Inbox for international stuff.
Tenerife fire in the Canary Islands grew more than 4,000 acres in a day.
In pictures: Wildfire on Spain’s Tenerife island spreads - August 17, 2023 | Reuters
3 Likes
Few European countries have escaped the extreme weather spreading throughout the continent. Wildfires have raged across much of Western Europe and the Mediterranean, while flooding and rainstorms have plagued central European countries including Croatia, Austria and the Czech Republic.
Torrential rain, flash floods and raging wildfires: Europe’s extreme summer | Euronews
Aug. 17 (UPI) – Residents of Yellowknife and surrounding areas have been ordered to evacuate as a wildfire threatens to reach the outskirts of the northern Canadian city by the weekend.
Some 20,000 people who call Yellowknife home were ordered Wednesday to leave the city by noon Friday, with residents of neighboring communities of Ingraham Trail, Dettah, Kam Lake, Grace Lake and the city’s Engle Business District instructed to evacuate “as soon as possible” as they are at the highest risk.
“Residents who choose not to evacuate should understand they stay at their own risk,” the government of Northwest Territories said in the evacuation order. “Responders may not be able to come to your rescue if it is unsafe to do so.”
There are 236 active fires in the territory, and as of 9 p.m., at least one was about 10 miles northwest of Yellowknife with the possibility that without rain it will reach its outskirts by the weekend.
“While rain is in the forecast, there are no guarantees,” the territories’ ministry of environment and climate change said in an update.
The fire progressed about 3,170 feet over Wednesday, and air tankers are expected to keep dousing the blaze overnight to reduce its intensity.
Shane Thompson, the local environment and climate change minister, told reporters during a press conference that the city is under a phased evacuation and that Yellowknife “is not in immediate danger” and that there is “a safe window” for residents to evacuate by Friday via road and air.
Wildfire threatens northern Canadian city; 20,000 ordered to evacuate - UPI.com
Canada Wildfires and Deployments Topic: Who wants to go to Canada?
(no worries if you’d rather not consolidate these)
4 Likes
Türkiye Earthquakes, 6 months later
6 months after a devastating earthquake, Turkey’s preparedness is still uncertain | AP News
USAID/SAR TFs Deployed To Türkiye Earthquakes - General Discussion - Wildfire Intel
4 Likes
Something For Nothing: Austerity Edition
3 Likes
Fire to Flood: Greece’s Destructive Roller-Coaster Ride
A summer in Greece marked by deadly convulsions of wildfire has plunged into an intensely wet week that has already dumped more than 20 inches (500 millimeters) of rain on parts of central Greece. The rains are being driven by an upper-level low pressure system, dubbed Daniel, that may transition into a “medicane,” or Mediterranean tropical-like cyclone. Medicanes are cyclones that develop over the Mediterranean Sea during its warmer months, typically late summer and autumn. They often manage to take on some of the hallmarks of a tropical cyclone despite the Mediterranean’s small size and mid-latitude location.
Fire to flood: Greece’s destructive roller-coaster ride » Yale Climate Connections
2 Likes
Daniel strikes again.
Libya floods: 10,000 people are missing and thousands are feared dead | AP News
Several dam breaches. Casualty numbers are all over the place. Catastrophic infrastructure damage. No ISAR reports, yet, but somebody is probably in there already. Security as bad or worse than Turkiye.
3 Likes
1 Like
Scientists tracked the fires with the new “Fire Events Data Suite” (FEDS), which draws on data from a group of satellites called VIIRS. “The thing that really sets FEDS apart is that the system excels at tracking the daily, incremental spread of fires at 12-hour intervals,” said Yang Chen, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Irvine. “That makes near real-time monitoring possible and allows us to generate much more detailed views of fire progression than we have been able to do in the past.”
Welcome technology, but 12-hour intervals isn’t even in the neighborhood of real-time, and it’s unclear what ‘making it possible’ means.
Animated progression maps:
Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC) has archives of day to day situation reports and links to maps from the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System (CWFIS).
[Typically, sorting out “wildfire”: “wildland fire”; “forest fire”; “timber fire”, “brush fire”, “grass fire” is left as an exercise for the reader. I don’t say these things to be a curmudgeon, but that we should stick to editorial standards of plain and clear language when we report on fires and fire reporting systems. Prefer simple verbs before nominalizations and turn nominalizations back into simple verbs whenever possible.]
3 Likes
2 Likes
2 Likes
Today, I Learned: Cheap saw hacks, like drop-starting and sticking blade guards with carpentry pencils, can land you in deep trouble when you are acting in the field of public safety.
2 Likes
2 Likes
2 Likes
Sadly approaching camp fire numbers…
3 Likes
Like last year’s big fires, it looks like the big fire that hit Vina Del Mar made its initial run across tracts of radiata pine and eucalyptus plantations, shown in purple on these maps.
GOES 16 shows Friday’s explosive northward run.
https://col.st/LNvka
Plantation data from CONAF.
3 Likes
Location of the Pomonal Rural Fire Brigade station (under way better fire conditions).
Heat detections. Winds are from the southwest. I’m not sure the indicator at the bottom of the map is correct. Some sources are saying the winds are up to 80 mph.
When shelter in place orders are issued in Australian bushfires, I think the reason why we don’t often see those in the US west has to do with how easily bushfires overtake the road system; how fast they move, how fast the fuels are consumed, and how long the brigades figure it will take to get access. Australia’s brush trucks seem to be built for more off-roading; open wheel wells, sprinklers and roll bars.
3 Likes
3 Likes
2 Likes
2 Likes