Californee is the place you oughta be.....

......or so the song goes. Guess they left off a verse or two in the TV version of the theme-song.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090508/ap_on_re_us/us_wildfires

More than 30K ordered to flee Santa Barbara fire

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – Turning the horizon a lurid orange and raining embers on roofs as it advanced, a raging wildfire that has destroyed scores of homes in the hills menaced this celebrity enclave and other coastal towns Friday, and the number of people ordered to flee climbed to 30,000. Authorities warned an additional 23,000 to be ready to leave at a moment's notice.
Columns of smoke rose off the Santa Ynez Mountains as the 4-day-old blaze — fanned by "sundowner" winds that sweep down the slopes in the evening — blew up from 2,700 acres to 3,500 in less than a day, creating a firefighting front five miles long.
"It's crazy. The whole mountain looked like an inferno," said Maria Martinez, 50, who with her fiance hurriedly left her home in San Marcos Pass, on the edge of Santa Barbara. The couple went to an evacuation center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
An unknown number of homes were destroyed in the blowup that began Thursday night, in addition to the estimated 75 houses that burned the night before on the ridges and in the canyons above Santa Barbara.

Didn't this like just happen?

Give 'em some FEMA trailers.

It happens all the time. Cali folk take it in stride with the "well sure occasionally we get fires/mudslides/earthquakes/car jacking/etc."

No, I mean weren't there fires in California last year too?

Why does all of this sound familiar?

Yes, there were fires last year in Cali.....it's an ongoing thing.

I would like to see The Governator do the "when can you start?"
promotional spots with a blazing fire in the background.

Southern California tends to have brushfires every fall. They're a natural phenomenon. Happened before humans were here; will continue long after humans are gone.

While it's unusual to have them in the spring as well, we had virtually no rain this past winter (rainy season is from Thanksgiving through the end of March), so the woods are exceptionally dry this early in the year.

While I don't know if the cause of the Santa Barbara fire has been established (arson is a big factor, not to mention stupid campers who think "No Campfires" means other people, not them), a rather bizarre burst of hot, dry wind on Wednesday evening drove the Jesusita fire ahead of it, exacerbating the problem.

I'm over 100 miles from the fire, and we could see the smoke from here. That's extremely rare.

People persist in building houses in wooded areas. Building codes for new construction require fireproofing, but anything built before the codes were passed can burn to the ground in minutes.

Yeah, because the humans in Cali refuse to cut back the underbrush in the interests of 'preserving the natural environment.' If they would act as proper stewards of the land instead of raging liberal eco-nuts, there would be a lot more acreage UNBURNT in Cali and a lot more homes still standing, and a lot of insurance money not spent on claims. (Guess how they recoup it?)

I shake my head EVERY YEAR at this bullshit, then go all John McLaine and just say: "California!"

Let it burn. Fucking liberals. Reap what you sow, bitches.

More like Southern California is ungodly hot and people who live there are dumb.

Northern California rarely has this problem--maybe once every 10-20 years.

Same old fucking shit every year. The greenies bitch about anybody who cuts down a tree and outlaw woodburning and every year they have a big fire. Funny how fireplaces and wood stoves pollute the environment but forest fires don't.

what

The first thing I thought was Sodom and Gamorrah. But Sodom's in northern Cali and Gamorrah's across the country.

Then I thought, hmm, Biblical reference, maybe there's a God, after all, and He's finally decided to shut actormike up.

Then I realized, no, if there was a God, He'd be a Marine, and Marines have better aim.

It would help if they wouldn't build in fire prone areas, so they could actually let the wildfires burn and do their thing in clearing out the dry material, and in some cases actually helping the reproductive process of some trees. Smokey did his job too well in preventing forest fires.

That's the danger of paying too much attention to cartoon bears. Or talking animals in general.

Case in point - PETA.

Can we get them all together in a hangar somewhere? There must be some way to fit them all into the back of a C-130 and use them to put out those fires. Tell 'em it's to save Bambi or something.

Can we make fun of people who live in Tornado Alley now?

What about people who end up with no power whenever there's an ice storm?

East Coasters and hurricanes?

People who build on river banks in the middle of flood plains?

Or, quick, somebody say something about mudslides and earthquakes.

Brush fires are nature's way of clearing brush. She's been doing it for millions of years. If you insist on building your home in the middle of the woods, up a winding private road that makes access difficult, you should be no more surprised by what happens than the guy who watches the river rise every spring and wonders if it'll just cover the porch or hit the rafters.

Besides, it's a media conspiracy. We don't want anyone else moving here, so we try to scare y'all away.

Sure, you can make fun of those people. Personally I live in a place that doesn't get many tornadoes, and when we do they don't kill or hurt many, if any people, and when we get winter storms, the power doesn't go out because our infrastructure is built to withstand it.

And I live in an urban area with no brush and hence no brushfires. The worst that happens where I am is we get a little smoke in the air. What was odd about the Santa Barbara fire is that it was so far away, but the Santa Anas picked that evening to come roaring down and pushing the smoke over 100 miles away.

The majority of the folks who are victims of the geography in California are people with no common sense.

You don't build your house into the side of a cliff in an earthquake zone that's known for mudslides.

You don't build your house in the woods and then plant a grove of eucalyptus trees around it.

The problem doesn't come from nature burning things.

The problem comes from humans. We don't like fires. So for decades we did everything we could to prevent them. But as fuel for fires built up eventually you reached a point where you have massive fires.

We learned our lesson. Now in most places we work to clear out the brush (yes that means logging too) and even do controlled burns to lessen the amount of fuel for natures fury.

Except of course for the environmental nuts. They are always trying to stop things that would clear out the brush. One only has to look at California and the constant yearly fires to see that the nuts are in charge there.

If California would force real "forest" management we would not see so many fires nor would they become huge conflagrations.

I don't follow this all that closely, but I wonder how much of the problem is California's habitual budget shortfall. Easier to blame it on the tree-huggers than the politicians, I suppose.

Incidentally, there are currently wildfires in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Local media's probably covering those, but they don't make national news.

Mission accomplished IMO!

Anyway, as far as Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, etc. having fires and not many folks hearing about it.....no millionaire celebrities live there.

But that Arizona high-elevation pine/spruce forest is sweeeeet!

Who'd want to live in Communist California anyway?

Me, motherfucker. I just came back from a beach party where I cooked out under the stars, smoked hash and watched the police break up a massive gang fight.

I can do all of those things but the last one right where I live, and to be frank I'm happy to do without the gang wars.

Building codes are useless when it comes to wildfires if the government forbids sculpting your own landscape in such as way as to keep the fire at bay around your house. What difference does it make if your house is constructed with masonry when the fiery branch of a sacred tree collapses into your window and lights the bedsheets aflame?

With any luck, these Californians won't take their fire insurance checks and pollute the surrounding states with their presence.

Well, if you're stupid enough to surround your house, which you've had built in a heavily-wooded area to begin with, with a grove of eucalyptus trees - which are, yanno, where eucalyptus oil comes from; they're basically oil-soaked torches waiting for a spark - then you deserve the consequences.

That's a great idea. Then you can buy their burnt out land on the cheap and build your own mini-mansion in a known fire zone, and a coupla years from now, you'll be about how you barely had time to toss the Calloways in the back of the Escalade before the mean old state troopers made you evacuate.

Just maybe somebody who said, "I wish California would die in a fire," is getting their dream come true.

Fire's 40% contained. Thirty houses totaled, another 50 or so damaged enough to file insurance claims. No one died.

You people really should get away from the keyboard more often.