NASA shares high-resolution satellite images of California's Camp wildfire

Team Yeti, Are you talking about the Camp Fire? Yeah, they don't know the exact cause but PG&E is high on the suspect list. They sent technicians out to check a sparking transformer, but the woman wasn't home so they couldn't get permission. Then not long after they suffered a blackout at that transformer and 15 minutes later there were reports of a fire in that particular area.

@photogeek, foxnews talking points.

1. Most of the recent deadly wildfires have been because of downed power lines. PG&E (utility company) is notorious for poor maintenance and have been implicated in other fires in both urban and wilderness areas. Dry grass and shrub is a part of the problem, but it doesn't spontaneously self combust. 2. People keep putting houses ever closer to forests. 3. No one blamed MoroninChief; he inserted himself in the conversation with his stupid theory. 4. Normally, by now, we would have received a few rains in the season, but climate change ('chinese hoax' according to a certain climate 'expert') has absolutely exacerbated the issue. All western states have seen wildfires and it's only going to get worse.

Wildfires and forest fires are normal. With 600,000,000 lightning strikes per year in North America, can you imagine what normally starts them? Don't blame PG&E. Blame nature.

@photogeek , it obviously isnt Trumps fault! he is not almighty and only been prez for 2 years. He is only at fault for being an a-hole and spreading lies and hate for his own benefit.

@photogeek Let's be real and stop with the strawman arguments... commercial timber companies aren't interested in removing those hundreds of millions of dead trees. They are worthless for lumber, and are the most expensive to cut/remove (they are so rotten they fall apart easily)

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/30/thinning-californias-fire-prone-forests-5-things-to-know-as-lawmakers-move-toward-a-plan/

Also, why are you complaining about California state government when the majority of forest in the state are control by the federal government ... which has specific cut funding for "forest thinning and controlled burns"

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article216160995.html

"Don't blame PG&E. Blame nature."

PG&E has already started at least 12 wildfires in 2018. You're on a roll in these comments with stating misinformation. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/12-Northern-California-fires-caused-by-PG-E-power-12979955.php

"With 600,000,000 lightning strikes per year in North America, can you imagine what normally starts them?"

Again with the lightning strikes. You know what starts most wildfires? Not lightning strikes.

If satellite fire monitoring is being done (which I doubt), I wonder why so many of these fires are getting out of hand instead of being put out immediately. They would have the GPS coordinates, and I would think it's straightforward to send in aircraft with fire retardant to deal with them.

Satellite monitoring of wildfires is done at least since about 8 years, both in the US and in the Mediterranean, and apparently now alos in India. The challenges include:

- relatively low resolution of IR cameras on satellites (think 1km² pixels)
- relatively infrequent satellite passes over any given spot (though that is improving with a higher number of satellites, e.g. in Europe the current Copernicus missings keep adding capability)

It is not even close to being trivial to detect to then to quickly extiguish wildfires. There are limited numbers of planes and other resoruces that can be quickly deployed, and under some weather conditions it is next to impossible to really contain a wildfire. It is possible to detect and evacuate wuickly however.

ITT: People drastically underestimating how difficult it is to see the *start* of a wildfire from space.

Not to accuse other countries, but judging from the meager resources the US Govt devotes to acquiring effective firefighting aircraft (until recently, mainly leased from Canada as needed) and all the other domestic infrastructure that languishes in disrepair -- contrasted with the VAST resources devoted to military aircraft (F-35 program) and other purported "defense" imperatives -- I think the excuse of "limited numbers of planes..." is likely the same weak argument as for difficulty of detection from space. Both detection and firefighting are likely considered a relatively low priority, similar to the whole range of other unmet domestic needs that are sublimated to an unmitigated profit motive by our corrupt leaders.

The fire detection that is being done is very poor due to the lag time of officials being notified, thus the fires spread rapidly until they're out of control. This has happened time and again. Also as I mentioned, the firefighting equipment is woefully inadequate. There should be a fleet of water tankers and "super scooper" aircraft stationed at every Air Force base in the West. Then, the system of emergency notification of the public is not set up correctly -- officials don't even use it because they're afraid of a mass exodus that would clog highways. Finally, disaster assistance is inadequate -- lack of shelters and help with relocating / rebuilding. The whole infrastructure is a mess because public funding is insufficient for the needs of the commons -- it's almost all going for "defense."

Yeah, the proof of the pudding...

Most of the speculation seems centered around equipment or cables owned by California's giant power utility PG&E sparking (literally) this fire.

40 million people sucking every river dry might be part of the problem too.

Growing rice in the desert-which uses more water than the entire LA basin of people-when it grows to perfection on rain alone in so many other places, might also be part of the problem. Environmentalists have been on about this at least since the 1990s and probably before that.

And if the Federal Government weren't short over 450 appointees because Little Orange Twiitler can't be bothered to do his actual job of appointing them.. it might also have the manpower to manage those lands better.

75% of the California water goes for agriculture products most of which are exported in the entire US. There are even rice fields in CA! Rice fields where hundreds of thousands of acres are flooded and look like lakes. This is not small farmers, this is big industrial farming. The california farm industry is destroying the state, the groundwater levels are plummeting lower and lower, the Central valley is sinking as a result of this. Not the reason for this fire but to put things in perspective.
NOTE: Mr. Bolton, apparently we were writing replies simultaneously...

I wonder what the correlation of structure damage to number of structures being built is. in the last 25 years I'm willing to bet many many more structures were built near fire prone areas and therefore when a fire does happen higher numbers of structures get burned. If one wants to use structures burned as a measure of how bad a fire is and they also don't want the fires to be worse as the years progress then the simple solution is to stop building structures in the fire prone areas. Don't get me wrong the last week has been a horrible time for people in CA and I feel for them!

