I am curious if this site edits out the word the rertard in ******ant? Or is it like people who won't write out god...

Son-of-California said:

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I am curious if this site edits out the word the rertard in ******ant? Or is it like people who won't write out god...

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I typed out r e t a r d a n t. I didn't self edit. That's something I rarely do.

sp4149 said:

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FWIW, I am amazed that San Diego back country has escaped so far without any out of control wild fires this week. Earlier this year there were several fires that ignited when conditions weren't nearly as extreme as this week. We are very fortunate to have been spared so far. Maybe a steep decline in Border Patrol arrests means less illegal camps in the hills?

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San Diego's good fortune has ended, a fire off the I-15 freeway is racing up a hillside toward a senior citizens mobile home park in FallBrook. In half an hour it looks to have raced a mile from the freeway with flames over the tops of the oak trees. The wind is blowing West into Fallbrook.

burritos said:

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sp4149 said:

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Since this topic is a booth of a similar thread in Off-Topic, both discussions are incomplete with missing discussions in the other thread. ...
San Diego's biggest fires have been started by arcing power lines, lost hikers, dumb hunters, illegal camps, fireworks; actual arsonist caused fires have been smaller. This extreme fire danger event can make anyone a fire starter, no special skills required. In those cases where I know of a fire fighter starting the blaze, the fire danger was not elevated, they were helping mother nature burn...

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You're right, I haven't worked around high voltage lines before. I mountain bike under them regularly and have yet to see something spark. But I'm ignorant of these causative phenomena. And I thank you for your thorough explanation for these more likely causes. A day where you don't learn something new is a of lost opportunity for the gray matter. This reassures me that arson as an explanation is unlikely. While the damage is no less destructive, to me bad luck seems more acceptable than arson.

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San Diego county has just had it's first wildfire of the week as the winds have been shifting further South. Wind gusts tonight in the San Diego back country up to 90 miles an hour, only around 30mph now. The fire appears to have started on I-15 but is spreading rapidly West toward FallBrook (site of a Navy Weapons Storage facility). Flames look to be 50 feet high moving up a ridge to a senior citizens mobile home park (under evacuation). This looks to have been started by either a cigarette tossed from a car or maybe a vehicle breakdown in the Southbound lanes.

Note Navy Weapons Storage bunkers, handling sheds have some of the most stringent vegetation suppression protocols (to reduce fire fuel) in California. However there are many abandoned avocado orchards in the area providing dry, standing fuel that could speed the fires spread West.
This fire could head toward the huge base of Camp Pendleton. Years ago I worked on a fire suppression contract for that base. Each year they cut major fire breaks across the base for fire suppression. However they can't do the work during dry weather as the steel tools cutting the fire break along the flinty hillsides ignite fires. Right now relative humidity is 5%, down from the normal 60-80% range. This could be a challenge for fire fighters...

To add a couple more 'fire starters' to your list sp4149, Up here near Reno in the last year we had 2 fires started by gun owners shooting at targets on open hillsides. The bullets glance off a rock and spark. They burned a few buildings, about 10 total, but came close to other more populated areas.

One fire was started by a broken beer bottle, thrown from a truck and breaking up on the hard ground rock nearby. One broken piece was shaped roughly like a lens and focused the sun on some August Dry vegetation. The wind was blowing fairly strong in one direction and the inspectors basically tracked it back to the site near the road where it started.

Human caused.

NVGolfingBear said:

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To add a couple more 'fire starters' to your list sp4149, Up here near Reno in the last year we had 2 fires started by gun owners shooting at targets on open hillsides. The bullets glance off a rock and spark. They burned a few buildings, about 10 total, but came close to other more populated areas.

One fire was started by a broken beer bottle, thrown from a truck and breaking up on the hard ground rock nearby. One broken piece was shaped roughly like a lens and focused the sun on some August Dry vegetation. The wind was blowing fairly strong in one direction and the inspectors basically tracked it back to the site near the road where it started.

Human caused.

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One time flying into Reno at sundown I was amazed by all the sparkling lights in the canyons. Took awhile to realized it was all broken beer bottles reflecting the setting sun. Pendleton has several fires each year, many started by military operations. On the hillsides they make a fire break by dragging a 100 foot section of anchor chain between two bulldozers, flint in the hillside always starts a few small fires from sparking off the chain. Conditions are so dry down here now, that tracked vehicles can start fires just passing through.

After two hours the fire in north San Diego county is already over 500 acres, headed West. It's pretty much burned out next to I-15 where the fire seems to have started. The hot dry winds are moving south, likely to have more fires in the southern part of the county tonight and tomorrow. A lot of irrigated vegetation in the area has been dying the last month, not good.

