Re: Fires in Southern California


Tony & Moira Ryan, Wainuiomata, New Zealand
Climate ( US Zone 9). Annual averages:-
Minimum -2°C; Maximum 28°C Rainfall 2000mm
----- Original Message ----- From: "B. Garcia" <paroxytone@gmail.com> 


Nan, I am glad that you and your family are alright.

\(Snip)
the local news reported a Canadian

Supertanker plane is being sent to help out.

Up here in Monterey, there has been some high level smoke that has
been blown north from the smoke that the Santa Ana winds drove west.
It provided for a strange sunset (much yellower than they usually are,
and the horizon was filled with strange gray, brown, and dusty pink
"clouds").
We are so lucky here in NZ that out forest, being damp temperate rainforest, is very hard to burn, though we have very occasionally had bad fires in our commercial plantations and quite often have to battle nasty scrub fires on the outskirts of inhabited areas. However we are well aware of the really dangerous burns that take place most years in Australia. Indeed because of prevailing winds we have quite often had our skies filled with smoke for days from conflagrations right on the far side of the Tasman sea near their east coast, particularly around Sydney. In the worst years(and last summer was one of them) we have had crews of our fire fighters volunteer to go and help out and even had them suffer the occasional casualty.
The vegetation in Australia is very much geared to withstanding burning which seems to have developed as a normal part of its life strategy. My very first view of Oz was from a train coming into Sydney from the south where a fire some months earlier had blackened all the trees in sight (mainly different gum species) , but virtually none was dead. They were all rapidly coming into new leaf.
Moira
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