Yeah, the Honey Fire in Butte County is literally a block away from the house my aunt and cousin lived in, that they just sold about six months ago. Their neighborhood got evacuated. Where my cousin now lives, they’re apparently safe, because they’ve been taking in strangers who have been evacuated. This is in Paradise, California.
Thanks. Yes, it’s been stressful. I’m one of the lucky ones- my biggest problem is that I have to breathe the smoke around here. An awful lot of people have lost their homes, businesses and even lives. However, the fires did get close to my house, and the stress of dealing with that has affected us. School was out, my wife’s work was out and five of us were stuck in our little house together all day every day. That alone is enough to send you 'round the bend. Add a generous slathering of imminent danger, and it gets* really* fun.
My wife went back to work today. She works at Silverado Resort, where they finished the PGA tournament the day before the fires started. (We’re talking about pretty much where the Atlas Fire started.) There’s cleanup to do, but she works in one of the administrative offices and they have to catch up from a week off. Red tape waits for no one.
The kids go back to school tomorrow, unless the school district decides the air quality is still too bad. It’s smoky right now, but the last couple days have been pretty clear. At least, I think it’s smoky. It might just be our normal marine layer fog along with the smoke. Hell, it always smells smoky anymore.
The New York Times has an article on the investigations into the origins of the fires, here. The second photo shows one spot that Cal Fire is investigating - I found it on Google Maps, here.
As of tonight, all of the wine country fires are fully contained, 23 days after they started.
Yay! And we’re expecting rain later this week.
Here’s an article about a type of power-line device called a “recloser” that might have caused the wine country fires. A recloser seems to be a type of circuit breaker that automatically tries to restart a power line after it trips, by sending bursts of electricity down the line to see whether conditions have returned to normal. The idea is to recover more quickly from power failures. These devices have been implicated in wildfires before, and two California power companies other than PG&E now routinely program their reclosers not to attempt to restart lines during fire season. PG&E had been conducting a pilot program this year to do the same thing, but it hadn’t been implemented in all of the North Bay, where the fires occurred.
The thing I found most interesting about that article is from the video. The power company in that area, that uses the reclosers, PG&E, has not yet been responsible for the costs from the fires, but the power company is looking for ways to pass part of any fines on to their customers, not to their share holders.
So the shareholders get the profits but no the liabilities.
They tried the same thing with the San Bruno explosion, but they didn’t get away with it. I don’t think they’ll get away with it this time, either (assuming they’re held liable), although I expect years of legal and political battles. The gatekeeper on this is the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates PG&E’s rates.