Apologies if this has been covered already. It does not seem to be in the “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain” thread.
Willamette Week story shows how the big Columbia Gorge fire is blanketing Portland with smoke and ash. I have friends there who are mourning the beautiful Gorge that was. (I went through there twice this summer, when it still looked idyllic-ish).
The biggest fire seems to be in the hills east of Brookings, not far from California. But there are also complexes all over Washington and Oregon, near Mt. Rainier and [del]Cicely[/del] Roslyn. The air smells like smoke, the sky may or may not be overcast (hard to tell) and the sun and moon show ominous red orbs in the sky.
Harvey, Irma and perhaps Jose have been ugly, but they drop their load, play out and are done inside a week (on the mainland). This ongoing, expanding conflagration is showing no sign of letting up. Rain may ease the burning, but this is the late summer, where the area has been known to go completely without rain for as long as six weeks under blue skies.
It’s been awful here. I’m in the foothills of the Coast Range on the east side outside of Eugene and it’s not as bad up here as down in the Valley, but it’s still bad enough that until today, I couldn’t see the bottom of my pasture from the house due to smoke. I’d say that’s about 500 yards.
I think today’s overcast is cloud, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Our air quality sucks and has done for about 3 weeks. The sunlight has that awful orange cast to it.
And still no rain for the 10 days as far out as the forecast goes. This is my absolute least favorite time of year here.
All the same, I won’t complain against what those poor folks in Houston and Florida are/will be going through, because while it’s true the storms bring their havoc and leave quicker, the aftermath is miserable for a lot more people for a much longer period of time. At least I’m insured for fire. I understand your feelings, though.
Last year I was very lucky. A wildfire started and got quickly out of control about 3 1/2 miles from my house. I live in the middle of a forest of primarily mature Doug Fir. Terrifying. On the first day, the winds were driving it every which way and I was ready to go at a moment’s notice. Fortunately, the winds died down overnight and kept still for a few days while the firefighters worked day and night to contain the blaze.
That really did feel like hell was just over the hill.
It was snowing ash on my deck yesterday morning! And I am nowhere near the fires. There was a full moon last night and I had to actually look around to find it. Very dim, much more than a lunar eclipse.
The Columbia River Gorge is on fire! And the east wind that is so popular with the wind surfers is pushing the fire along. Sad that so many beautiful areas are going.
On the bright side, it rains a lot around here and it will grow back, but not the same as it was.
Aspenglow, you mentioned your pasture. Do you have livestock? Are there horses etc. on properties in your area? In the fire-ravaged and threatened areas? Are people able to get them out?
This time-lapse video from Monday night shows the Eagle Creek fire outside of Portland exploding. The hills you see (used to) have some of the most gorgeous waterfall hikes anywhere. I know they will recover, but it won’t be the same in my lifetime.
And day 3 of keeping all the windows closed and avoiding outside activity is no fun. The air quality index hit 250 yesterday in Portland. 151-200 is unhealthy, 201-300 is very unhealthy, and 300+ is hazardous. Fortunately, I think we’ve seen the worst. That sadly probably isn’t the case elsewhere in the state.
I had a lot more livestock until recently, because we’ve also got cougars. Animals I’d kept for more than 13 years… disappeared, and in short order. Everyone on the lane is suffering livestock losses and no one has gotten a good shot at him/her/them yet.
But yes, at the time of the nearby wildfire last year, I had goats, llamas, pigs and chickens, in addition to my dogs and cats. I haven’t kept a horse for several years, but a couple of neighbors do keep them. I had already made arrangements with friends to come help me load and transport everyone in my horse trailer to move to a friend’s place if the need arose and I would have helped others with their livestock if necessary. Fortunately, the fire never got that close.
Can’t do much for the wildlife, more’s the pity, but they do seem to know when to get out of the way if they have a way to do so.
TroutMan, our air quality here is at 240 today. And it’s much better than it’s been all week!
I’m in Vancouver BC. The light is strange, yellowish grey and it feels darker at noon with the lights on that it does at 10 pm. Everything is through this hazy filter. Yesterday I was awake from 3 am all day and it was hard to wake up or feel motivated in this heavy, smokey, post apocalyptic haze. Unlike our haze when the interior forest fires the sky wasn’t so much grey as it was a very dirty yellow. The sun is a weird pale pink like badly over poached salmon.
