The news is not good. Video and satellite imagery follow.
From Action News Now, interviewing a CalFire official:
The “Carr Fire” burning in Shasta County has grown to 80,906 acres with 5 percent containment as of Saturday morning, according to our reporter Elizabeth Zelidon who spoke to a Cal Fire official.
Source: http://www.actionnewsnow.com/content/news/Carr-Fire-Grows-Near-Whiskeytown-Lake–488935601.html
Satellite image shows a huge plume:
More about the Carr Fire making its own weather pattern here
I visited Shasta County two years ago and spoke to several residents, who were terrified to learn that, on the basis of the usual bogus, trumped-up pseudo-environmental case, the dams on the Klamath River were to be torn down. What is more, Warren Buffett, who owns the electricity utility, had induced Moonbeam Brown to let him charge the users of electricity and water from the dams with a ten-year surcharge to pay for their dams to be torn down, leaving them without water or electricity.
The environmental case was based on the notion that salmon could no longer reach the headwaters of the Klamath. In fact, they never could, even before the dams were built. Underneath the largest dam, there is a reef 33 ft high right across the river, and salmon can’t jump that far. The scamsters in the Californian administration and in the electricity utility had pretended that remains of salmon found in the stretch of river above the reef had made their own way up. Closer examination of the remains, however, revealed that the native Americans of the Shasta nation, whose excellent Chief I had the honor to meet, had caught the fish in the stretch below the reef and carried them up in bundles slung on shoulder-yokes to their members living along the stretch above the reef.
I asked the utility whether the money for tearing down the dams (due to be demolished, quite unnecessarily and very damagingly, in 2020) would be repaid to the residents if the Trump administration, via the Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission, withheld the necessary permits for the demolition of the dams. The answer was No: Mr Buffett would keep the money either way, thank you very much.
My sympathies, therefore, go out to the residents of the affected territory around Mount Shasta. it is some of the loveliest land I have seen, sensitively and sensibly farmed. For the moment, water can be drawn from the headwaters of the Klamath river because the dams remain in place. But, if the profiteers of doom get their way, the dams will be torn down, leaving the residents unable to defend themselves and their properties against future range fires.
And have the California and national news media mentioned a word of this scandal? Of course not.
I may be wrong but didn’t he also oppose the Keystone Pipeline with Obama because he owns the railroad up north that transports oil by rail?
Beware of money men bearing gifts. They don’t push the agenda out of the goodness of their own hearts
Sparky
To a genuine businessman, a deal’s not a deal unless it benefits all involved.
Well, the dams can be easily replaced by windmills!
pochas94
Damn the windmills!
🙂
Huge wildfire caused by windfarm in Canada.
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4765333
Watch the stunning video of several huge water bombers scooping up water one right behind the other. Best bush pilots in the world!
Flying in a Bombardier 415 water bomber:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x34v621
Interesting, we spent enough time in northern California to know that they would return the sympathy. We happened to get a package of fine chocolates from London today that came packed with a 10 July Evening Standard where one Samuel Fishwick (about electric cars) wrote “Cost is diminishing with hefty government subsidies.” My son has a degree in journalism from back when he said they had to get permission to use an adjective, no doubt allowed for hefty.
Not much left of the circuitous Klamath River in California above Shasta County, not that they would have anything to say about keeping water for fire control. Salmon go a long way, although one might guess they would first try the Salmon River. But consider that even too many biologists, or so they claim to be, deal in simulations, easier to climb such cliffs. I suspect that there is not as much information available on the effect on salmon of destroying dams.
Keep up the informing.
HDHoese
Salmon will always find a river to spawn in. Humans just imagine they allow them to spawn where we want.
To their entire credit, not one animal contemplates mitigation of climate change, they all adapt.
Climate mitigation may well be man’s downfall, it contradicts the forces of nature.
Chris
Thank you for that inspiring description of the realities of the region.
The UK is replete with stories of American climate disasters, but never provided the background which, on investigation, invariably contradicts the narrative.
I think it is fair to assume that Buffett and his cronies had a hand in the premature decommissioning of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear plant , along with many others accross the US. All bought and paid for via congress and the NRC.
Meanwhile I hear Texas utilities are paying $300 MWh to cover their needs in spite of all those wonderful windshills, wonder what retail price is for 30 cent kwh wholesale electricity ?? Why we can be every bit a stupid as the brainwashed Germans.
