The whole LA Basin is erupting in fire. A fire that was 200 acres about 9 AM is now an 11K acre monster. Another is at 500 acres and has closed I5. The big one is now well over 45K acres. And a 25 acre one just sparked up in San Bernardino causing evacuations. All of these are being pushed by 60mph gusts that aren't going to abate until at least Thursday. They can't use fixed wing to fight the fires because of the winds, about all the firefighters can do is try to wet down buildings in the fire's path and evacuate folks.
Yeah, the neighborhood I grew up in is going up in smoke, friends have already lost their homes, the high school I went to has been evacuated. The evac zone is ENORMOUS. "Earthquake weather" is bullshit, it's just whatever the weather is when there hasn't been one in awhile and the newscasters are bored, but fire weather is real and Santa Ana winds are it. They always make me nervous. My mom always says, it's not a question of if your house will burn, but when.
That 500 acre fire 3 1/2 hours ago is now 5000 acres. I've never seen fires explode like this and with the winds they can't really get any aircraft under 5000 ft, so they can't dump water. They're pretty much screwed until the wind stops.
Remember how we used to think countries like Germany and Russia are filled with strong, robotic-like people? Nah, nigga. They just had the best drug dealers of their era.
It’s fucking erasing everything like it’s nothing. Jesus, what the fuck. It’s like a biblical plague.
I was just reading in the LA Times that the Thomas fire (In Ventura county) started at 6:25PM Monday. That means in about 22 hours it grew from a spark to 50K acres. It's still 0% contained. Un-fucking-believable.
All the rain in the fall of 2016 and winter, spring 2017 really grew the grass down there. Now it is dry as anything and plenty of fuel if a spark happens and the wind just acts like a supercharger as far as feeding oxygen to the fire. A perfect setting for what is happening and no one took any measures months ago when they had the chance.
The 405 freeway, the busiest in the country (300,000+ cars a day), is closed between the San Fernqndo Valley and West L.A. The bottom of our pool is turning black from soot from the nearest fire (Kagel Canyou/Sylmar) which is 20 miles away. The Ventura county fire chief said the Thomas fire was consuming brush/trees/houses at the rate of one acre per seciond! No less than six out of control fires are burning across southern California. It is the end of times.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/06/us/ventura-fire-southern-california/index.html Some of those pics and videos are intense.
Question for someone who knows more about than aircraft than I do: How is it possible to fight something like that with the visibility issues (I would assume)? Also, does low altitude required for dropping fire retardants pose an issue in higher population areas with power lines, radio towers, etc.? What about flying through the updrafts and the associated weather conditions with significant crosswinds and then obviously the heat?
My dad used to be a water bomber for years. Visibility issues are handled by having a BirdDog... it's a spotter aircraft that just circles the area, well above any tanker traffic, with an airborne air traffic controller who is basically calling in the strikes. They are usually well up and away from the attack lanes and can therefore see better. Part of what they do is create a circuit for all aircraft in the area; enter the zone here, line up along this line, release load, turn out in this direction, exit zone here, go reload, wash/rinse/repeat. Very rarely are they dropping so low that power lines are an issue. Power poles and radio towers are taken into account when it comes to the above-mentioned circuit they create. They can drop from 100' up and get a good dispersal of the retardant and other chemicals and have it be somewhat effective. Fun fact, that shit is usually made up of 2 things; retardant and a surface tension reducer commonly referred to as "wet water". The retardant does what you think... it helps retard the fire/burning. But how does it get to where it needs to go? If you've ever sprayed water on a tree, especially a pine tree, you see that it beads up and sticks all over the place... on the surface... you can be at the base of the tree, near the trunk, and it's dry. That's caused by surface tension. Wet water is an additive that drastically reduces the surface tension of the water/retardant mix, allowing it to flow down and through branches/leaves and totally soak into everything. It's also a great practical joke material, as a few drops in someone's coffee will have them shitting through the eye of a needle at 100 paces for a couple of days. There are also other additives, like Gel Guard, which is added to turn the water into something like jello... so that it stays together and hammers the ground in a more concentrated and forceful manner than the typical dispersing spray of a normal drop. The up drafts are the absolute most dangerous part of water bombing... because where there is an up draft from the heat, there is an equal down draft filling that vacuum. There's a reason why you hear about aircraft crashing... huge stresses caused by the transition from down to up drafts, as well as just aircraft hitting a major down draft and then being sucked/pulled into the ground as a result. Watch a live water bombing run and you'll see it's like doing a carrier landing in a rough ocean storm... shit is going EVERYWHERE... A lot of the BC water bombers are using these now instead of the monster aircraft: When I was at ground zero of a forest fire a couple years ago, there were 8 of them in a big circuit just going round and round and round for about 90 minutes at a time before they had to go and refuel. They were much safer to use because they were more nimble, and therefore in less danger of crashing. It's kind of like being in a boat and having a whale or something appear suddenly in front of you... smaller boats can get out of the way much faster than supertankers.
On some smaller fires, the Bird Dogs will actually do a few passes to test the approach, etc, and then will have the tanker follow them on the live run. Not really feasible for large fires where there are more tankers.