POOR AIR QUALITY Alert

[yuiyoshida]

Received on my phone, from the City and County of San Francisco. People should try to remain indoors, it says, avoid areas like the down town district ... etc..

I been smelling smoke for three days now, and I now know its Brush Fire related.

http://abc7news.com/weather/abc7-news-forecast-fire-danger-poor-air-quality-persist/39468/

[bdtrppr6]

1. yes stay inside

as much as you can until it subsides. the Columbia Gorge fires made Portland air very thick and nasty and we are 40 miles away from it's origin. if it smells like campfire, you don't really want to breathe it a whole lot. we had ash "snowflakes" falling for a few days.

[Rollo]

2. Yes the air is crappy over here in the East Bay...

Usually I ride my bicycle to/from work. Tomorrow I'll be driving the short distance, just to avoid breathing in too much of the smoke. It's been made a bit more miserable for me with the dregs of a cold I caught last week. Such fun!

I should buy stock in Kleenex...

[BigmanPigman]

3. We we had bad fires in San Diego it was so bad that I passed out

blue breathing masks to my students. The district ending up closing the schools for an entire week. They had never done that before. This was in 2003 and then it happened again in 2007. I wonder if San Francisco is going to close the schools.

[Lordquinton]

4. It's more than a brushfire

the images coming out of Santa Rosa/Napa are scary, and it's starting to reach further east.

[Rollo]

5. Causes...

1) Dead trees left over from the 2012-2016 drought...

2) High sustained offshore winds. Known as the Santa Anas in SoCal, up here they're calling them El Diablo...

3) Usual end-of-summer dryness and hot temps...

4) Multiple fire loci spread over a four country region...

5) Smoke so thick air tankers have trouble locating the best spots to drop water/fire retardant.

After the Oakland Hills fire, the county and cities involved mandated defensible fire zones cleared of combustible trees and brush around all structures in the hills. I haven't heard that Napa/Sonoma counties and cities have similar ordinances. From the "before" aerial shots it does look like trees and homes are perhaps in too close proximity in the Coffee Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa. But then my neighborhood in the East Bay flats looks much the same. We are not adjacent to wildland, however, a fire once started here could also jump from property to property via the vegetation.

[Retrograde]

6. I could smell smoke in Mountain View

earlier today and here in Palo Alto there's a visible haze. We're about 100 miles south of the nearest blaze: I can't imagine what it's like closer.