This is just awful. I am praying for everyone out there.
How do fires just pop up like that?
The wind is howling today in many areas.
Embers blowing miles downwind start new fires
People tossing lit cigs
High wind knocks down power lines that spark off a fire
Arsonists lighting them
Homewowners using edgers or welders throw sparks into tinder dry brush
etc. etc. etc.
Dry lightening, intellectual elitism (the campfire'll burn itself out) or deliberate arson.
There was one where some woman in Arizona went to commune with the Navajo gods, got lost and set a signal fire in the middle of the desert, thus burning about one third of Arizona...she got no fine or anything, because she was "distressed" when she set the fire that burned about a third of Arizona. But that sort of thing doesn't happen all that often.
My brother lives in CA and is an avid hiker and camper. He's told me several stories of walking along a popular hiking/camping trail, smelling a BIT more smoke than is comfy, checking it out, and stomping out the abandoned campfire of shoveling dirt over it. He said that finding drug paraphernalia was pretty usual in those cases. He got to the point where he checks out every campfire he hikes past, just in case. I wish more people did that.
Many ways. #1 High winds, causing trees, branches to fall onto power lines, etc etc.
In addition, high winds blowing burning embers FAR beyond the fire lines, spotting fires FAR in front of initial fires.
I received this from Homeland Security:
Global Fireball - al Qaeda Planning New Environmental Terror Attack?
21 Oct 2008 12:54 AM PDT
Extremists are threatening an environmental disaster by sparking a series of catastrophic wild fires. We first posted on this last year.
Western intelligence agencies fear that Al Qaeda terrorists are planning a “global fireball” in a new departure in its war on the West.
Deliberately lighting forest blazes in Europe, the US and Australia would not only stretch emergency services but leave insurance companies facing multi-billion pound damage bills as the credit crunch bites.
The fires would also create a pollution disaster, with billions tons of climate change gases escaping into the atmosphere.
The so-called “forest jihad” is being championed by Islamic scholars and Osama Bin Laden’s terror strategists who believe setting fire to dry woodlands will produce maximum damage for minimum risk.
Western security services have picked up internet chatter which spells out in graphic terms the terrorists’ thinking.
One message warns: “Imagine if, after all the losses caused by such an event, a jihadist organization were to claim responsibility for the forest fires. You can hardly begin to imagine the level of fear that would take hold of people in the United States, in Europe, in Russia and in Australia.”
Australia is at most immediate risk from Al Qaeda’s change in tactics. Years of drought have left tinderbox conditions and with summer beckoning, its bush lands are vulnerable to a coordinated fire starting.
also:
Documents recovered from a remote area along the Pakistan border have revealed that Osama bin Laden wants al-Qaida to launch a “global fireball” by lighting forest fires in Europe, the United States, Australia and South America.
The documents were uncovered during an operation led by the British intelligence service MI6, and now have been described by experts in that agency as “the most worrying [plot] that the world is facing.”
This story comes to us via Homeland Security - National Terror Alert. National Terror Alert is America’s trusted source for homeland security news and information.