Posted on 12/31/2021 4:54:22 AM PST by Scarlett156
Also - sorry to add to the previous post - Louisville is rural, but not small, so lots of folks don’t know about the big shopping complexes and stuff. And there are small ranches, big farms, and a lot of businesses. I bought a car in Louisville once!
Those folks in the candle factory and other towns/villages in KY, some of whom where working when the giant tornado struck? We had already been experiencing very high winds where I live (mountains in Colorado - it’s an area a lot of people call “North Park”) up until that point, and then learned of devastating tornadoes in the east.
I thought the tornadoes wouldn’t be the worst of it. The forecast here called for “moderate winds.” Yep. And COLD. I’m looking at a haze of smoke on the mountain view from my house. I guess the Louisville fire is out, or mostly so. Some people only had minutes to leave.
I suppose we could blame Boulder. A long time ago they decided that they would surround their city with a greenbelt so that the rest of the Denver metro area would not be able to encroach on them. They spent a bunch of money buying up ranch and farm land to make this happen. If they hadn't all that land would have been filled with homes with more Californians, and Colorado would have gone Blue even sooner.
Just another example of good intentions going bad.
We visit Boulder regularly, since our son is there. It's not a horrible place at all. It is in a beautiful setting, and it has all the virtues of a prosperous community. It is clean, offers excellent educational and medical services and excellent shopping for many things. I'm not a big shopper, but I like shopping there for outdoor recreation.
The downsides of Boulder are somewhat political, and ultimately economic. It is a very liberal community, due in good measure to the university. There are also a lot of people migrating from California and the east coast. Boulder is heavily anti-2nd amendment. If it weren't, perhaps the shooter at the King Soopers grocery would have been stopped sooner. We'll never know. Gun ownership in Boulder involves local restrictions and is generally frowned upon by many locals.
Although the views are gorgeous, air quality can be poor due to wildfires in the state and further west. They get smoke from California fires. There are lots of dead trees in the Rockies due to pine beetles. You can drive past miles and miles of standing dead timber. The thought of being there during a lightning strike is pretty sobering. They're not done with wildfires. Boulderites are very serious about climate change and tend to attribute many things to mankind's depradations upon nature. If you're there, it doesn't pay to debate these issues.
Boulderites embrace the outdoors. That's a really nice thing. I like it too. Boulder has a commitment to outdoor recreation. They have a lot of open space for recreation - also a nice thing. There is a green belt (brown during drought) around Boulder so that everyone has ready access to bike paths, hiking, dog walking, etc. Nobody can build in the green belt. Building heights are restricted so that everyone in Boulder can see the mountains. Also very nice. The problem with all these nice things like green space and building restrictions is that it drives up the cost of housing. Boulder has one of the highest real estate markets in the nation. People still want to live there, so the areas outside the green belt are getting heavily developed. (Last night some of those places burned.)
If our son stays in Boulder after the stresses of wildfires and having his grocery store shot up, we'll still visit. I don't see us ever moving there. It's too expensive and too restrictive for our taste. It is beautiful though, in a planned community sort of way.
Morning.
160mph?
Yikes!
Highest we’ve had is 115mph for four hours. I do not want to relive that.
we live about 20 minutes north of this fire and could easily see the massive smoke plume ... this fire is REALLY bad news: this is not a mountain fire in a sparely populated area, but instead is an urban fire burning out of control in heavily populated suburbs ...
we’ve had almost no moisture for months and have had very high winds every day for the last 2-3 weeks, so it started out as dry as i’ve ever seen it in this area since i moved here 37 years ago, and these continuous warm dry winds have dried it out even more ... the fire potential here is explosive and my fear is we could see more of these devastating fires ...
we live just a couple of miles east of the foothills in a semi-rural area not dissimilar to Marshal, and are reviewing our bug-out list and plan because a fire like this could potentially spring up in our area as well ...
SUPPOSEDLY we’ll be getting a bit of moisture for the first time Friday (it just started to snow a tiny bit) and Friday night, maybe a few inches of snow total ... that’ll probably help some, but if these winds keep up, the moisture could be gone in just a few hours ...
and yes, totally devastating ...
Hmmmm . . . I guess I shouldn't write before my second cup of coffee, since that wasn't clear. I have no issue with people buying generators, nor did I intend to suggest that. What is wasteful is putting above ground electric lines in places where they have a high probability of being damaged by normal local weather conditions. It is wasteful to put residents in a position where they are repeatedly without power and independently duplicating services that are being paid for through (expensive) utility bills. It would be more efficient to bury some of those lines and prevent the damage, disruption, and expense of frequent large-scale outages. If you've ever lived in a place with ice storms or tropical storms, you may have experienced this. As to being ugly - it's not the generators that are ugly. Overhead lines and poles are ugly, and in places like the front range, they mar otherwise gorgeous vistas. Yeah, I know we have photoshop now, but wouldn't it be nice if we didn't need to do that?
error.
147, not 160
When the jet stream descends and destroys our infrastructure, we are reminded of our place in nature.
You know what kind of fish live in a jet stream?
Flying fish.
Spot on. To bad there is not a way for proglibs to spontaneously combust.
Nobody is surprised they say that, but what does it mean? Sounds like an excuse to fund things that have nothing to do with the real causes.
“...garden hoses...”
All well and good in summer. Winter in Colorado - most homes have likely turned off and drained the outside water outlets, to prevent frozen pipes and bursting.
Not so. I can look at the black from the burn north of my house. 80 acres of my land were burned by the Cameron Peak fire. There were a couple other 200,000 acre fires north west of that close to Laramie Wy.
Re: 33 - Thanks for mentioning this.
Don't see how this can be blamed on the power co.
My daughter lives in Longmont, and a brother in Loveland. The daughter posted a video of Chuck E Cheese’s when folks were enjoying the time with their families and then they couldn’t get out because the wind was blowing so fiercely.
My brother seems to be in an area where nothing happens, including weather.
‘Face
;o]
Boulder is where the U of Colorado is, isn’t it?
Same here in the south. Every time a tornado comes through, thousands are without power for days, weeks, see Louisiana this past hurricane season, took months to get the power back on. We have had new poles put up around here three times in the past four or five years because of tornadoes.
We were there yesterday for my sister’s funeral which started at 11:00 am about the same time the fire started. The smoke was black and terrible. The winds @ 110+ mph was even worse. While we were driving the winds not only blew our car over one lane, it also blew a Walmart 18 wheeler over on its side right in front if us. It was not a fun day.
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