Pages Tagged “Fire”
Reviews
- Watch Duty ★★★★★ More useful than official alerts or the LA Times fire maps for knowing which parts of a wildfire you need to worry about and how soon.
Blog Posts
- Talk About an Understatement!
Several local cities will send out SMS notices for emergencies and “avoid this area due to collision/police activity/etc.” All weekend they kept sending reports about an intersection being closed due to a “traffic collision” Saturday morning. One alert mentioned a vehicle had crashed into a building. What all of the alerts failed to mention, and […]
- County Fair-Pocalypse
On Thursday I took the day off from work and we went to the Orange County Fair. It was a particularly bizarre visit because Costa Mesa was beneath the smoke plume from the Holy Fire (so named because it started in Holy Jim Canyon) burning in the Santa Ana mountains. The sky, except for clear […]
- Smoke rises from Mt. Wilson
Smoke rises from Mt. Wilson above Los Angeles on Tuesday around noon. The wildfire has threatened the observatory and critical communications towers. Today it’s too hazy to see anything but the barest suggestion of the downtown skyline, much less the mountains behind it. Not that it looked quite this clear even on Tuesday – I […]
- California Burning
A fire is raging in the hills and canyons of Orange County. It’s nothing compared to the devastation in Northern California, where 160,000 acres have burned, killing 21 people and wiping out whole neighborhoods in Napa and Santa Rosa — but a dozen homes have been lost and about as many damaged in the 8,000-acre […]
- Sand Fire Smoke – From a Distance
A few views of the smoke plume from the Sand Fire burning near Santa Clarita (in the mountains north of Los Angeles), seen from a distance. The fire broke out on Friday, just a few days after the smoke from the recent fires on the San Gabriels finally cleared out and I was able to […]
- Fire Up the Grill!
Wait, you’re supposed to grill the burgers, not the cars!
- Split Sky – Distant Smoke from the Colby Fire
Two photos showing the contrast between smoke from the fire near Los Angeles, and the unusually clear skies around it.
- Fireworks Ban
Most cities in Orange County have banned the sale and setting off of fireworks to and by the general public for safety reasons. Of course, fireworks are an Independence Day tradition, so most cities also put on professional displays on the Fourth of July. But a lot of people like the hands-on experience of setting […]
- Fire by Satellite
From @ThisIsTrue: AMAZING false-color NASA satellite pic of the damage caused by LA’s Station Fire. Yes. Yes it is. (Full size on the linked article.)
- Bad Timing
I keep putting off washing my car, then finally getting to it right before a freak storm…or the arrival of a giant cloud of ash. *grumble*
- Mt. Wilson Fire Status (Sep 1 2009)
Mt Wilson still intact for now! Status, Towercam. Image from Mt. Wilson Observatory Towercam at 12:06 pm. Observatory website still up, but towercam very slow. Mt. Wilson Towercam showing lots of smoke: 12:21 was the last image I could get. Definitely cooler today, but humidity & smoke since the wind changed make it feel worse […]
- Touring the Mt. Wilson Observatory in 1992
With the observatory threatened by the Station Fire, I dug out my photos from a tour my family took 17 years before.
- Station Fire Smoke Plume from Irvine
About 2:00 in the afternoon today, in a park in the Quail Hill area of Irvine. Roughly 50 miles away from the fire, perpendicular to the wind (thankfully!) That puffy plume looks a lot whiter than the rest, which is clearly smoke, making me wonder if it’s a cloud that’s formed above the fire somehow. […]
- Saddleback Haze
Taken Friday morning. You can really see the layers in the haze that (I assume) has drifted down from the Morris Fire near Azusa.
- Magenta Sunset
Watched the sun set, its disc tinged almost magenta by the smoke plume from the Morris fire near Azusa stretching along the horizon.
