This was a disheartening read.

Yet the worst is probably still to come for much of the state. The California fire season usually ends with the first rains of fall. In recent years, these rains have been arriving later, and precipitation has concentrated in the darkest winter months. California's hilly scrubland is at its driest--and most fire-prone--right before the rains arrive, so their delay can lengthen and intensify the fire season. Climate change appears likely to push the rains to even later in the year.

Insurance companies in particular have started to fear the worst. A recent RAND study found that home-insurance premiums have risen in the state's most fire-prone areas compared with its less fire-prone areas. Some high-risk homeowners have switched to higher-deductible policies. The same study estimated that as the climate changes, the number of acres burned annually in the Sierra foothills will double in the next 30 years. If humans continue emitting carbon pollution at current rates, the number of acres burned will quadruple by 2100.

I have thoughts/questions about staffing fire crews too, but I'm on a deadline this morning... Maybe I'll ask if anyone has read Danielle Allen's book Cuz? Thorn? (Relevant for the prisoner fire fighting content.)

Unflattering.

That review is not super flattering to the critic either, IMO.

I checked a misleading map that made it look like my family in CA were about to get burned out, but when I emailed them they say the fires are still 50 miles away.

Fake news. I blame Trump.

I drove up to Stockton for the company gathering yesterday, and the smoke was thick -- thick enough that I kept wondering when the fog would burn off until I got a good sniff.

Fortunately, this round of fires isn't particularly close (yet), though it sounds like there's a fire near Sequoia.

Fires cleared out my parents' neighborhood last year, leaving their house isolated, partially burned, and uninhabitable for most of the year. There are no houses within 3 lots of them in all directions. So they're probably ok for a while when it comes to brush clearance.

I don't know why I feel like going presidential on this, but something about the isolation has made me hesitant to post much online. Less of a risk here, but with photos it's obvious where they live.

6.2: You don't want to give the fire any ideas, just in case it reads unfogged.

this seems like a petty thing to bring up in light of the horrors unfolding, but man the air quality is super shitty and has been for days here in sf, it seems much worse than it was during the fires in the north bay. i keep on trying to avoid the inhaler, but then when i do take it i feel doom receding for a period of time. staying inside and keeping all windows closed all the time is also super not great for my mood.

Everyone's feeling the air quality here, I don't think that's illegitimate to point out. I had a little bug before the fires that made me cough, and now I think I'm over it but I'm still coughing, which isn't fun.

The air quality problem isn't a trivial aside. My poor kid is wheezing for breath. He started with a cold, I think, and the combo is nailing him.

You guys are reminding me of last summer. The whole town was visibly depressed. And everyone had worse colds in the winter, because of the smoky summer.

Is PG&E responsible for the fires? Someone was telling me that electrical wires cause almost all of California's forest fires. Would they have been preventable if PG&E had acted differently?

Entirely possible. But, the thing is that the kind of maintenance PG&E would have to do (cutting back trees from lines, retrofitting towers, replacing lines) is far more than they've ever budgeted for. (Another example of how life in our new climate is more expensive.) They keep saying they'll have to raise rates to actually do that.

They have, twice now, turned off the power to sections of the grid in anticipation of hot windy weather, and the people who got their power turned off were LIVID. I did hear one high school principal make a good point. They cancelled school because of the power cuts. Said the principal, 'sure, the kids can learn by daylight, but when the automatic toilets don't flush, we can't open school.' Which was something I hadn't thought of.

Entirely possible. But, the thing is that the kind of maintenance PG&E would have to do (cutting back trees from lines, retrofitting towers, replacing lines) is far more than they've ever budgeted for. (Another example of how life in our new climate is more expensive.) They keep saying they'll have to raise rates to actually do that.

someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

when the automatic toilets don't flush, we can't open school

As you must know, they make tiny turbines that fit in the pipes and charge the automatic flusher.

Not that they're in wide use, but a techno-optimist would rave about invisible, distributed hydroelectricity.

I assumed the problems in CA were mostly in the south until I saw 5. (In hindsight I have no idea why. Maybe I got the Paradise fire confused with the Thousand Oaks mass shooting.) The in-laws are just 15 minutes or so from Stockton. But Cassandane was on the phone with them just yesterday, so they're OK so far.

I assumed the problems in CA were mostly in the south until I saw 5. (In hindsight I have no idea why. Maybe I got the Paradise fire confused with the Thousand Oaks mass shooting.) The in-laws are just 15 minutes or so from Stockton. But Cassandane was on the phone with them just yesterday, so they're OK so far.

Sorry about that.

Jesus, 300 people reported missing in Butte County now. Presuming a number of those are dead, that's getting closer to Chicago Fire than wildfire fatalities.

19: Although at the exact same time as the Chicago fire there was a wildfire in northern Wisconsin and Michigan that killed an estimated 1500 to 2500 people.

If only the elite hadn't forgotten about them, they wouldn't have voted for Trump.

I grew up hearing about the Peshtigo Fire from time to time, yeah, but I am actually quite terrified of fire and avoided the subject. But since it's inevitable at the moment, Bay Area commenters, are you alive and well? We fled south but expect the smoke to catch up to us.

This NPR story about a husband searching for his missing wife is a total gut punch.

22: It seems a bit worse than last weekend but I was away Tue-Fri, so this might be better than what mid-week was like. But San Jose is also not quite as a bad as farther north.

It was okay Tuesday, but it got bad Wednesday night and Thursday.

1,000 missing now? What happened? High wind? Old people?

Hopefully some of that is because people who fled have worried family members that they haven't been able to reach. Or not-very-close relatives who watch too much TV and are reporting as missing people who just didn't think calling their uncle was necessary.

Naively, one would expect California to have processes for locating people after natural disasters.

One of the stories I read yesterday about the evacuation said there are few routes out of the town of Paradise and by the time word spread of the evacuation the fire was practically there. It sounds like there was a huge failure of the warning system - people apparently had to opt in to get some kinds of warnings, rather than it being broadcast - coupled with very little time to even get warnings out.

There's some hope that the high number is the result of putting together a bunch of lists from different types of records, and it will turn out that there's duplicates like "first last" vs. "first middle last" vs other variants, so the number will go down. The earlier, lower counts of how many are missing may have been based on people's reports of others being missing. The horrifying conclusion, though, is that the initial reports were so much lower because so many people died without anyone surviving to report them missing. And now even the records that would be used to identify them have also been destroyed.

Naively, one would expect people's places of residence to to be recorded on some medium in addition to paper, at some level of government higher than township.

There's more uncertainty about the list than I thought. Maybe the number will come down a lot. But the big increase just yesterday suggested that they switched how they were counting.

What records there are would be kept by the county, which is one level above the township (in Pennsylvania).

Naively, one would expect people to not be fucking assholes about a tragic natural disaster.

And I guess the state would have an address for everybody with a state ID, which is going to be most people.

I mean, if you're dead, but no one can identify your remains, who do you have to call to get your name off the missing list? Do you go down to the county office and relinquish your property title?

23 fuck that's awful. It's all awful.

I'll cop to being an asshole. Someone explain this video to me. I see burned houses surrounded by mostly unburned trees and grass, and burned houses mixed apparently randomly with unharmed ones. Which suggests to me that the houses which burned had roofs made of wood.

The houses still standing looked to have ordinary shingle roofs, which would mean asphalt in this part of the country. But the video doesn't really give you a good view.

My understanding is slightly different. They missed the machine recount deadline, so their original count was used for the machine recount, but since it was already close enough to go to a hand recount this doesn't actually matter. I'm not sure what it would mean to "base a recount on."

Sorry wrong thread