California Fire Impacts

A friend told us last night that the visitor's center at Big Basin has been destroyed. The VC is in a relatively open area near the road, so if that's gone, I'm imagining the other structures in that area are destroyed as well.

We have many friends in Loma Mar, Pescadero, Boulder Creek, and so on, and so on. They are all under evac orders as far as we know. I have friends who operate communications facilities in Bonny Doon, and I'm pretty sure those are badly damaged if not destroyed.

The fires (there are dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of little fires created all over the area by lightning strikes mostly on Sunday morning) have conjoined into a large "complex", which is now called the "CZU August Lightning Complex". The body of the conflagration is moving generally in the south easterly direction. I think our area was evacuated out of an abundance of caution, as we are in the very northeast corner of the evac zone. The fact of the matter is that there are many, many fires all over the state. When the lightning storm hit our area, most of our local resources were elsewhere doing mutual aid. There was not much available in our local area to deal with this when it happened. The fires popped up as (probably) hundreds of little fires, and before you knew it, fire was everywhere.

The CZU Complex, was 1,000 acres on Monday morning, then 10,000 acres Tuesday morning. By yesterday morning it was over 25,000 acres. When fires grow that fast, there is not much humans can do. We were watching helicopters doing drops on Tuesday, and they were like tiny specks against a backdrop of flame and smoke.

Good news this morning is that temperatures have dropped significantly. Where yesterday we hit a high of around 97, the temp this morning is 60. It's likely cooler near the coast where the complex is. Don't know much more than that, will let y'all know after I've collected myself. 

Retired Forest Service Firefighter here.  I keep up on the latest wild fire news with these web sites.

Wild Fire Today, wildfiretoday.com/author/admin/

National Interagency Coordination Center (NICC), www.nifc.gov/nicc/information/information.htm

Direct link to the daily Situation Report, www.nifc.gov/nicc/sitreprt.pdf

National Smoke Jumper Association, smokejumpers.com/index.php/home/getall

Direct link to "Smoke Jumper magazine, smokejumpers.com/index.php/smokejumpermagazine

InCciweb, Incident information System,  Zoom in on the map to find a fire, inciweb.nwcg.gov/

But with the entire area becoming hotter and drier due to climate change, combined with fire suppression for many decades allowing undergrowth and duff to build up, the whole area is at risk in the next few years. There is also now an invasive pathogen that was brought in on ornamental plants which causes sudden oak death, leaving dead standing oak and tanoak trees to add fuel to the fires.  

I worked for the Cal Dept of Parks out of Big Basin and Henry Cowell for several years and had some firsthand experience fighting fires in those forests. Redwood duff can be many feet thick and allows fires to burn sideways under the surface to pop up again many feet away from where the original flames were. Its really kinda surreal to experience it happening, kinda like a video game where enemies come back to life after you kill them, and really hard and very labor intensive to put out, one reason small fires tend to become big ones there before they can be stopped.