Two people have them in my condo complex; one reads 8 and the other 0. A few days ago there were readings of over 500. Finally I can stop wearing that mask… oh, wait.
Well, frick. We bounced back up to 152 and are back in the red zone. Damn it. And the NWS pushed back the forecasted rain another day.
I don’t like these people any more.
In Portland, we got a good thunderstorm last night with a decent amount of rain, and more to come throughout the day. Fortunately, the storm is wet enough that more lightning-caused fire isn’t a big risk. The storm made its way up the west Cascades where a lot of the fires are burning, so it will be a huge help in the fire-fighting efforts there. It will take a lot more rain to completely put out the fires (like weeks or months), but this will greatly hinder the spread.
We’re down to an AQI of 169 (unhealthy), and it’s supposed to slowly drop through the day with clear skies on Sunday. It smells like wet ash outside now - not exact pleasant, but it is nice to be able to breathe outside. The bad air blew in on Labor Day, so we’ve suffered for over 10 days now.
That’s an encouraging report from Portland, especially the rain.
Out here in Hillsboro (20 miles west of Portland) the AQI is down to 100. Most of the area is about 100 +/- 15. The exception is Beaverton, which is still around 150. Here’s a site that updates AQI frequently:
Sweet, merciful rain.
The Umpqua Valley has had rain on and off for the past ~20 hours or so. The big Archie Creek fire, which has burned ~150K acres, hundreds of homes and threatened the entire city of Glide forcing a full-scale evacuations, is dying down. Iqair.com has our air quality at 23, purpleair says 26. We were over 500 on Sunday.
The forecast is for less rain over the next few days but hopefully this was enough to give the fire crews the upper hand.
Lane County has much better AQI in the valley and foothills. We had an AQI of 10 for a few hours yesterday, and now it’s back up to around 10, but this is much better than “more than twice the ceiling of AQI measurement.”
To add to the situation, we had a magnitude 4.5 quake last night, its epicenter only a few miles south of the 90,000 acre Bobcat fire in the San Gabriels.
A good-news story of sorts:
The bad news is about those who didn’t survive. Some humans perished, but I would guess many more dogs and cats, as well as forest animals, did too.
Here’s a cat rescuer.
It’s not in this video but that mama cat was reunited with her kittens.
I’ve been smelling smoke since around sundown. Either strange people have their fireplaces going with an outside temperature of 60° or enough wildfire particles have congregated here on the East Coast.
There are “philosophers” who argue ad infinitum about whether animals experience pain when, for example, they are burning alive. That’s gotta be every bit as gruesome for animals as for any alleged humans. It must take some kind of soulless monster to doubt that.
We’re on fire again here in Napa Valley. This time closer to semi- rural residential areas.
Getting really bad now - bearing down hard on eastern Santa Rosa.
Oh, god. Hadn’t Santa Rosa suffered enough in 2017?
It’s two fires now since I posted the other one. One, the Glass Fire, is on the eastern side of St Helena. The new one, I think they’re calling it the Spring Fire, is on the west side of town. I was visiting a friend in St H and we saw the red- lit smoke clouds when I was leaving. I thought it was the Glass Fire, but it ended up being this new one.
Looks like the wind has died, anyway. Apparently, they were using a lot of air support to fight the Glass Fire yesterday, hopefully the same will happen for the Spring Fire.
Looks like this one literally threaded the gap between the 2017 Tubbs and Nuns fire scars, shooting through the unburned areas between them like an arrow. Lot of bad déjà vu moments out there.
We’re heading into a week that is being forecast as the highest fire danger of the year. PG&E is, of course, adding the bonus of power outages.
I really hope we get some rain soon.
It must really suck to live in what’s functionally a 3rd-world country.
Most of the Western world has no need to turn off the electricity in order to try to prevent wildfires.
Yet it still must get expensive to pay for all the forest sweepers.