Silicon Fire

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• This is unhappy news and I pray for rain!!!! Or SNOW even :(

• Thank-you, Kate. My nerve receptors are on alert, unfortunately, as we enter a heat spell. I see some fluffy white plumes in Carmel Valley Village from the east in the direction of 101 and also your neck of the woods, Big Sur. I hope the plumes are cloud formations as yesterday, apparently, they were.

• I sympathize with DW. This fire is running in dry weedy alien annual grasses, brought on by the belief that "brush" was anti-cattle. Unfortunately, the carrying capacity of those weeds is not sufficient for the desired stocking levels, resulting in cow-burnt "pasture," or, as the firefighters refer to them, "flash fuels." Unfortunately, this has led to soil loss and degradation of the more palatable and nutritious native perennial grasses, which tend to stay green longer and have packing ratios that slow the burn rate. Look at the miles of edge between the dead weeds and the green chaparral in the photo. The chaparral does not ignite so well in the absence of a ground fire in the weeds that are tall enough and burn long enough to ignite it (flame front fuels are limited to <0.5"). The smaller the fuel and the more oxygen is available, the hotter and faster the burn. This is the elephant in the room--the importation of weeds along with cattle and farming, beginning with the Spanish colonists and continued to this day, is at the root of most of our fire problem. I'm in the market for as much water-storage capacity (for my little shack, at least 2,000 gallons) as my little place can handle, and at least 250 gpm and 85 psi of pumping power for each tank. That's eight minutes with the valves wide open, but hooked up to a water-curtain galvanized pipe system for window cooling and ember suppression inside and outside governed by thermocouples, I hope to be able to operate at much lower delivery rates, with an exterior fire hose hooked up to its own tank. I would like to get 5-10,000 gallons of storage, and to harvest rainwater from the roofs of the house, garage, and outbuildings. Zero runoff. Near-zero fire damage. Survivability. Smoke hoods and a well-stocked fire/storm shelter backup.