Posted on 10/13/2017 10:54:15 AM PDT by Red Badger
One was a 14-year-old boy found dead in the driveway of his Redwood Valley home, where his parents were badly burned and his 17-year-old sister so badly hurt she had both her legs amputated.
Some were found dead in cars and trucks as they tried to flee the firestorms, or inside homes where they apparently were trapped. Still others were discovered as piles of ash and bones, as though they already had passed through a cremation chamber.
By Thursday, officials throughout Northern California had begun cataloging the death toll of the huge fires that broke out Sunday night and plowed through cities, small mountain valleys and forests, killing at least 31 people. Sonoma County Sheriff Robert Giordano said Thursday night that two more people have been confirmed dead there.
The Oakland Hills fire of 1991 killed 25 people by itself, and the Griffith Park fire in Los Angeles in 1933 killed 29. While no single fire currently burning has killed as many as those, state fire Deputy Director Daniel Berlant says collectively this is the deadliest series of simultaneous fires in the state in recorded history. Officials said they expected to find more bodies in the coming days.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
Oh, I thought the initials stood for Pigs, Goats and Elephants.
I looked at some of the fire pictures. The round barn burned and that was physically isolated. There had to be embers going up and out from some of the hottest fires (stronger winds aloft)
NorthMountain ~ Such people should be hanged in public.
Nope.
Burned at the stake.
I didn’t go to link. What is this about PG&E ?
Apparently some local media is blaming the electric company for this somehow.................
The fires erupted in the middle of the night. 70 mph winds spread them. People woke up to find everything they could see on fire.
I was watching OAN news and on the crawl could see something about PG&E. Print to small for me to real all of it.
“Not sure how much difference that would have made with the winds they are dealing with.”
Probably none. Windblown embers can travel a very long way. They land on shake roofs or get sucked into the attic vents of tile roofs.
The approaching wall of fire can be 50 ft high or more, and things ignite well ahead of it. Radiant heat transmits through windows and sets fire to the interior.
That can be true, and was true in some cases. But in many cases in Santa Rosa there was no wall of fire. There were unburned trees and even unburned houses in the middle of burned houses. That suggests mostly windblown embers (your first thought). Most of the roofs were not shake, but asphalt shingle, probably class A, probably did not catch. But the houses had many entry points at vents, soffits, siding joints. Many houses that burned had indented corners while a plain square house next to it did not burn.
“There were unburned trees and even unburned houses in the middle of burned houses.”
That caught my eye as well.
In the 1993 Laguna Beach Fire one house on a street of maybe 50 survived. It was built with fire resistance in mind.
IIRC the eaves were minimal and boxed so that superheated air wouldn’t collect under them. The attic vents were an ember-proof design. There was no exposed wood that could catch fire and lead back into the main structure.
Some of this would be very easy to incorporate into a house. Even to retrofit. California should encourage it in existing homes and require it in new construction. Insurance companies should encourage it.
Most homeowners won’t know about this construction in order to ask for it, but architects and insurers and builders should. It’s terrible to see people lose their homes and even die when a way to prevent it should be available at a reasonable cost.
Pacific Gas & Electric
70 mph winds. The fires erupted after midnight and spread at 70. I heard one guy say that smoke woke him and he stepped outside to find everything in sight on fire. He thought that North Korea had hit them with a nuke. He couldn’t imagine that a wild fire could have done it.
People who made it out barely had time to get their cars going. Some grabbed neighbors and pulled them into their cars and saved them. I think the death toll is going to be large.
Some redesign will be needed like sealing an open porch. A deck can probably be made to burn away without catching the house, but you can't keep flammable stuff under it.
One of the big challenges should be keeping dense neighborhoods safe, essentially 100% firewise compliant. California has had their day of reckoning, hopefully they can learn from it.
But an ember generating fire can torch a neighborhood with 20 mph winds if nobody is available to fight the fire. It would be a slower advance, but embers will advance at those wind speeds.
Japan requires earthquake building. One would think CA would have required fire resistant building a long time ago. But, no, that might upset the tree huggers and artists.
bg, you won’t be surprised to learn that the lone survivor house in the ‘93 Laguna Beach Fire was built by a Japanese man for his parents. And IIRC he used Japanese building codes to make it fireproof.
Weather has not changed.
But the population growth since I lived in California has grown tremendously.
California HAD AN ANSWER to PRAYERS for more rains, but that results in a lot more vegetation growing and fuel for fires.
California has had a lot politics about water - such as how the OWENS VALLEY was robbed of its water. I guess legally.
But maybe such things need to come to light rather than GLOBAL WARMING.
Basically, God controls our weather. If sinners repent and pray (Jews/Christians), we will have less problems like this year.
I have relatives in the Sacramento area... Concerned about them.
If people want to worship the WHORE of BABYLON and then complain, so be it.
Any updates on the six would-be arsonists?
Here’s the source, from an individual on the ground there.
There’s a deafening silence from the hyper-liberal California MSM, except for a followup on how evil the feds are for wanting an ICE hold on accused arsonist Jesus Fabian Gonzales, who the local sheriff denies is an arsonist, despite his admitting he started a fire, despite him being caught walking away from the smoke plume...
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