Evacuate Sonoma County
This isn’t what global warming will be like, it’s what it is like. This is global warming.
Californian authorities have issued new evacuation orders as wildfires that led to mass power cuts continue to sweep through the state.
The orders, covering large parts of Santa Rosa city, markedly increases the number of residents told to evacuate.
Some 90,000 people had already been ordered to leave towns in northern California.
“Anyone left in this mandatory evacuation areas need to leave now,” the sheriff’s office said in a warning.
The new evacuation order encompasses a huge area of Sonoma County, including Santa Rosa, where an estimated 175,000 people live.
Sonoma County is just north of San Francisco and Marin County; the whole area can be seen as a giant conurbation. This is climate change, not tomorrow but now.
The National Weather Service said a powerful windstorm was expected to create “potentially historic fire weather conditions” in the region.
By Sunday morning, gusts reached 90mph (144km/h) in the hills north of Santa Rosa and up to 50mph across San Francisco’s East Bay, the forecaster said.
Forecasts predict the high winds will continue into Monday morning.
The National Weather Service issued a “red flag” warning for areas around the Kincade Fire.
The new normal.
And, after repeated droughts, and last year’s catastrophic fires, Pacific Gas and Electric STILL deferred ,maintenance of the lines which cause the fires, used bankruptcy to avoid liability for the deaths last year, and paid millions in bonuses to top management.
What will happen if they have to evacuate San Francisco? That would be such a massive undertaking, and I doubt they have a good evacuation plan. I remember when I lived in Oklahoma City, their evacuation plan was pretty much “go to Edmond”, which is a bedroom town to the northwest, which cannot hold the amount of people that would flood in from Oklahoma City, and that don’t have enough road going that way to fully handle rush hour traffic without long jam ups.
But, hey, California didn’t vote for Trump, so why worry, right? Not a problem. Let the losers feel the heat.
The world is very scary.
I don’t think SF is vulnerable to wildfires in the way that for instance Los Angeles is. There’s not really anywhere for a wildfire to come from that would be big enough to threaten the whole city.
I know; I’m just sort of sounding off because the lack of attention to global warming pisses me off so much.