Intersection Logs

Today was cold and rainy again -- yet another second-hand California storm. I think the leak in my bedroom has shifted along again, fortunately not by more than the length of the receptacle I had under it; I don't know whether that is just gravity or the result of another intervention by the roofing company. If it moves another couple of feet that way it won't be my problem any more.

Mount Wilson is getting hammered, with roads getting washed out in the aftermath of the fire.

The Santa Anas are coming, and the Station Fire isn't quite fully contained, let alone out. It's been pretty quiet by Mount Wilson the last few days, but over the weekend the firefighters have been pretty busy dropping water from planes and helicopters, hoping to damp down the last smouldering hotspots before the winds come; now and again the towercam catches a glimpse of one. I've been keeping an eye on it. This afternoon there were plumes of smoke puffing up from the mountains on the other side of the valley every few minutes, there in one frame and then gone the next. Hot spots heating up, or dust-devils of ash, or reactions to something the tankers were doing? I don't know, but it was a worrying sight. It calmed down after about 3.30, and it all looks pretty dark and peaceful now.

Meanwhile, MODIS is showing a tiny new fire up to the north of Sonoma county, in the mountains. (Google Earth fire-detections.) That one doesn't have a name or a website that I can find -- at least not yet.

This is the one where I got both the Mount Wilson Observatory and the Station Fire in the same shot, though you probably have to view it full size to see them.

The fire is finally winding down, though there's still a fair amount of smoke from the back-burning around Mount Wilson visible on the Towercam.

Lots of smoke on Mt Wilson today, particularly in the afternoon; the long-awaited controlled burn finally went ahead. (What they did last night was just preliminaries, apparently.) Details on the director's fireblog and at the Inciweb, which is currently showcasing children's letters to the firefighters. (Class project or something more spontaneous, I'm not sure which.)

I've been capturing the image from the Towercam every five minutes since Monday. Currently I'm geeking out a bit over the amount of information that can be deduced simply by considering the size of the JPEG files as a time series. Considering the destruction (and the loss of two lives) caused by this fire, I feel a little uncomfortable about this, but looking for patterns in data is what I do ...

*Not* uploaded at full resolution, but this one hardly needs it. (It was taken at fairly high zoom -- we were out over the ocean at the time, heading north from LAX to San Jose.) That's the smoke from the remnant of the Station Fire, still burning in the far north-eastern corner.

Planned burn at Mount Wilson tomorrow, weather and whatnot permitting? It's been pretty quiet there all day, by the looks of it.

Daylight hides the fires on the distant mountains, but as dusk falls they emerge, little spots and flags of orange against the dun of the shadowed slopes. They aren't as many, or as bright, or as close, as they were last night and the night before, but they're there.

Mike Brown of Caltech has made movies from the Mount Wilson webcam from Friday night and Saturday night. I think that burning mountain in the distance must be in the Chilao area. It's still burning over there tonight, but not quite as fiercely, to my eye.

The fire isn't anywhere near dead yet at that end; in fact it spread quite a bit yesterday. The observatory is very well defended by now, though.

The Mount Wilson webcam is back! Also at the mirror site in case of congestion. The .travel mirror seems to have dropped it, but maybe they'll pick it up when they notice. There's a lot of smoke, but it seems to be mostly coming from some distance off; the camera has been turned around to face eastward, towards the area where the fire is still burning.

There's a map of the fire's development here, which saves me some messing about with Google Earth and Photoshop.

From Inciweb:

"Today the fire continued to move west toward Mount Wilson. Currently there is a large contingent of fire engines, hand crews, and water tenders in place to protect and defend the valuable assets on top of the mountain. Aircraft were also called in to drop retardant on the west slope of Mt. Wilson to slow the fire's progress. Thanks to the hard work done over the past few days Mount Wilson's defensibility has been greatly improved."

The director moved his blog again, but he's hoping to visit the mountain over the next few days (he's based in Georgia, apparently) so there won't be any more updates there for a while.

Waitaminute, move west? Considering that the bulk of the fire seems to be heading eastward, that doesn't sound good. Let's hope it's just a slip of the fingers.

More Google-earthable satellite fire data available from a slightly different branch of government, here. Extremely coolimpressive. It doesn't seem to be showing any activity very close to Mt Wilson today, but the sort of wisps of smoke I noticed this afternoon, when one of the local TV stations had parked a camera where the Towercam used to be and CNN.com Live was briefly streaming it, would hardly show up at 1km resolution. If I'd known about that one a few days ago I'd be spending far too much time making animations.

It's been a busy day on Mount Wilson. There was a lot of smoke on the webcam from early morning, and a LOT of smoke by lunchtime. After lunch someone put up a proper mirror of the poor oversubscribed webcam; about an hour later the observatory went offline. The director was ready for this and evacuated his blog to Georgia State; apparently most of the smoke was from backfires set by firefighters who were back on the mountain, and they think one of the backfires took out the internet connection. Mid-afternoon there was much excitement over a big water-drop, which I managed to miss despite juggling three or four live video feeds -- one of which cut away to NASA TV just as things were getting interesting.

Cautious optimism, I think.