The Offline Report

  Every time a home or any fire fuel burns, CO2 is released into the atmosphere. The culture is slowly catching onto the counter-intuitive fact that tiny fire embers coupled with small twigs start more fires than do large old-growth trees. This was illustrated for the slacker general public in 2003 via the infamous tie-breaking challenge from "Survivor: Cook Islands": A later, more serious 60 Minutes segment from 2017 called "In the Path of Fire" reported the specific small measures that made an enormous difference determining which homes withstood fires unscathed . It took well over a year to distribute the information through the confusion silo that is Facebook before "embers" were reported on more widely in mainstream media. We Californians and other fire-prone state residents need to repeatedly spread this information. The L.A. Times this week reported the state legislature just stripped a program that funded loans to fire-proof homes : Meanwhile, t...

Just three years ago, in this era of nonexistant current events caching, a firefighter died Christmas day fighting a weeks-long wildfire and hardly anyone noticed. That was before people had quit Facebook kaleidoscope and re-joined the real world. Since that time, Californians have adapted somewhat, ironing out alert techniques, running practice evacuations in towns with narrow roads, and clearing brush to create a defensible space within 100 feet of homes and buildings. This frees up firefighters from the duty of saving people to actually dousing flames or cutting fire breaks. It's only November 2nd, though, and we're holding our breath in the back of our minds as we breath through the day, dutifully carrying on business as usual so as not to abet panic contagion. This year because our statewide power company PG&E decided to preemptively prevent fire with planned power grid blackouts, the drama is amplified. Also, thanks to uber-environmentalist and 360.org founder Bill M...

Here's a news story from Dec. 13th this reader only discovered in the paper edition. The SF Chronicle home page is lovely, but it's difficult to discern which stories are from today's paper, yesterday's paper, or last month's paper. In the paper edition AND the e-edition, however, the reader can flip through that day's edition and scan headlines of every story in every section. The story titled " 911 call logs reveal terrifying moments at onset of Camp Fire " covers both which residents received evacuation calls from regional authorities, and which residents placed calls. Particularly heart-breaking is the story of one 11-year-old who called 9-1-1 and remains unaccounted for. "Hundreds of calls rolled in throughout the day" the story says. "In Magalia, an 11-year-old child had stayed home from school, and her parents couldn’t get home to get her out." Evacuation call procedures, and their failures, have been covered by othe...

In the last decade digital technology has pushed analog off the cliff, and we're still tying up the loose ends from the severed analog connections. People over a certain age (40) remember analog telephones never needed a battery or any kind of power adapter. Among the half of households still using landlines these days, few of them realize their home lines won't work when the power is out, regardless of what kind of phone they have, because the underlying analog telephone networks have been replaced with digital networks . In 2018 KQED combed through 9-1-1 logs to identify some evacuation communications failures from 2017's fires , many of which have been fixed since their report. The L.A. Times this week reported more communications and alert failures in this article: Camp fire evacuations failed to reach more than a third of residents meant to receive calls . The L.A. Times also reported more state legislature calls to action toward closing the feedback loop in this ar...

A 60 Minutes segment called In the Path of Fire that ran just last year in May 2017, but many wildfires ago, described and showed the enormous difference fire-proofing a home can make. Just clearing a home's perimeter of debris goes a long way, as does installing ember-proof vents. Circled in the photo above is the unscathed California home of retired firefighter Fred Roach. Fred Roach: This house here was prepared. And did not need ... the air tanker full of retardant ... or the helicopter full of water ... or all the engines to protect it. It, it was, it protects itself. Voiceover: Fred Roach thought about fire when improving his home. And says anyone can do what he did. FR: The house was stuccoed about five years ago. And we stuccoed everything under the eaves, the entire thing. Steve Inskeep: Stucco's basically fireproof? FR: Uh basically. Close to it. And then we took all the redwood decking off the deck and replaced it with synthetic. SI: Which doesn't...

Carole Masson, 68, one who successfully evacuated the Paradise, CA, town recently leveled by wildfire, told the SFWeekly that landlines in the area have been converted from analog to digital. A Harvard Business Review in 2014 reported the FCC was coordinating the replacement of analog telephone networks with digital ones . Analog phone networks worked when the power was out. Apparently digital phone networks don't: The main problem with the Camp Fire, she says, is that PG&E warned people they were going to turn off the power in the days leading up to it. When it did go out, it was because the fire blew out the transformers and knocked down power lines, but many residents thought it was simply their energy company taking precautions. As landlines are digital now, the minute the power goes down so do the house phones, destroying communication for those who don’t own cell phones. “We need either some kind of a landline system with remotes in people’s houses, because if they d...

A Cal Fire firefighter monitors a burning home as the Camp Fire moves through. November 8, 2018 in Paradise, California. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) Here's a 28-minute audio broadcast worth transcribing when time allows: Nov 21 KQED Forum An Update on the Camp Fire . The day before Thanksgiving a fill-in host from Southern California hosted on KQED Forum a Paradise Fire update, featuring: an interview with a FEMA administrator, reporters who'd filed stories from the field, and listener calls. 28 minute broadcast. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Forest thinning done wrong, removing old-growth trees, makes forests more fire-prone. As this reporter from 1875 witnessed, a fire races across a prairie then calms considerably upon forest entry: TULARE -- In the forest between the Middle and East forks of the Kaweah , I met a great fire, and as fire is the master scourge and controller of the distribution of trees, I stopped to watch it and learn what I could of its works and ways with the giants. It came racing up the steep chaparral-covered slopes of the East Fork cañon with passionate enthusiasm in a broad cataract of flames, now bending down low to feed on the green bushes, devouring acres of them at a breath, now towering high in the air as if looking abroad to choose a way, then stooping to feed again, the lurid flapping surges and the smoke and terrible rushing and roaring hiding all that is gentle and orderly in the work. But as soon as the deep forest was reached the ungovernable flood became calm like a torrent entering...

("In order to deal with the upsurge in ecological, economic, educational, legal and health issues associated with more and bigger wildfires in the West, Dr. Schoennagel proclaims, 'We need to develop a new fire culture.'" - Sara Vowell, NYTimes.com June 13 2018) Here's an item from one story deserving of expansion into a larger feature story of its own: From one of multiple thoroughly reported stories on the Carr Fire in today's "edition" of the San Francisco Chronicle (July 29, 2018 page A11 headline "Fires merge, forcing evacuations") ( online version of same story here, with different headline "Mendocino fires combine, moving into Lake County and forcing evacuations" ): "One of the problems that firefighters are facing right now is just lack of resources," said Brian May, spokesperson for the state's Office of Emergency Services. "With all of these fires burning across the state, they are just tapped out....