Trump's been in office for 2 years, so it's his fault that 100+ year old trees are where they are, and the state of the forestry, LOL. Good example of Trump derangement syndrome - seriously. Been fires there for as long as I can recall (40+ years).

junk1 -no one's blaming trump for the fires -it's his use of them as a political football that is the issue. No disaster is beyond his ability to point fingers and make it all about his petty squabbles. Did I mention he's a tone-deaf cretin?
These fires are nothing like you recall.

@junk1 No, hes at fault for being a grand a-hole and spreading lies and hate. That is his own doing and it certainly does not help maters.

He only hates people like you sneakyracer . . . and radical muslims . . . and illegal aliens . . . and Rosie O'Donnel . . . and . . .

Fk U @Scottelly , hope the orange tanned pres fks u too. Whoever voted for him deserves that and more.

@Tommi K1, I read somewhere that 90-95% of the fires we see in the US in recent years in typical fire prone areas are a result of human activity (human fires that got out of control)... Simple solution, get rid of the humans!

He's the end game of the Rethuglicans' 'Government is the problem' strategy: make the government run by such incompetents that it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Then give everything to the rich.

Flint doesn't have water. Puerto Rico doesn't have infrastructure. We're using slave prison labor to fight fires. Record natural disasters and failing schools and rampant gun violence.. meanwhile tRump is, in his words, having "a bad hair day."

But yeah. Soros and the Clintons and Obama.

Thanks to all for the many wise and thoughtful comments on this! I agree very much with the points made by Fleabag, Junk1, Mr Bolton, georgievv and others, not least that Water management may be a far greater problem than forest management and that the President is completely ignorant and tone death when it comes to the environmental issues plaguing the world right now. The Sierra Club and other environmental organizations raise the point of roadless forests as being more resistant to fire. Also, old-growth forests are considerably less fire prone than forests which are cut down every eighty to a hundred years. Thats a lesson we here in Sweden learnt last summer when we experienced our by far worst wild fires after months of drought. Sweden has extremely little old-growth forest left, only a tiny fraction in fact - a few parts per thousand of the nation's forests.

The Finnish have made a great joke about the false claims made by Trump that they have a great forest management since they "rake their forests". "Make America Rake Again". Check out this guy for a good laugh: https://twitter.com/Valavuori/status/1064210224624689153
More can be seen here: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/18/politics/finnish-president-trump-raking-forest-fires/index.html

My heart goes out to all people and animals in California who were killed, harmed and affected by this horrible disaster. We all have to dig in deep now and join forces in stopping climate change.

CA should spend more on forests, less on illegals. Wouldn't cost that much (compared to 1000's of houses burning down and dozens killed) to cut down trees to create barriers for fires. Heck, could sell the wood, so it might be free to cut them down. Use the new roads/paths for hiking, ATVs, dirt bikes; etc.
I also wonder if certain types of trees and bushes are more fire tolerant. Poplar wood for example is very hard to burn in a campfire.

California sees approximately five times the return dollars for every dollar they spend on undocumented immigrants. That's a far better ROI (at least five to one) than the money we're spending to put FLOTUS up for ninety five grand a night in Cairo. Or the $140 million and counting we've dumped into Mar A Lago. California pays hundreds of billions in federal tax revenue every year, and we're sure not getting any of it back that's spent floating this orange turd. In fact he's simply failed to do his job: over 400 executive branch positions unfilled because he doesn't know how to do it. There's your mismanagement.

You wanna talk about ROI on government spending in this administration? Yeah, let's go there. And before you say it: the Mueller investigation has cost less than Benghazi, and has brought down eight companies and 33 people with convictions and plea deals. So far. In contrast, all four Benghazi investigations together found: nothing.

"Poplar wood for example is very hard to burn in a campfire." It's also a wetlands tree -requiring far more water than is available in the burning areas in California.

You do know that you can't get medicaid or welfare or college tuition aid if you aren't a citizen... right? You know that, right?

Meanwhile, I've worked with puh-lenty of very useless white guys. Undocumented workers pick most of our food, for starters. It would be far more expensive if citizens did it themselves.

Junk1: I've known you for ten minutes and enjoyed none of them. So, I'm not gonna do your homework for you. Google the movie "A Day Without A Mexican" and its accompanying statistics. But then you'll find out who is FOS here. It's not me. From my back in the day mechanic job at the building insulation place which made its fortune on the backs of $2.50 an hour illegals because they installed insulation twice as fast as useless white guys (Oh, and crooked Capitalist boss didn't have to bother with any of that annoying safety gear), to my current jobs in construction where the non-English speakers are doing all the work while Whitey stands around 'supervising.. I'll tell you to your face where you can cram that 'lazy immigrant' BS.

So which is it, Trumpkin? Are they 'taking our jobs' or 'lazy immigrants'?

Spot on Bolton.

"Hardly are they more productive than citizens - they don't even speak the language typically" Junk1, I quote you above where you most certainly did say they weren't citizens.

You know dang good and well of the racism at the dark heart of every anti-immigrant argument foisted by a citizen of a country made up mostly of immigrants. Except for the natives which were genocidally wiped out en masse by the first wave of said immigrants. It seems like they'd have a pretty good anti-immigrant argument to make.

And if you didn't say they weren't citizens, then what's your point? Every citizen gets the same (more or less.. more if you're rich, less if you're not and even less if you're brown) rights and privileges. So your Ecuadorian uncle went through the hoops to gain citizenship-itself more rigorous than a high school education in the USA-then got college tuition aid so he could.. get a better job and make more money?

We put children in cages now. Enjoy your tRump.