Apple Donating Additional Funds to Firefighting Efforts on the West Coast

[hot-gril]

Jeebus. That looks like a literal hellscape. Like a Michael Bay after effect.

In 2017 it was like this in Los Angeles. I saw this pic, instantly recognized the sign I used to always drive past. Thought someone had photoshopped in an erupting volcano.

 

[hot-gril]

So hows this compare to the environments in Doom: Eternal? (Wouldn't know - still waiting for the Switch port.)

I just keep thinking they don't look like real pictures - they look like something out of a game or movie.

I think some of them actually have the exposure settings adjusted or a filter. Those pics of the Bay Area don't match up with what I see here in person. It's orange and terrible, and my throat hurts from breathing, but it's not _that_ orange.

 

[firedept]

Actual images from the Valley fire here in southern California. This was just the beginning of this fire. It had only consumed about 1500 acres at this point. It's now around 20,000 acres. It has been an orange over cast here for the past several days now due to the smoke from it.

 

[reden]

People here, NOT ENOUGH MONEY!!! APPLE IS A TRILLION DOLLAR COMPANY!!! What's wrong with them? Meanwhile, them, not a single dime donated 🤣🤣🤣

 

[ignatius345]

Ironically these fires are so bad because we are so good at putting out the fires.

Just read an amazing article about California fire policy on ProPublica.

They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?

This is a story about frustration, about watching the West burn when you fully understand why it’s burning — and understand why it did not need to be this bad.

www.propublica.org

 

[Shirasaki]

This immediately reminds me a similar scale of bushfire happened in NSW at the beginning of the 2020. The orange sky and cloud looks just scary, and at one point fire was so close to Sydney city.

Maybe they should allow controlled burn throughout the year to avoid bigger fire happening as well.

 

[jerwin]

Striplin, R., McAfee, S.A., Safford, H.D. et al. Retrospective analysis of burn windows for fire and fuels management: an example from the Lake Tahoe Basin, California, USA. fire ecol 16, 13 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-020-00071-3


One of the issues is that fire crews are seasonal. It's not safe to prescribe a burn, if you can't get resources to suppress it if it spreads beyond the alloted area.

 

[unobtainium]

This isn't about fire suppression. This is the fact that we as humans are causing most of the fires to begin with and human caused climate change making wildfires burn for much longer. https://www.nps.gov/articles/wildfire-causes-and-evaluation.htm

Fire suppression plays a role because it allows fuel to build up to unnatural levels: “The effect of fire suppression has changed over time. Throughout the twentieth century the impact was to exclude fire. However, as more and more natural fire cycles were missed, forests have increased in tree density, and many of the saplings have remained suppressed in the understory. This has the unwanted effect of producing ladder fuels capable of carrying surface fires into the canopies of the dominant trees and converting surface fire regimes into crown fire regimes.”

This is especially the case in forested regions (e.g. Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.) SoCal chaparral is different for various reasons. Fire suppression has probably helped there.

 

[BlazednSleepy]

Fire suppression plays a role because it allows fuel to build up to unnatural levels: “The effect of fire suppression has changed over time. Throughout the twentieth century the impact was to exclude fire. However, as more and more natural fire cycles were missed, forests have increased in tree density, and many of the saplings have remained suppressed in the understory. This has the unwanted effect of producing ladder fuels capable of carrying surface fires into the canopies of the dominant trees and converting surface fire regimes into crown fire regimes.”

This is especially the case in forested regions (e.g. Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.) SoCal chaparral is different for various reasons. Fire suppression has probably helped there.

Im not denying the effects of fire suppression. I'm simply stating that it's unrealistic on a massive scale to think that limiting it, doing controlled burns and brush clearance is the concrete solution. There's nothing in that article that gives a clear specific answer as to how to manage the increase in fires. It gives a multitude of possible solutions. It's such a complex situation and still being debated and studied today. The article even states that when fires continue to happen in similar areas to previous years, it can have disastrous biological impacts. The camp fire happened 2 years ago and it's being affected again by the fires happening right now.

"Without fire-suppression activities these landscapes likely would have had fire frequencies grossly in excess of natural and sustainable levels. On an average fire suppression has managed to maintain this landscape within the historical range of fire frequency, although many localized areas have been hammered with fire to such an extent that they have lost most of all of their native biota and been replaced by non-native grasses and forbs."

 

[tCdemon]

We need better technology to combat fires...we can make all these rules for people and companies to follow, at the end there will always be careless in the world.

 

[groove-agent]

This is our weather in Vancouver, Canada. It's actually sunny, but we have so much smoke from USA that it looks cloudy.

 

[Aston441]

This is our weather in Vancouver, Canada. It's actually sunny, but we have so much smoke from USA that it looks cloudy.


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Why are there not lots of fires in Canada too? Seems odd they stop at the border?