While watching the TV on the out of control wildfire along I-15 north of Escondido. I have been ignoring a fire south of me. A large fire in Tijuana has blanketed the border with thick smoke, but we have the Trump Wall to protect us.

burritos said:

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heartofthebear said:

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burritos said:

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Not a fire expert here, so maybe someone else can chime in. What is the percent likelihood that these fires are intentionally set? 1%? 25%?

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My guess is that winds cause both the start and the extent of these modern day urban wildfire disasters.
But there is always a human component.

Like the wealthy folks partying on the Titanic, they didn't create the iceberg or intentionally cause the ship to hit it, but they played a huge part in their own demise by failing to ignore the warnings and the signs.

In a sense, most of modern day civilization is a modern day Titanic and those that really understand where we are headed, like some of those that never even wanted to take the ship off the harbor for that trip, are not seriously listened to, their voices drowned out by those that are economic determinists who think that all human welfare should be determined by the market.

The jet stream is more erratic these days due to, you guessed it, global changes in weather patterns, also known as global climate change. The unintended consequence is more offshore winds, also known as Santa Ana winds. And these winds are happening more often and in more places in California.

If you have trouble understanding how winds can start a bad fire in an urban environment, I can't help you.

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Yes you can help me or at least you can try. So you're stating strong winds + incidental low grade sparking from various industrial electrical stuff/cars/industrial machinery and subsequent spread of embers equals 5 large fires all at the same time. If you say that's not only a reasonable explanation but the likely reason, then I'll turn off my conspiratorial detector.

In this day and age where society inadvertently produces mass shooters, I wouldn't be surprised at someone with a strong warped societal grievance use fire as a way to lash out.

I was in California during the 80's and 90's when fires were deliberately being set by a Fire Chief no less:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Leonard_Orr
[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Leonard_Orr][/url]

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Go to google images and type in "arcing power lines".
I am a public servant and on the road a lot.
I have seen what wind can do to power lines and how it can start fires.
Since there are power lines throughout the area and high winds throughout the area, that would be enough.
Certainly there could be either criminal negligence and/or outright arson involved and their is a history of each creating large urban wildfires.
But it is not necessary to search for sinister reasons when perfectly normal reasons are more probable.
I don't know how those probabilities break down as percentages and I don't know why it would be of interest.

I will say, however, that the cause of all fires is fully investigated, including all the possibilities we have been discussing, but, if you had to put money on the result of those investigations, I would not put money on any sort of sinister or deranged cause. I would put money on man made (unnatural) but normal causes.

Son-of-California said:

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I am curious if this site edits out the word the rertard in ******ant? Or is it like people who won't write out god...

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I believe it's the site. The reason is that, even in serious threads about tragic subjects, there must be some comedy/absurdity.

What's next? They edit the last seven letters in a simple sentence like "Stanfurd men are sheep****ers."?!?

Edit: Thank goodness for our sanity they left in the last three letters.

Big C said:

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Son-of-California said:

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I am curious if this site edits out the word the rertard in ******ant? Or is it like people who won't write out god...

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I believe it's the site. The reason is that, even in serious threads about tragic subjects, there must be some comedy/absurdity.

What's next? They edit the last seven letters in a simple sentence like "Stanfurd men are sheep****ers."?!?

Edit: Thank goodness for our sanity they left in the last three letters.

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I'm confused... what's wrong with sheepherders? My father was a sheepherder, my grandfather was a sheepherder, my uncle's were sheepherders, etc.

Rubbing salt in wounds, here is what I rec'd in Cal Econ. Dept. newsletter today:


SAN FRANCISCO The fires that ravaged Northern California in October claimed lives, weakened communities and scarred one of the West's most distinctive landscapes. The destruction of an estimated 14,000 homes in the wine country north of San Francisco will worsen a severe housing shortage in a region where rents and housing values are already sky-high.
The shortage harms rural communities on the fringes of the Bay Area, but it is rooted in urban communities in the region's core San Francisco, Oakland, Palo Alto and Berkeley. It is exacerbated by well-meaning but misguided housing policies championed by urban liberals. The area has some of the most progressive voters and policymakers in the nation, yet it has also adopted some of the most regressive housing policies, with large costs for low-income renters and the environment.
The regional economy of the Bay Area is like an integrated ecosystem, where everything is connected. The exceptional economic dynamism of the region's urban core affects the labor and housing market as well as the physical environment in the periphery.
The San Francisco and Silicon Valley labor markets are the most robust since the mid-1960s, when researchers started collecting jobs data and employment and wages are higher today than at the peak of the dot-com boom of 2000. Young, well-educated workers can have some of the best careers in the world here. Labor productivity and wages are among the highest anywhere, creativity and innovation flourish, and incomes are growing inside and outside the tech sector.
So it is unsurprising that tens of thousands of workers want to move here every year. The problem is that the supply of houses in the region's core remains wildly inadequate. Over the past two years, San Francisco County added 38,000 jobs, reaching its highest employment level ever. Yet only 4,500 new housing units were permitted. For all those new families knocking on San Francisco doors, new units are available for less than 12 percent of them. The numbers for Silicon Valley are even worse. This is why the rents skyrocket.

