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Reply to "So Cal Fires (again)"

Thank you everyone.

Gary, to answer your question, when the high winds blow here, with gusts in the 70 to 100 mph range, it will cause the cables of the high voltage power towers to swing, and they eventually come close enough together to arc & make sparks, the sparks touch off the dry brush below the towers, and we have a fire. Another cause of fires are poorly running cars that fill their catalytic converters with unburned fuel thus creating sparks or flames. Lightning has occasionally started fires, but that was not the case this time. However, if you have watched the news, you have seen that over a dozen fires were started. Some of them are nowhere near a road or high voltage power towers. The remainder of the fires were started by arsonists.

Much of Southern California is a dry, desert area. Some of that desert has been reclaimed, valley by valley, because we import water from the western & eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Colorado River. Dry brush is natural to the ladscape. So are the dry, hot, high speed desert winds (aka Santana winds). We were lucky this time, the high winds only lasted a few days. They can last upwards of two weeks. To give you an example, 2 nights ago the temperature in the evening never dropped below 80 degrees, last night the temperature dropped to about 65 degrees, a 15 degree difference in 24 hours, simply because the direction of the winds changed.

George
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