“Out Of Control” Wildfires
#171702
10/28/2019 08:10 AM
10/28/2019 08:10 AM
|
Joined: Oct 2001
Posts: 19,733
A 059 Btn 16 FF MSC
ConSigCor
OP
Senior Member
|
OP
Senior Member
Joined: Oct 2001
Posts: 19,733
A 059 Btn 16 FF MSC
|
“Diablo Winds” Are Ferociously Whipping “Out Of Control” Wildfires Across Vast Stretches Of Northern California
By Michael Snyder | Economic Collapse Monday, October 28, 2019
Why does this keep happening to California year after year?
As you read this article, enormous wildfires are ravaging large portions of northern California, and Governor Gavin Newsom has already declared a statewide emergency. An extreme wind event that began on Saturday evening is pushing the fires along at a staggering rate, and when the winds are howling this ferociously it is exceedingly difficult for firefighters to keep the fires from spreading. It was being reported that on Sunday morning there were sustained winds exceeding 90 mph in northern California with “gusts that topped 100 mph”. It was the strongest wind event in several years, and it came at an extremely unfortunate time. These “hurricane-force Diablo winds” will continue into Monday morning, but that doesn’t mean that things will start to get better. As you will see below, another extreme wind event is in the forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday.
The Kincade Fire is the largest of the wildfires, and according to ABC News it has now “grown to 85 square miles”…
California Fire officials say a rapidly moving fire in Northern California wine country has grown to 85 square miles (220 square kilometers) and destroyed 94 buildings.
Cal Fire spokesman Jonathan Cox called the conditions throughout California “a tinderbox” Sunday and asked people to continue being vigilant in helping to prevent fires from breaking out.
That is an absolutely massive wildfire, and the extremely strong winds are picking up embers from the Kincade Fire and starting blazes in new areas.
The following is what Cal Fire Captain Robert Foxworthy told reporters on Sunday morning…
“The wind speeds are extreme…The strongest winds I have felt in my career,” Cal Fire Capt. Robert Foxworthy told KPIX 5 Sunday morning. “They (the winds) are throwing embers a considerable distance in front of the main fire, causing spot fires, creating a real challenge for the crews fighting the fire.”
The Kincade Fire was only about 10 percent contained early on Sunday, but thanks to this extreme wind event the level of containment has now fallen to 5 percent.
In other words, this fire is completely and utterly out of control.
Pacific Gas & Electric is telling us that “nearly 2.7 million people lost electricity” on Sunday, and they are expecting more blackouts in northern California during the week.
Could you imagine being in the dark with no electricity and massive wildfires are raging all around you?
This is a terrifying time for those living in northern California, and approximately 200,000 are currently under mandatory evacuation orders.
According to the Sonoma County Sheriff, nobody can remember another time when there was an evacuation order this large…
Approx 180,000 people under evacuation order due to #KincadeFire. This is the largest evacuation that any of us at the Sheriff’s Office can remember. Take care of each other.
Sadly, most homeowners in California do not have fire insurance, and so when they lose their homes they may find it exceedingly difficult to rebuild.
And after last year’s horrific fires, some insurance companies decided not to renew coverage for many of those that did actually have fire insurance…
After last year’s devastating wildfires, insurance companies are balking at fire coverage policy renewals for more than 350,000 residents in high-risk areas.
“We are seeing an increasing trend across California where people at risk of wildfires are being non-renewed by their insurer,” state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara said in a statement.
The California Department of Insurance “has seen cases where homeowners were paying an annual premium of $800-$1,000 but, upon renewal, saw increases to as high as $2,500-$5,000,” a staggering rise of more than 300 percent in most cases.
Insurance companies keep making it really hard for us to have a positive view of them. The entire purpose for insuring our homes is so that if disaster strikes we will be able to rebuild.
Of course it probably doesn’t make much business sense to keep insuring multi-million dollar homes that are built in the middle of a tinderbox if these sorts of wildfires are just going to keep happening year after year after year.
But the truth is that we never used to see fires of such ferocity and intensity year after year. Yes, there have always been wildfires in California, but something has changed.
So why is this happening?
Why is California being absolutely pummeled by unprecedented fires in recent years?
Ultimately, I think that these latest fires will encourage even more people to leave the state, and you certainly can’t blame anyone that wants to leave.
The winds that are fueling the rapid growth of these wildfires are expected to die down late on Monday, but then another extreme wind event is coming on Tuesday…
On Sunday afternoon, PG&E announced it’s monitoring another extreme-wind event that could trigger yet another power outage Tuesday and Wednesday, the third such blackout in a week and fourth in October. Up to 32 counties in Northern and Central California could be affected.