I have attended a few concerts at the Gorge in Washington state. Beautiful area, it is so sad to see the “after” pictures.
I’m in the hinterland west of Puget Sound. It looks overcast; when the sun shows up it’s red. The moon was bloody. There’s a light coating of ash on my husband’s car, which sits in the driveway.
The good news is that it’s stopped the sun from making these last couple days even hotter than they were.
I’m in BC. We’ve had 894.491 hectares burn in BC this year, or about 2.21 million acres. We are in a state of emergency, and have been for months. There are still 140 fires burning throughout the province, the largest single fire being over 1.2 million acres. I have family who have lost livestock to the fires down in Williams Lake. I have friends who may have lost their homes, but don’t even know for sure yet.
In short, nobody is having fun in the smoke and haze here.
I guess it’s just petty of me to remark on the fun I might or might not be having, when all youse guys houses and horses are threatened.
The Tahoe/Reno area is of concern to me. I’m planning to spent the weekend partly at Truckee (near Tahoe) and partly at Sky Sailing (near Reno), flying gliders. It’s a literally world-famously spectacular region for doing that.
The weather reports I’m seeing are saying lots of lightning and thunder and fire and smoke, today (Wednesday 9/6) and tomorrow, all the way from Sacramento/Tahoe/Reno areas on up to Oregon border. (And obviously beyond, but that’s the area covered by the reports I’m reading.)
Less obvious what’s in store for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but may at least be lots of smoke in the air from all the fires that’s going to start. Now I’m wondering if it’s going to be a good weekend for us (there’s a group of us planning this) to be flying aircraft in those areas.
Two (or was it three by now?) weeks ago, I flew at Air Sailing and at Truckee – a brief thunderstorm wafted over the Truckee airport and shot a lightning bold from the cloud down to one of the hangars there, while we watched it from 12000 feet about 10 miles away :eek: Spectacular but, y’know, kinda scary. Air Sailing was ghastly hot, and it only takes a brief spot of rain to create flash floods in that area too.
Two weeks before that, I flew at Air Sailing, but the smoke was so thick (from a fire near Quincy, I heard) that the flying conditions were shitty and I also got kinda sick from the smoke. I had to curtail my “fun” both those weekend because of the heat and/or smoke.
I shouldn’t complain if it’s only going to affect my recreational activities, but the people living in those areas gotta be sweating.
Damn, I forgot about the wind tunnel, which drove me out of Portland. Yesterday’s map (linked in OP) showed the fire right about the county line, but now it is up to Crown Point. How much further will it reach? Troutdale?
We just moved to Ashland, OR a couple of weeks ago. Had no idea the name would be so appropriate. The great irony is that we have a vacation home in Brookings, the plan being that we’d head over there whenever it was to hot to icky in Ashland. Best laid plans & all that …
Two weeks ago in Brookings the pall was so thick that all the traffic on 101 had their headlights on; it felt like we were in Mordor. And the fire has grown nearly 10x since then…
I’m in north eastern Oregon and we’ve had days that were so smoky that it looked like mist. This summer has not been nice, hurricanes, floods, fires, yikes.
The wildlife is suffering and those that aren’t killed by the fire (heat, smoke) will certainly did from lack of food and adequate shelter.
My sympathies to all.
Apparently humans cause 84% of wildfires, according to the National Academy of Sciences *, The researchers took their data from the US Forest Service Fire Program Analysis-Fire Occurrence Database—and the causes of the fires were unsurprising: “equipment use, smoking, campfire, railroad, arson, debris burning, children, fireworks, power line, structure, and miscellaneous fires.” Arson and lightning accounted for the same number of fires, according to ClimateCentral.org’s reporting. Think about that: humans set as many criminal fires as nature would have lit alone.
**Gizmodo
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Some of these are unavoidable, but maybe a strong hand is needed with most perpetrators.
Which sounds as dodgy as Hell — like an Internet distance college of about 5 people run by a crook — but was founded by Abraham Lincoln, taking time off from the War.
Seattle suburb. Yesterday had a layer of ash covering my car, blood red sun, and made me recall the heydays of Taipei circa 1989 or Shanghai circa 1998.
Today not nearly so bad.
This past weekend I took the twins to Lake Chelan camping. On Sat, what look like a serious thunderstorm (but was obviously smoke) was sitting off the mountains.
Everyone on the lane is suffering livestock losses and no one has gotten a good shot at him/her/them yet.