods have stressed trees and made them more vulnerable to disease, you see a lot more dead (brown) trees in the forests. I just lost a 100’ tree on my own property and am watering the others now. I think this sort of intense fire season is going to be The New Normal.

A friend was telling me about one proposal to cut very wide firebreaks to essentially separate areas of the mountains and contain fires.

Sometimes there is no immediate benefit (other than saving lives). Now that we saved all that money, we can use it as a down payment on the loan we will need to pay for the billions in damage caused by these recent fires.

We have homeless people all over California. I find it hard to believe that we don't have manpower. Maybe some people that aren't working need to start.

That is the main driver for the severity of these fires. Climate change weakens the trees, makes everything dry out more, drives intense winds, and allows insect pests to breed all year long - plus a longer list of things

wildfires are generally very commonplace and a normal part of this ecosystem - it is the severity of the fire that has gone way up (W. conifer forests; also true of southern pine forests)

2/3 to 90% of ignition events are due to humans - the above is what happens after a fire is ignited

USFS is now spending most of its entire budget on fire suppression; leaving little money for everything else - Congress just this year altered the funding pools, but it will be a long time before the forests can be thinned to make the fires less intense

thinning means removing some trees - usually the small "doghair" trees
all branches within 8 ft. of the ground need to be trimmed off
then it is all piled and burned just before a rain

the above is labor intensive and has to be done over thousands of square miles of forest

the other fly in the ointment is ecosystem conversion - again caused by climate change
- that means the ecosystem will change to a different type of ecosystem

all the Douglas Fir forests that the enviros have fought so hard to "save" will change to some other type of plant cover

with luck and a lot of work, some can change to Ponderosa Pine

it won't be fun and you are seeing the future coming at you hard

So how effective are controlled burns and how long do they keep their effectiveness? On the news they keep saying Paradise is in danger of burning down all over again, from the nearby Bear Fire. But the Camp Fire was 2 years ago. If this is true, then how effective can a controlled burn be? Hopefully, the media are wrong, which certainly would not be the first time.

bureau of land management HATES fire.

Flew over this yesterday afternoon, just coming into LA.

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it varies - they have to be done at a certain frequency for each 'area' (ecosystem and more local area)

but it worked well for the Indians in the western US...

Oregon fires are now 3x the area burned of the fires that were collectively called The Tillamook Burn

the 1910 fires (Big BlowUp) still hold the historical record...