Terrible smoke in Yosemite valley from Ferguson fire!

[Drew Wiley]

The east side of the range is mostly GOOD air quality at the moment; but that could all change if the perimeter of another tropical storm sets up a rotational wind direction. I'll take the gamble, and would in fact like to get a few distant shots of the carnage while in transit. "Moderate" air quality means "awful" for me; I'm sensitized to wood smoke from all the previous fires I've been through, though I'm certainly not adverse to employing atmospheric haze to enhance
a sense of scale in outdoor photography.

[Tin Can]

Local Illinois story on Fire Fighters from here working in the West, soon in California.

https://thesouthern.com/news/local/l...f78bcf870.html

[BradS]

Local Illinois story on Fire Fighters from here working in the West, soon in California.

https://thesouthern.com/news/local/l...f78bcf870.html

Thank you for sharing this...and special thank you to all of the firefighters and hand crews.

[Tin Can]

You bet!

I have a friend who lives in Alaska but spends his summers as a roving Fire Fighter, often at the big ones. We see him seldom.

I spent 30 years on the Fire crew in a million sq ft factory. Every Fall we trained on big gasoline fires set in the parking lot. They were designed by our Fire Extinguisher supplier to require users to work as a team. Since my job was testing gas engines, I put out several gas fires inside the factory. Scary.

Thank you for sharing this...and special thank you to all of the firefighters and hand crews.

[BradS]

You bet!

I have a friend who lives in Alaska but spends his summers as a roving Fire Fighter, often at the big ones. We see him seldom.

I spent 30 years on the Fire crew in a million sq ft factory. Every Fall we trained on big gasoline fires set in the parking lot. They were designed by our Fire Extinguisher supplier to require users to work as a team. Since my job was testing gas engines, I put out several gas fires inside the factory. Scary.

I remember getting fire extinguisher training - we had a much smaller gasoline fire - at a factory where I worked summers during college. It is definitely not as easy as it seems like it should be. Luckily, I've never had to use that training.

[bloodhoundbob]

Local Illinois story on Fire Fighters from here working in the West, soon in California.

https://thesouthern.com/news/local/l...f78bcf870.html

I had seen huge structure fires growing up in central Illinois, as well as observing a huge structure fire in Nha Trang, Vietnam. But these experiences never prepared me for the wildfires I saw during my five years in northern Arizona. When I would see one of these fires "laying down" at night, it reminding me of a huge dragon asleep. I used to see and say hello to some of the Hotshots in Prescott who later perished in the Yarnell fire. Why the team leader made the fateful decision to move them from a safe area is a question that will never be answered.

[Drew Wiley]

There was news footage last nite of a massive fire cyclone at the Redding fire in suburban northern CA. None of the firefighters had ever seen anything quite like it; and nothing inside it had a chance, including the one fire fighter in its path. You can't outrun em, or even drive fast enough under such conditions. Even linear crown fires in the forest can travel at
remarkable speed. As a kid, I'd sit out at night on the patio and watch the fire atop a local ridge. The flames could be a
hundred feet high, and as trees ahead of the fire reached "kindling temperature", they'd simply explode, with the fire jumping up to two hundred yards at a time, rather than just spreading. We had an aluminum roof and plenty of water hoses just in
case the wind brought hot ash-fall our direction. But in those circumstances, the fire generates its own winds on a somewhat different basis than general weather, sometimes predictably, depending on the terrain, and sometimes very unpredictably,
as in the Redding fire and that terrible incident near Prescott.

[tgtaylor]

Yosemite air quality is steadily improving - in fact it is in the "good" category for this hour according to the website.

Interesting observation in this morning discussion on NWS website:

One interesting item of
note this morning are some of the readings above the marine
layer. There is typically drier air above the very moist marine
layer, but observations at Mt Tam are on the extreme side.
Observations overnight for relative humidity showed readings on Mt
Tam bottoming out at 2-3%. Other peaks around the Bay Area are
dry, 20-35%, but not as extreme.


Thomas

[Leszek Vogt]

Not sure what "good air" means. I've looked at conservancy webcam and the air looks awful (Yos Valley), as if at least 20K people camped there....and there are only spaces for how many campers ? I think it goes without saying, if someone is looking for clean air it will take some time for the winds to push all that out.

Les

[Drew Wiley]

Up to 30K people are sometimes in Yos Valley on a summer day. Doubt there are many there now. Tour buses don't care about visibility. 10 minutes at the scenic turnoff, with your choice of either taking a picture or standing in the outhouse line, then off to Vegas (only a slight exaggeration; usually it's a local casino instead, so the bus has extra time to get to Yellowstone for 10 minutes there). But towns on the outside of the park depend on those kind of tourists, and it going to be one bad year for them. A number of businesses will no doubt go broke. Or those towns could simply disappear in the next fire. I might try Tioga Pass in the near future. On Hwy 120 there's no need to drop into Yos Valley itself. I'm actually after burn pictures; and there's far more of that to choose from than just the present fire. Then over the top, where I'm hoping the air will actually be clean at high elevations, not sorta clean.