There needs to be a reckoning of the perpetual screwing of the American public..
The “Bring Back the Salmon” is still another false flag front used to clear people off private property, especially in the western states. Also noteworthy is another effort the feds used to try and force ranchers and farmers off their land near Klamath Falls.
On April 7, 2001, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation ignored state law in the name of the ESA and stopped water to more than 200,000 acres and 1,500 canal- irrigated family farms near Klamath Falls, Oregon, plunging the community toward bankruptcy and devastating families.
Why? Because bureau-funded reports—imagine that—said two species of bottom-feeding sucker fish and a Coho salmon that “lived” in a reservoir that the ranchers and farmers depended upon might be ‘affected’ if water was released to Klamath Falls landowners.
With a drought in progress, the feds theorized the fish might need a little the extra water in the reservoir, and had to know the planned shut-off of the ranchers’ and farmers’ water they’d used for decades and depended upon would put the majority of them out of business, and devalue the land of those that stayed.
So, a thriving, $250,000 million a year agricultural economy and community was reduced to dust for a couple of fish and the ESA, putting 1,500 families into immediate stress, some into food bank lines, and others on welfare.
Land values for the farmland depending upon the water dropped from $800 to $50 an acre, making it ripe pickings for foundation-funded NGO envirogroups to come in, buy up the land at fire sale prices, close the farmers out, and turn the land back to the desert it was before farmers started reclaiming it in l906 with water rights guaranteed them by the state and the federal government.
If a Department of Interior feels land belonging to 1,500 farm families is worth sacrificing for the ESA, the public good, and three fish, then government should condemn the farmland and pay its owners fair market value for their acreage, or fair market value for the use of their land and the income lost therefrom so the government could save three “endangered” fish.
Taking private property in the name of suckerfish is wrong. This common EPA false flag is a part of a decade’s-long national effort to place centralize control on America’s land, water, and private property.
Smug politicians and their handlers ignored landowners’ objections during the nineties while socialist bureaucrats were hauling these property owners before sympathetic tax paid federal judges and lawyers on bogus EPA/ESA charges or accusations by some foundation-funded NGO. To defend themselves in these stacked federal courts, property owners had to (still must) dig into their own pockets to defend themselves; many of whom couldn’t/can’t.
It’s a deliberate, well-thought out, long-term socialist racket that’s run out of an EPA storefront.
Some of the funds for destroying these dams come from the Water Bond Californians voted for in 2014. It was discussed at the time under the heading “Protects the Environment” with details of providing “for the restoration of our fish and wildlife resources”. It was explained that this would include paying for demolishing of several existing dams. Look up Proposition 1 in 2014.
But most people saw the title of the bond, and read no further. The LA Times described it as demolishing old dams that were no longer useful. We were still in the era of “We have to pass this bill to see what’s in it.”
Anthony …. Drudge Report has your “fire making it’s own weather” on the front page now
Better pack the servers in ice. It could be a hot one.
it’s should its.
“it’s should its.” should be “‘It’s’ should be ‘its.'”
Even boats on the Lake burned. That’s some hot flames.
Sad.
If you own an adobe or stone home with a tile roof in fire country, you can still have an issue. The radiant energy passing through the glass can ignite the contents of a room. Even a water curtain won’t prevent it.
These are fire adapted ecosystems in that neck of the woods; probably burned more often than not every summer for millennia until folks came along and started putting those fires out. Now instead of slow creeping fires that last for months and consume the light litter on the forest floor you have huge amounts of fuel built up over decades that explodes when it goes.
At this point we’re screwed. No way the limited amount of prescribed burning the agencies do will clear this built up fuels issue, if for no other reason then the public wouldn’t stand for the risk of escapes and all the smoke. I think we’ll be seeing wholesale changes in forest composition across much of these types of forests over the next century due to this. And it wont be majestic pine and doug fir forests taking their place. More like manzanita scrub.
There are a lot of extremely flammable resinous plants growing across the American West:
Creosote bush,
Sagebrush,
Rosemary,
Juniper,
Tumbleweed,
Eucalyptus, an immigrant,
etc. etc.
Quite a few of these plants literally erupt in searing hot flames like heads of matches. There are no slow fires where these plants are abundant. When their flames are racing uphill, or downwind their rate of advance is terrifying.
