Fires Still Rage; Most Of Medford Spared, But Not Other Towns

When I was on this blog thingy yesterday morning, it looked like an Oregon city was about to be consumed by another wildfire - another major tragic fire story perhaps.  Most of the city had been evacuated.  

A very hazy sunset over St. Albans, last evening.
Most of the haze was created by smoke from
wildfires out west that had drifted across
the length of the United States

I suppose the good news this morning is that the city of Medford, Oregon, population about 82,000 still exists this morning, and people are going back home. Unfortunately that's not the case for towns near that southwestern Oregon city.

Firefighters saved almost all of Medford, but flames raced through nearby towns like Talent, population about 6,500 and Phoenix, where about 4,600 people lived. Much of both towns are now destroyed by fire. 

The fires rage on, although a temporary change in the weather pattern along the West Coast will probably make all those fires currently burning a little less explosive and erratic over the next few days.

Getting ahead of the fires amid a continuing drought and inevitable heat waves and wind storms in the coming weeks is going to be next to impossible.  At least 96 major wildfires  are burning over 5,400 square miles of land, according the National Interagency Fire Center. Half of those fires are in California, Oregon and Washington. 

Four of California's five largest wildfires in the state's history have started within the past month.  

In places in the West not on fire, vast areas, including cities like San Francisco, sat under an otherworldly, dark orange pall as the wildfire smoke smothered the atmosphere. 

On the other side of the mountains the strange, extreme shot of frigid air for this time of year is stunning people.  Places like Denver and Rapid City, South Dakota went from 100 degrees to snow within two days.  The high temperature in Amarillo, Texas yesterday was 42 degrees, which was two degrees colder than the record low for the date. 

The media attention weather disasters will likely wane a bit this week as the fires tame down. Meanwhile, there's more trouble on the horizon, as there always seems to be. The National Hurricane Center is watching seven possible tropical storm or hurricane threats.

There's no immediate threat to the United States from any of these systems and at least some of these storms will miss the U.S.But just the fact that the NHC has seven balls in the air right now is really something. 

As the Associated Press points out, this year has had more than its share of weather extremes around the globe. Mostly hot, some pockets of incredible cold, along with big floods, big droughts and big wind storms.  

As AP reports:

"Freak natural disasters - most with what scientists say likely have a climate change connection - seem to be everywhere in the crazy year 2020. but experts say we'll probably look back and say those were the good old days, when disasters weren't so wild. 

'I strongly believe we're going to look back in 0 years, certainly 20 and definitely 50 and say, Wow, 2020 was a crazy year but I miss it,'' said Colorado University environmental sciences chief Waleed Abdalati."

If anything, this year's spate of weather disasters and extremes are perhaps worse than climate models had predicted a couple decades ago. 

As CBS meteorologist Jeff Berardelli reports:

"'This is yet another example of where uncertainty is not our friend, says Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State. 'As we learn more, we are finding that many climate change impacts, including these sorts of extreme weather events, are playing out faster and with greater magnitude than our models predicted.'"

Far away from the disaster zone in the West, we can sadly see the effects of all this way here in Vermont.  It's been quite hazy here for the past few days.  I can't even see the Adirondacks from my house in St. Albans, Vermont this morning, it's so hazy. Those mountains are barely 20 miles away. Usually I have a grand view of that New York landscape. 

We Vermonters have been enjoying a spell of "boring" weather. Nothing too out of whack. But that hazy, smoky air out there is a reminder that we are all vulnerable to climate change. Avoiding a weather disaster these days seems to be nothing more than luck.