Western USA wildfires
September 12, 2020 at 4:38 pm
(This post was last modified: September 13, 2020 at 8:12 am by Jackalope.)
I don't know how much of this has made the news but we've got a disaster on our hands in Oregon, Washington, and California.
We had a very unusual hot, dry, windstorm blow through the area starting last weekend. It's wildfire season and with new fires and flare-ups of existing ones over a million acres has burned in Oregon in the last 72 or so hours. Our home is safe unless things change drastically but my wife works just outside the mandatory evac zone for the Riverside fire burning southwest of Portland, and we have friends and coworkers some of whom are evacuees and some who have been told told to be ready to go at a moment's notice. We have coworkers who have lost their homes.
On Wednesday the smoke rolled in and has only become worse - it's not safe to go outside even masked. My cousin in Kennewick reports AQI of 684 this morning. It was 364 when I last checked.
I've lived in this area for 48 years, I've seen plenty of bad wildfire years, and I've never seen anything like it, or the storm that preceded it. The degree to which population centers are affected is unprecedented here, at least 500,000 are under an evacuation order, about one in ten.
What a year this has been.
We had a very unusual hot, dry, windstorm blow through the area starting last weekend. It's wildfire season and with new fires and flare-ups of existing ones over a million acres has burned in Oregon in the last 72 or so hours. Our home is safe unless things change drastically but my wife works just outside the mandatory evac zone for the Riverside fire burning southwest of Portland, and we have friends and coworkers some of whom are evacuees and some who have been told told to be ready to go at a moment's notice. We have coworkers who have lost their homes.
On Wednesday the smoke rolled in and has only become worse - it's not safe to go outside even masked. My cousin in Kennewick reports AQI of 684 this morning. It was 364 when I last checked.
I've lived in this area for 48 years, I've seen plenty of bad wildfire years, and I've never seen anything like it, or the storm that preceded it. The degree to which population centers are affected is unprecedented here, at least 500,000 are under an evacuation order, about one in ten.
What a year this has been.
