California Fire season 2008
29 June 2008A few weeks ago I noticed on my rss feed from RTE a story about a fire in Norway. Its was a 5000 acre fire and was the biggest fire there in 88 years if memory serves me correctly. Being an irregular event, they were struggling a bit to put it out. When I heard this, it reminded me of my surprise when I learned about the fire seasons here in California and the completely different scale of fires here. At the same time that fire was burning in Norway, there were 2 large fires here in California totaling about 60000 acres. A week or 2 before that, there was another fire in the Santa Cruz mountains which was several thousand acres as far as I remember. The Bay Area has been shrouded in smoke for the last week in which there has been over 1000 fires around the state. In this past week alone, over 300000 acres have burnt! In one week alone! That is 30% greater than the size of County Dublin back home!
This year is particularly bad - in fact from what I hear it has been getting progressively worse year on year. This year is shaping up to be a record fire year. We seem to be a few months ahead of schedule with the amount of burning that has already occurred so far. But thats the price for living where there is little rain fall I suppose.
Hopefully the 4th of July celebrations don’t add to the flames…
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