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The firefighter attraction is to get to pose with the camels, and it seems the camels are happy about it too. Some people are being let back to their homes today... and are cautioned about the hazards in sifting through the rubble.
I'm thanking my stars for Kym Kemp in my map frenzy. The best maps are at Cal Fire, but turns out you have to have yourself signed up for more Google Apps to get to them, and I'm signed up for too many already. So, after days and days of going to every conceivable fire map from every conceivable agency site and not being able to get anything that was congruent with my knowledge of the area and the laws of physics, I'm feeling a boost in admiration for her.
Her site is the source for local news, even if it's not that local for me, and all the busts and break-ins and car accidents and murders and homeless people stabbing each other and semis needing towed out of turns they couldn't make and conflagrations and landslides and dying fish and bank robberies and home invasions and suicides tend to be demoralizing as heck. She does throw into the mix stuff about wildflowers and gorgeous wild critters and rainbows and comical stuff when you're on the point of shooting yourself, thank Odin.
Anyway, the Valley Fire has hit 74,500 acres, 48% containment, and it looks from this fabulous map released last night at 10pm as though they very seriously have not been letting any grass burn under their feet. Dozers at full throttle, it looks as though the fire will be reaching some semblance of opposition before it eats up Sonoma and/or Napa.
It sucks that the weather is now against them again, but they're not as defenseless against it as it looks from just about every map out there. I am going to gripe to Cal Fire about this. Ask them to upload their maps to their site so that people don't have to go through the shit with Google before they can see them.
I mean, fine, maybe all those fun panning and zooming maps are good enough for people who don't really care, who are just fatalistic about it, going to let whatever is going to be be what it's going to be, but some of us need to feel okay about what is being done. Even if it's just me! I'm not getting over the realization that our fires, right here, were/are not being fought.
They let them burn. They planned from the git to let them burn and to just keep them within certain parameters. And Cal Fire and local volunteers are as outraged as I am, but they are being politically astute about it. So now I want to sock the feds and the guys who didn't shoot them and go in and do things right.
The Valley fire has burned as much acreage as has burned here in seven weeks, and that means to me that our weather has kept our fires slower... AND that they have bigger, healthier trees to keep them busy while the "opposition" lolls around watching it with binoculars and holding little back fire drills next to old logging roads.
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And I wonder if you can appreciate my fortitude in following the fucking twitface feed on this. Religious kooks blathering away fake piety after fake piety; every conceivable and inconceivable PR ploy by zombie marketing pigs; pets obsessed Munchausen syndrome people raving in machine gun bursts; people retweeting images and bits of information so many times your head nearly explodes while your fingers scream from scrolling; and the general loathing of the hard fact that this is going to be the primary mode for agencies to blurt out whatever heavily modified and attenuated and self-aggrandizing and outright lying bits of information to whatever public no longer bothers with mainstream news BECAUSE all it does is barf up heavily modified and attenuated and self-aggrandizing and outright lying bits of information.
The system is broken. BROKEN. Beyond repair.
It needs to be dismantled and replaced with something sane.
always and any time....
