The Dixie Fire is moving too fast for California's emergency alert systems

[marmar]

(Grist) Northern California’s Dixie Fire continued to make history this weekend, jumping past Oregon’s Bootleg Fire to become the biggest active blaze in the United States. As of Monday afternoon, it is California’s second-largest wildfire in recorded history, having ripped through nearly half a million acres since it sparked last month.

But it’s not just the Dixie Fire’s size that’s notable; it’s also incredibly fast-moving. Since its inception, the Dixie Fire has devoured California’s parched forests at a mind-boggling rate — on some days tearing through an acre of land every second. As a result, authorities have had to work swiftly to try to disseminate up-to-date information to local residents whose homes may be endangered by the flames.

“We’re seeing truly frightening fire behavior,” said Plumas National Forest supervisor Chris Carlton in a public briefing on August 5, shortly after the historic town of Greenville, California, was razed by the Dixie Fire. “We have a lot of veteran firefighters who have served for 20, 30 years and have never seen behavior like this, especially day after day.”

While that behavior is new, it’s not entirely unexpected. The Dixie Fire is just the latest in a series of wildfires that are much more extreme than the blazes of the previous century. A century-long history of bad forest management is partly to blame, but so is climate change: Severe drought and rising temperatures have sucked moisture out of California’s forests, creating tinderbox conditions that are ripe for massive and quick-moving conflagrations. Once wildfires get going, they can even create their own positive feedback cycles: On July 20, the Dixie Fire generated a “pyro cumulonimbus” cloud system that sparked lightning and drove strong winds, helping to accelerate the fire’s spread. ................(more)

https://grist.org/climate/dixie-fire-california-fast-climate-evacuation-communication/

[CrispyQ]

1. Today's kids are going to see a radically different world by the time they're adults.

It's simply boggling that we lack the political will to work as a collective to save our planet.