Wildfire smoke spreads across the bay | Hacker News Reader

Wildfire smoke spreads across the bay

mercurynews.com

79 pointsFiveSquared41 comments

You can see the smoke being blown south pretty clearly here http://col.st/DGu7J

Here's a satellite image composite of it: https://i.imgur.com/DrHZbg6.jpg

Nasa Worldview has layers with daily updates collected from a bunch of different weather satellites: https://go.nasa.gov/2ycBN2H

really good visualization of this from the forest service airfire tool https://tools.airfire.org/websky/v1/run/standard/CANSAC-2km/...

via stamen design https://twitter.com/stamen/status/918210924615426049

Your link is from 2 days ago, here's one from today https://tools.airfire.org/websky/v1/run/standard/CANSAC-2km/...

There's some great tools on that airfire.org site! Data overload for sure.

The smoke reminded me of back home in India.

We burn lignite ash coal, it's 50% low quality coal.

About 0.5M Indians die yearly from air particulates. http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/pollution-particulate-matte...

Yeah. I remember that. To make matters worse, people continue to burn trash in Delhi despite fines, which just makes the already bad air quaility even worse.

Source: Garbage burning undermines AAP govt’s focus on reducing air pollution http://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/garbage-burning-und...

Do you get such low temperatures in India that coal burning is an issue? How many months do you need heating?

"India" is a huge country that includes some of the tallest and coldest mountains anywhere in the world. There are places in India where heating is required 100% of the time.

I'm unaware of how much of New Delhi needs heating. Even tropics can be cool at night.

Coal-fired power plants?

Correct.

We're opening one every month til the USA gives us unfettered uranium/plutonium access rights. We were kept like this for 50 years.....

The Santa Rosa area is being hit hard. See the Cal Fire map.[1] Two of the fires in Sonoma have connected since last night, and it looks like the Patrick Fire and the Norrborn Fire will connect soon. Many towns are already gone. Santa Rosa looks like it will make it.

I have friends in Lake County. They're helping evacuate horses from areas that are worse off.

[1] http://www.fire.ca.gov/general/firemaps

SFPL has said that they have air filters in some of their locations & the mayor tweeted that people can go sit around in the library if they have trouble breathing.

https://twitter.com/mayoredlee/status/918477373657325568

Yeah. This is time for me to get on my high horse about controlled burns and fire being part of the ecosystem.

We've gotten so good at fighting fires that there is so much underbrush built up that one spark causes huge catastrophes like this, rather than a whole rash of little fires.

The bay area is so built-up that a lot of people really are building where they shouldn't be building, or don't do proper fire safety measures, such as cut back trees for 50 feet around their house and clear out underbrush. So even the "natural" little fires cause great property damage and need to be fought, giving these huge blazes enough fuel to really spread beyond any hope of containment.

At this point I think they're just trying to divert the fire, save lives, and hope it burns out soon.

I live in SF (Bernal Heights) and had to brush ashes off my motorcycle before I left for work today. For the last few days, every time I went outside it smelled like a campfire. Some coworkers just dropped off supplies in Petaluma this morning.

Really glad I'm on this side of the water.

Los Altos here. A bit better tonight than last night, when it smelled like a campfire and the sky was a thick orange. My main concern is our young ones.

Also, the houses here weren’t really built for this (or the dangerous heat waves we endured this summer). Poorly insulated, designed for very moderate Northern California weather.

And we’re just the periphery - the side effect of the tragedy unfolding just an hour north of here.

Stay safe - keep an eye on the air quality reports and take them seriously.

Live and work in the south bay and yesterday was really bad. This morning I could still smell the smoke but the skies seemed a bit clearer. Yesterday, though, the conditions reminded me of pictures from China where the pollution is so dense, your field of view appears to be around 10 meters or less. I could barely make out the mountains east of my home.

Don't underestimate how bad smoke is for your health. If you are in an affected area, try to work from home, stay indoors, and order in.

These days you can even get groceries delivered and laundry picked up, so take advantage of that and save your health!

You can also buy portable air purifiers online and have those delivered as well.

Why ruin your own health when you can pay other people to do it for you?

Offices tend to have better filtration and air pressure measures than the average house. You may be better off heading in.

The poor delivery people.

If you are a not-too-young, not-too-old, otherwise healthy not-pregnant person, this kind of smoke will be an annoyance with acute effects, but isn't going to do any long term damage to you.

That's basically what the guest on KQED Forum said this morning. A week's exposure isn't going to have significant long term damage for healthy individuals.

You can get a good quality respirator for 30 bucks on Amazon.

Link?

You want this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008MCUT86/ref=od_aui_deta...

And the filters: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0009XYN7O/ref=od_aui_deta...

P100 (P for oil Proof, 100 for reduces particulates by 99.97%) filters are the best you can get[0]. N95 (N for not oil resistant) filters will also work for smoke[1], but they will get clogged in heavy-smoke environments quicker, so P filters are recommended [2 (filter selection flowchart)].

Like others have said, being inside is safer, and these filters get expensive.

[0]https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/96-101

[1]https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/477874O/wildfires-cleanu...

[2]https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/96-101/images/96-101.gif

The white smoke in the fireforests is mostly made of water.

The air quality in the East Bay is so poor that my home smelled like I left the windows open during a BBQ this morning.

We had that up in the PNW for pretty much all summer. Welcome to the experience.

That's the same in basically every apartment in SF right now, too.

How is the temperature? I live in SoCal, and usually the bad wildfires happen at the same time as the Santa Anas, so it's either close your windows and overheat, or open your windows and damage your lungs.

It's heating up this weekend, but will only be in mid-80s (at least near Palo Alto — perhaps 90s in the East Bay). So far, it's not too much of a dilemma: windows closed, AC off.

The high is around 80 on Sunday, 70 today. It really depends on what neighborhood you are in. Some are higher and most are a little lower.

The NOAA HRRR smoke model is the best visualization I've found:

https://hwp-viz.gsd.esrl.noaa.gov/smoke/index.html

Enable Near Surface Smoke. And the Z-time at the bottom is 7 hours ahead of Pacific Daylight Time.

Even the SF city has been unbelievably smoky the last couple of days.

280 was unbelievably smoky yesterday. Hills next to road hard to see.

Cosplay as China day.

Friend at a bank in downtown San Jose just posted a view of the sky there.[1]

[1] https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155626120452976&se...

Photo isn't viewable. Likely private.

Oops, not public.

Downtown SJ bank buildings under a reddish-brown sky. Taken at noon today.

Boohoo, poor Silicon Valley! I can't sit outside comfortably drinking my kale smoothie today!

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