Good Morning!!!! 67F @ 5:45AM. Plentiful sunshine. High 94F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph.
It would be nice to open some windows and let the cool air in, but it's pretty smoky outside from the Dixie Fire. That'll be the pattern until they figure a way to put it out; the wind runs down canyon all night bringing the smoke with it.
Pretty frustrated with the mismanagement going on with this fire. Don't want to sound like a Monday morning quarterback, but when you won't spend the money for helicopters to move ground crews into position, then hesitate to spend even more money on heavy air support, money that wouldn't have been needed if the ground crews would have had an early shot, you need to be replaced with someone that has more experience. Yesterday in a few hours, the total of acres burned went from 500 to 1200 to 1500 then back to 1200 then shortly after that to 2200. How can you keep people safe when you can't even tell where the fire is? It's not like there's no way to tell; it's just a matter of
a few mouse clicks. So far, the fire seems to be moving to the north and east, away from here. And the forecasts don't show any strong winds, so at least for now we don't have another Camp Fire on our hands. But the geography of the canyon is such that the potential is always there, and if you don't respect that, people lose their homes, livelihoods, and lives. The Sugar Fire is still burning away to the north, they're still issuing new evacuation orders, and it's another one where they thought they had it contained at just a few acres and it grew to over 200,000 acres in just a few days when the wind came up.
There was some good news yesterday when a Very Large Air Tanker pilot, on his way back to the fire after refueling, spotted a new start on the edge of Paradise town and put it out with three passes of his airplane. That guy deserves a medal!
Was still having trouble with the soft start yesterday when I decided to take everything off of the A/C unit, compare the factory wiring with the diagram that came with the soft start, and make my own diagram that looked like the parts I had in my hands and was labeled with the actual color of the wires I was working with. Followed my diagram and had it working in twenty minutes. And the UPSs have stopped clicking when the A/C starts. At three hundred bux pop, it's
an expensive solution, and I hesitate to run out and buy more of them for every big electric motor here, but it might come to that. Maybe I can find them selling for less somewhere, now that I know what to look for.
I was gonna head out this morning for a camping weekend, but with the fire still going strong, I'm going to wait another day to see what happens with it. Air quality isn't that great, either, not much fun when you're in a tent.
Hang in there, gang, Friday's comin'!