- Green and Brown
While driving to work this morning, I looked off to the left and saw this beautiful view of fluffy white clouds hugging the mountains, and bright sunlight on the patchy green hills.* When I got into work, I went straight for the corner conference room that has a view in that direction… but the clouds […]
- Before and After
On a clear day in early October, I went driving up into the Tustin Foothills to see what I could see. I took a bunch of photos at a turnout, and also stopped at an intersection that gave me a nice view of Peters Canyon, the hills behind it, and Saddleback in the background. I […]
- Ashen Mountains
Things are starting to get back to normal, at least for those of us not directly affected by the Santiago Fire. There was a layer of haze coating the mountains Monday morning, but the air smelled normal, and the sky, when the clouds broke up, was blue. My co-worker who stayed behind in Silverado came […]
- Clouds Replace Smoke
The change in the weather has brought in clouds today (Saturday), and even the occasional sprinkle of rain. It apparently helped slow the Santiago Fire considerably. I went into work this morning to deal with some network problems (you may have noticed that this site was down for a while), then went over to the […]
- Shift
Winds have shifted northward. The good news: my workplace is no longer drenched in smoke from the Santiago Fire. I can see blue sky and wispy clouds, terrain back to the nearby hills, and the twin peaks of Saddleback rising above the smoke. Reportedly the northern peak (the one without all the radio transmission towers) […]
- A Breath of Fresh Air. Please.
The Santiago Fire has moved up into the mountains, raging through the Cleveland National Forest. The canyons are still under evacuation, but out here in the Saddleback Valley, it just looks like a really smoggy day. With yellower-than normal sunlight. It was actually cold this morning, for the first time in well over a week. […]
- Fire by Night
With the winds dying down, the smoke from the Santiago Fire clung loosely to the mountains most of the day. Unfortunately, smoke from the new fires down on Camp Pendleton drifted up the coast to take its place, bringing back the yellowish sunlight. Also, without the wind to clear them away, ashes left a thorough […]
- Smoky Sky
Had a chance to run through all my Santiago Fire photos from the last few days with Katie and my parents, and they picked out a few favorites that I hadn’t already posted. This first one was Monday morning around 10:30, as I drove into the region covered by the smoke plume. Just a few […]
- Watching the Santiago Fire
Now that the wind and smoke have shifted, watching the progress of the fire has become a nervous office pastime. It’s far enough not to threaten us here, but from the windows along one side of the building, we can see the blackened hills through the haze. And we’ve got people who live in the […]
- More Fire
The wind shifted during the day, and by mid-afternoon the sky near where I work was considerably clearer—even though the fire seemed to be getting closer. Some geography: The Santa Ana Mountains run parallel to the coast, and form the northeast border between Orange County and Riverside County. Here are a couple of photos from […]
- City of Smoke
No 3AM evacuations, though we’re several miles away from the danger zone anyway. The Santiago fire we spotted yesterday was stopped before it crossed into suburbia, but judging by the OCFA map it was a near thing. Now it’s burning southeast, into the hills and toward the canyons. Some of which are inhabited. (Yes, there […]
- Wind and Fire
The Santa Ana winds arrived in earnest overnight. We spent most of the day indoors, going about our usual business with the howling wind and occasional thump in the background. I’d glance up from my book (I’m about halfway through Regeneration, the conclusion of Julie Czerneda’s 3-part Species Imperative) and look out at the trees […]
- Spring Haze
On Sunday, March 11, a brush fire struck in the Anaheim Hills area. It was controlled relatively quickly, and by the next morning, the smoke had settled into a blanket of haze over Orange County. For contrast, here’s a shot from a few weeks earlier (February 23), when it was unusually clear. This was taken […]
- Only… who?
Ordinary tagging? Or someone who got the point of the PSA and took it a bit too far? ð
- Smoke and Fog
Monday morning dawned foggy. By the time we left for work, most of the fog had burned off, but we looked out the car window and saw a huge, billowing gray cloud hugging close to the ground. If this had been the usual fire season, or if there had been no fog to start with […]
- Smoke
The weather has been… unusual the last few days, to say the least. Tuesday afternoon I could see smoke from at least two of the fires that had broken out. There was a huge cloud billowing up from the southern horizon, and another huge cloud creeping over the hills to the north. Both seemed to […]