Any way that you want to look at it, this is going to be a very tough week for northern California. This is what Governor Gavin Newsom said about “the next 72 hours” on Saturday…
“The next 72 hours will be challenging,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Saturday. “I could sugarcoat it, but I will not.”
At this moment, there are some portions of northern California that literally look like “hell on Earth”.
The devastation caused by these fires is going to be immense, but so far there haven’t been any reported deaths.
So that is the good news.
But the bad news is that these fires are going to keep happening, and the extreme social decay that is pushing so many people to leave the state is only going to intensify.
Yes, the weather is very nice in California in the winter and there are still lots of good jobs, but if I was living in California right now I would be looking to leave as soon as possible.
"The time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon, and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." Gen. T.J. Jackson, March 1861
|
|
|
Re: “Out Of Control” Wildfires
[Re: ConSigCor]
#171708
10/29/2019 06:56 PM
10/29/2019 06:56 PM
|
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 23,916
Tulsa
airforce
Administrator
|
Administrator
Senior Member
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 23,916
Tulsa
|
The wildfires in California is not a climate change story. it's a story about bad management and corruption.Last weekend, I was out shopping for a new smartphone. As most people who live in Florida were not originally born here, the Millennial behind the counter asked me where I was from. I told her that I have lived in several states, but I grew up in Southern California.
She shrieked with delight at this news. “I love Los Angeles,” she said. “Don’t you just want to move back?”
Nevermind the obvious point that we did have a choice of where to live, and we clearly chose to buy a house on the beach in Florida. But asking me if I am yearning to move back to Los Angeles is a bit like asking me if I am yearning to move to Pyongyang or Tehran. Nope doesn’t exactly cover it.
I’m not so in love with the Kardashians that I want to pay more than half of our household income to taxes at every level of government. To stare at homeless camps and dirty needles in the gutter while sitting in traffic. To listen to lawmakers congratulate themselves on mandating that abortion pills be passed out on college campuses while millions of people in the state are without electricity. “Try to find a cool place to store your insulin” is not the kind of government regime that I am eager to live under. The libertarian customs of Florida may lead to a lot of bizarre and entertaining headlines, but the government here is aggressively functional and not unnecessarily expensive.
The last time I heard about mandatory rolling blackouts, it applied to Puerto Rico – a US territory that ended up going bankrupt and was incapable of managing a natural disaster in the years that followed, resulting in the deaths of thousands of people. They couldn’t keep the power on under normal circumstances, so they were certainly unprepared to deal with a hurricane. Puerto Rico taxpayers had accumulated tens of billions of dollars of debt for infrastructure projects, but you wouldn’t know it if you looked at the decrepit state of their infrastructure. Where did the money go? It went to endless corrupt deals, that’s where.
Now California is witnessing basically the same situation unfold. The California electorate has become increasingly batshit, and they send increasingly batshit people to Sacramento and to the city councils of the state’s largest municipalities. As a result, they’ve taken a paradise and managed it into dysfunction. There is far more concern over policing how people think and talk in California than there is in actually providing essential government services. If you are a middle class resident of California, you are forfeiting the opportunity build any sort of nest egg so that you can live like the poorest people in the Caribbean or Central America. There’s no glamour in that life decision, sorry.
The rolling blackouts in California is not a climate change story. It’s a perfect storm of bad management decisions and rent-seeking green energy contractors.
California gets a lot of well-deserved grief for not clearing publicly managed lands of organic debris, thus ensuring that the state is an epic tinderbox every year. This is something that does not happen here in Florida. Florida ecologists and wildlife officials supervise controlled burns throughout the state to ensure that there’s not a situation where a wildfire among the mangroves poses a threat to a major (or even a minor) city. It also protects the state’s tourism industry, which is a significant component of the state’s economy.
But that’s not where the rolling blackouts came from. California’s investor-owned utilities have dealt with the increasingly batshit people in Sacramento by taking an “if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude in lobbying. And that’s what you are seeing backfiring now.
PG&E went all-in on the green energy projects that California lawmakers and their constituents love. So much so that the company was actively choosing to invest in new green projects rather than make the necessary safety upgrades to its existing transmission systems. Those investment decisions are how California got the deadliest wildfire in state history last year. They had shitty equipment that was past its useful life.