Forest litter from sugar pines, my favorite pine tree for the seeds, ponderosa pine, and a number of other pines is quite flammable; though mature trees are tall enough to escape most minor fires.
Sugar pine cones are amazing pine cones, and they are loaded with sap. One sugar pine cone makes an amazing fire.
Much like other Western America conifers, minor fires allow the cones to open and release the pine nuts
Squirrels are masters at chewing off pine cone petals to release the seeds. One needs to pay attention when in sugar pine woods during autumn. Squirrels cut the unopened pine cones free that fall and land like big rocks.
Up here it is a lot of manzanita along with other types of brush. Manzanita burns very hot.
Not every Summer as it takes a while for brush and undergrowth to grow back. But there were certainly wildfires in the West before modern “civilization” put humans and forests into close proximity. Richard Henry Dana wrote a book called “Two Years Before The Mast” in 1840 describing his experiences as a common deckhand in a trading ship working the then virtually unpopulated California coast. He recorded that there were no trees at Santa Barbara as a result of a wildfire around 1830 that forced the entire population of the area to retire to the beach while everything flammable burned.
Hope the Whiskey in the lake doesn’t catch fire . . .
Possible related
https://eu.desertsun.com/story/news/crime_courts/2018/07/26/brandon-mcglover-temecula-cranston-fire/842887002/
Cranston Fire: Suspect Brandon N. McGlover pleads not guilty to 15 counts of arson
Double would be from 48 to 96. Don’t want to start sounding like the idiots promoting catastrophe. Just saying.
It seems to me that we should develop and fund a national “air fire force” made up of large military transports or converted 747s. If we had like 20 of these 747s which can drop up to 19,000 gallons of retardant and the ground support to refill them quickly then we could literally carpet bomb these fires before they exploded in size. The cost would be less than the losses sustained by one of these mega-fires and they could be funded by an insurance premium surcharge for anyone living in an area that could see such fires.
Having worked with aerial firefighting, I can say that – unfortunately – it isn the that easy.
Start by doing the maths on how your proposed volumes of retardant compare with the volume of rain required to put half an inch over the affected area.
Then reflect on the fact that bad fires usually occur in the worst flying conditions. High winds, high temperature and high turbulence over very rough terrain. You don’t just buzz a 747 down into a canyon like an AirTractor.
Thanks for the reality check –
Speaking of huge plumes there is one looming over the mountains to the east of where I live. The town of Lewiston to the east-north east of me has just received evacuation orders. Life may get a bit too exciting here in the next several days dependent on which way the wind blows. Going to pack some boxes of the important stuff just in case.
Lets us know how you’re doing when you can goldminor.
The fire is around 15 miles way in a straight line. I live in Douglas City. Highway 299 is right here if the need arrives to head west towards the coast. They had Lewiston start their evacuation last night as it takes longer to get out of that area on the country roads. The fire is around 5 miles from the town of Lewiston with 2 intervening ridges between the town and the fire. Only a light haze so far as the winds continue to move east up the Trinity River from the Pacific Ocean.
Here is a view of the current situation. Note the town of French Gulch on the western edge of the map. That is where the fire started.
http://google.org/crisismap/google.com/2018-carr-fire
thanks for the map. This map from the SF Chron has what I believe are the satellite (Modis) hotspots – shows where the fire is most active –
https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2018/fire-tracker/
The NASA Worldview imagery is interesting – won’t help anyone in the local situation, but it does give one pause to see the massive smoke plume – satellite imagery – you need to zoom in -https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/
…
Wow. I thought the skies here in the Reno area were bad. We haven’t seen Mt Rose and her sisters for days. But the greatest smoke appears to be north to northeast of here. Feel sorry for those folks.
Meanwhile sanctuary state Grubbernator Brown begs US for more money that he promises will be used to battle wildfire.
I was off watching coverage of the Ferguson Yosemite fire and noticed something aobut the Hotshots; no fatties, no females, and no (well, you know, that idea that may not be spoken). The fitness requirements; a 3-mile hike carrying a 60-pound pack in under 90 minutes, 1½-mile run in 10:30 or less, 25 push-ups in 60 seconds, 45 sit-ups in 60 seconds and 2 pull-ups.
Obviously all Trump’s fault.<:o)