The main focus over the weekend was on those three large wildfires in southern California. It occurred to me last night that all of them had three prominent features in common with each other. For one, they grew very fast. Witnesses at all of them kept telling how the fire had suddenly just appeared in their neighborhoods without any warning. In some cases they were in their yards looking at distant smoke, then turned around and their own trees were on fire.
Another commonality was the timing of their origins. The fire organizations were predicting this event because of a combination of environmental factors and a specific weather condition including extremely high winds. Although there is some indication that the earliest fire in Montecito might have been caused by a “human event.” We’ll see what comes of that during the day.
[photopress:orange3_a_reut_anzuoni.jpg,full,centered]
Reuters / Anzuoni photo
The third similarity is that they are all in fairly dense urban areas. No longer is a “forest fire” something that you have to fly out to see. They are now sweeping through established communities on a more regular basis, such as last year’s disasters in San Diego County and these fires this weekend. A large part of this new phase of wildland fires is that people are moving farther away from the older population centers and spreading into previously natural habitat areas where their risk of losing their homes is much higher.
But am I over-simplifying things when I think that if you can control the land enough that you can build houses, roads, and lay in sewer lines, etc., then you should also be able to control your own area well enough to prevent large, fast-moving brush fires from sweeping across your neighborhood? I know the overall problem is more complicated than that, but I still can’t help but think about it.
* * *
If you didn’t catch it yesterday afternoon, then I hope you’ll take the time to scroll down to our posting (HERE) about the bionic-woman wannabe who plans to have a webcam installed in her artificial eye. Sounds kinda nutty, doesn’t it? But apparently it’s a concept that is very possible these days.
I asked a couple of other people what they thought about this and they both said that it sounds a bit creepy. I’ll go along with that. Personally, I don’t think we should mess around with Mother Nature like that. I even have a problem accepting things like lung transplants. But that’s just me. What do you think about the “eyeball lady”?
Before we get too far into that stuff, let’s get this equipment checked out. We’ve got the Monday weeklies to do, too. I’ll go get some more coffee started.
Recent Comments