The problem is largely self-inflicted: the region has some of the country's slowest, most political and cumbersome housing approval processes and most stringent land-use restrictions.
Thanks to aggressive lobbying by an odd coalition of Nimby homeowners and progressives radical county supervisors, tenants' unions, environmental groups in places like San Francisco and Oakland, it takes years (and sometimes even decades), harsh political battles and arduous appeals to get a market-rate housing project approved.

Everything is political in the Bay Area, but housing most of all.
Some restrictions make sense: Nobody wants skyscrapers poking up among Victorian houses, and nobody wants to tear down historical buildings. But many others don't: There are scores of empty parking lots in San Francisco and Oakland that can't be built on because of political opposition.
The lack of supply means rents and housing values increase faster than necessary. For homeowners, this is a boon, as their assets keep appreciating. For renters, this means an ever-increasing cost of living and for some, an impetus to pack up and leave.
One way to think about it is that the enormous increase in wealth generated by the tech boom is largely captured by homeowners in the urban core who bought before the boom. By fighting new market-rate housing, Nimbys and Bay Area progressives are de facto making the housing shortage worse. Ironically, given residents typically progressive political leanings, this has regressive consequences, because it helps rich insiders at the expense of everyone else.
The second negative consequence of the region's restrictive housing policies in the urban core is environmental degradation on the periphery. Good environmental stewardship suggests that we should build more in the urban core near transit and jobs and less on the fringes. Yet because of cities' strict housing regulations, we build more on farmland on the region's outskirts and less in the city center where demand is higher.
Families who can't afford San Francisco, Berkeley or Silicon Valley have to move to exurbs. Some 3,800 Californians leave urban parts of the Bay Area for cheaper housing in Sonoma and Napa Counties every year. This worsens traffic and heightens the pressure for development on the edge of the region in places such as Santa Rosa, home to some of the neighborhoods hardest hit by this month's fires.
This extracts enormous environmental costs. Bay Area urban progressives, by fighting new housing in their neighborhoods, cause more sprawl on the rural fringes. I'm a committed environmentalist, and it made me rethink the way I engage with such issues: For example, I was a member of the Sierra Club for a more than a decade. But because of all the unwise battles waged by the San Francisco chapter against smart housing growth in the city, I quit to support other environmental groups.
Just like fires, bad housing policies can carry horrendous social and environmental costs. As the smoke from the Northern California fires clears, our urban communities should follow the examples of other progressive cities, and embrace smart growth.
For this to happen, local urban progressives must moderate their reflexive opposition to all new market-based housing. The main winners will be the region's most vulnerable: urban renters as well as the land and inhabitants of areas incinerated by the recent infernos.
Enrico Moretti, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of "The New Geography of Jobs."
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

There is a lot here I disagree with here. Leave it at that.

Spoke with a fireman who injured himself on the front line in Ojai. Pumps were down due to the loss of electricity. Had to watch 100 homes succumb to the fire. He said it was the worst fire he's seen in 30 years. I asked him about the possibility of arson and he strongly resonated the same suspicion. He said that fire in Ventura would not lead to fire in Bel Air and Sunland on the same day. Their simultaneous origination seemed very suspicious to him. He did acknowledge that the wind would definitely exacerbate a fire that would otherwise be snuffed out without being newsworthy. When I asked him to quantify( in his opinion) the likelihood of it being arson vs bad luck(1%,5%,25%?) he wouldn't answer the question and said he'd leave it up to the fire investigators.

Hey WIAF, I hope no news is good news update.

It looks like most of the fire is buring through vegetation. Doesn't sound like a lot of homes have been damaged, which you can take from language when they rpeort that "structures" have been burned.

We had a small fire in the hillside by my house (you know, the one with no valet parking... hey, got to have a little levity) and it was a little hairy.

Anyway, I hope all is well.

Some positives. Cal acts preemptively to keep almost the entire football staff in place.
Fires are on the wane, except in Ventura/Santa Barbara (we have had evacuated friends sleeping over).
Its holiday season and the best to all of you. To our friends in wine country, a toast to recovery and better times.