#lnu lightning complex

[oiloceansurfclub]

LNU Lightning Complex fires, photos taken by my brother, who's a volunteer firefighter with the Cazadero fire department.

He's currently fighting a 2500 acre blaze in NorCal with only 11 engines and NO air support. He says this is a losing battle.

CalFire is spread SO THIN due to the incredibly high number of fires that they don't have the resources to properly battle them all.

PLEASE EVACUATE. If you are told you MUST evacuate, then GO. Not only are you putting yourself at risk, you are endangering fire fighters AND increasing the chances that more area will burn. When you don't evacuate, you are forcing CalFire to relocate resources to your aid instead of putting resources where they belong: on the front lines, fighting the blazes.

Don't be that guy, evacuate when you are told.

[disastergis]

Current GIS works in progress, LNU Lightning Complex and ANF/LAC Bobcat burn scars in 3D 

[smakkabagms]

everything, unstable and alien each failed encounter: I can make no sense of it only that it is wrong for life to go on, for the world to not stop and ache             for the steaming mass  of its many dead death death duskdusk, nothing moves on except itself and I will never catch up to it

[francofolle]

so my family’s been keeping quarantine for nearly two weeks now, like masks in the kitchen and six feet apart all the time etc, but i broke that today and hugged my mom bc i needed it so bad. we both talked about how were having a lot of flashbacks to 2017 right now and how were both struggling with this. and apparently also feeling sorry/guilty towards my brother and his girlfriend who are here with us right now. my mom and i were here alone the last time fires like this started, the rest of the family wasn’t here. i want so much to protect them from experiencing what we did, i want to take care of my mom and myself trying to deal with the stress/anxiety/trauma of experiencing this again, i want to run and hide and scream. im so grateful my dad’s here this time though, i don’t have to be in charge at all. even though this evening, i saw my dad dozing outside and as i was headed out to make him wear a mask (bc of falling ash) he woke up and came inside. 2017 was terrifying, and i have been terrified of this happening again ever since. when the pandemic hit, one of my first thoughts was please god i don’t want to go through fire season in quarantine. and then our power went out this evening, thanks to pg&e’s rolling blackouts bc of everyone staying home and blasting their acs all day bc of the heatwave. being powerless (in every sense) during a massive wildfire is terrifying. it was one of my biggest fears last october/november during pg&e’s planned power outages bc i have no service whatsoever too during the power outages. id love to ignore the fire updates and just distract myself but the truth is the idea of someone banging on our door, telling us we have x amount of time to escape, is scarier and id rather be prepared. so im feeling stuck right now between packing my go bag or not doing that and trying to be positive and calm and optimistic. i do already know everything i’d grab in my room though. there’s two sides of me fighting right now: one saying be prepared and ready, and the other saying you’re okay, it’s alright, just relax. truth is today was my boiling point. im done. life is really hard right now. silver linings are not silver linings, but straws im grasping at to try not fall completely apart. im at the loud music, constant sitcom netflix, trying every kind of distraction just so im not constantly a mess point. im exhausted, i wont keep pretending everything’s okay. 

[schnoogles]

california now has 2 moods: grey or orange

[smakkabagms]

Of an aviary of thirty-eight birds - parrots, parakeets, canaries, finches - three survived. It took three hours (of sifting through their bodies) to find my house finch, Wendy, a small, charred thing beneath the collapsed roof. Her feet stiff and curled against her black stomach, where, on the backside, two lone feathers left unscorched. Resemblances of her old color, light brown and soft. Wanting to bury them each individually I went to the only part of the field left alive; yellow grass, covered in so much ash as if all night it had snowed. I go back and forth like this, between the aviary and the small patch of soil that I clear with my naked hands. It is still hot. The air is orange and thick as leather. The smell of it all, the collapsed house, the burning metal, the split septic tank, the near-by still-flaming tree, is unmistakable, different kinds of deaths. All that survives: three birds, one pot, and a shed where we kept our firewood. I have moments of unbearable illness and continue to work. All language flails before it, and I hate how pathetic my own mouth seems. 

[francofolle]

Norcal is in for a really bad week and I’ll definitely be venting on here so watch out for #tw wildfire and #lnu lightning complex tags and blacklist at will.

[captawesomesauce]

If you had stood in the middle of vacaville and looked out toward the hills at the worst of the fire storm, this is pretty much what you would have seen.  This is the current fire perimeter overlayed with the MODIS flames from 8/18 to 8/22 when it was at its worst.