The company now has so little faith in the safety of its equipment that it decided leaving millions of Californians without power during natural cycles of high winds and dry conditions was worth the risk that people might die or be otherwise injured without power. That turning major intersections into four-way stops for days on end was a better idea than burning a large fraction of the state down. Their decision isn’t stupid. The decisions that created this dilemma in the first place were stupid.
The investment bank Credit Suisse estimated that contracts with green energy companies is costing PG&E $2.2 billion more than rates can support EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Over two billion dollars to nurse their liberal political connections, while the utility cannot afford even to inspect their 100,000 miles of power lines, let alone make repairs to them. The utility claims that inspecting the lines alone would require quadrupling their rates. That’s how long they have let their system rot in the service of liberal fantasies.
That’s the opportunity cost of turning your government over to AOC-esque personalities. Your whole system of providing essential government services is screwed beyond repair. The cumulative financial cost of bringing these systems back to normal pretty much ensures the government is going to watch its tax base walk out the door. And that’s going to create a downward spiral in the provision of all kinds of essential services. You are already seeing the warning signs that this is happening in California real estate prices and in the financial struggles of the state’s largest school districts. If you want to see governments that are further along on this trajectory, look at Puerto Rico and Chicago.
Thanks to the tens of billions of dollars in liabilities from the wildfires last year, PG&E has filed for bankruptcy. The utility’s bankruptcy has been a source of absolute chaos. It looks like PG&E shareholders will likely be completely wiped out. It is unlikely that any new controlling party will bring the utility back from the dead. So Californians should not discount the possibility that being without power is their new normal. No one seems to know how the utility is going to survive at this point, and that’s a big problem for the millions of people they support.
The incredible irony in all of this is that the green state of California has been keeping the lights on during this period with privately procured generators running on… wait for it… fossil fuels.
I am all for conservation of the natural environment. But people have to be pragmatic in making decisions as important as how infrastructure is to be managed and maintained. This is one thing the climate hysterics cannot think clearly about, and that’s why they should never be placed in leadership positions and they should not be able to control narratives about government. Onward and upward, airforce
|
|
|
Re: “Out Of Control” Wildfires
[Re: ConSigCor]
#171724
10/31/2019 01:23 PM
10/31/2019 01:23 PM
|
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 23,916
Tulsa
airforce
Administrator
|
Administrator
Senior Member
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 23,916
Tulsa
|
California is "winning" its way back to the Stone Age.... The same California that has been the seedbed of world-famous companies — like the ones that make it possible for people to send widely viewed short missives of 280 characters or fewer and share and like images of grumpy cats — isn’t doing so well at keeping the lights on.
The same California that has boldly committed to drawing half of its energy from renewable sources by 2025 — and 100 percent renewable energy by 2045 — can’t manage its existing energy infrastructure.
The same California that has pushed its electricity rates to the highest in the contiguous United States through its mandates and regulations doesn’t provide continuous access to that overpriced electricity.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has to try to evade responsibility for this debacle while presiding over it, blames “dog-eat-dog capitalism” for the state’s current blackout crisis. It sounds like he is referring to robber barons who have descended on the state to suck it dry of profits while burning it to the ground.
But in fact, Newsom is talking about one of the most regulated industries in the state — namely, California’s energy utilities that answer to the state’s public utilities commission.... Onward and upward, airforce
|
|
|
Re: “Out Of Control” Wildfires
[Re: ConSigCor]
#171852
11/28/2019 12:49 PM
11/28/2019 12:49 PM
|
Joined: Oct 2019
Posts: 15
UK
Doug1943
Member
|
Member
Joined: Oct 2019
Posts: 15
UK
|
I lived for a few years in California back in the Sixties and Seventies. It's a beautiful state. At that time, you could go backpacking in the mountains and drink straight from the streams. In the summer
you didn't need a tent, because it almost never rained. Paradise.
But it's gone. It will move inexorably to the Left -- and the more horrible problems it has because of Leftist control, the more extreme will be the measures passed by its Leftist controllers.
It will be like a man on a liferaft at sea, trying to slake his thirst by drinking salt water. Get out while you can.
Any patriot living there now should consider leaving, while your property can be sold for something approaching its real value.
The liberal elite will live in gated communities protected by armed guards, while the world around them becomes like the Third World.
If you want to see what Calfornia will be like in a few years, visit Central America or Mexico today. Life's not too
bad for the upper middle class, if they don't go outside their own neighborhoods.
Move to one of the 'Redoubt States' like Idaho.
You can get a lot further in life with a kind word and a gun, than you can with a kind word alone.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.
|
|
|
|
|
