Brushfire Threatens Mount Wilson

[erik]

The wildfires that have wreaked destruction and death in the Wine Country of northern California (forty people dead, so far) are not the only ones we're dealing with here. Just this morning, another brushfire broke out very close to Los Angeles, just below the 5,710 foot summit of Mount Wilson. As of this moment, 40 acres of dry brush and trees have burned, and the fire is 25% contained, but no one is resting easy, simply because the conditions are very tinder-dry, and we have the typical Santa Ana winds blowing. Mount Wilson also happens to be where every television and radio station in Los Angeles has its transmitting facilities, and where we also have historically significant scientific facilities, including the Mount Wilson Observatory, which will be celebrating its centennial in two weeks. Those facilities are still under a significant threat from this blaze:

losangeles.cbslocal.com/2017/10/17/brush-fire-mt-wilson/

[the Scribe]

This is just awful. I don't care what anyone says, fires are worse than floods, not that anyone should have to go through both except for global climate deniers and we all know who they are. Sorry but it angers me big time. The Diablo Winds are compounding the problem.



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[erik]

I can say, having been up there many times, that Mount Wilson is a great place to walk through, with the observatory and its 100-inch telescope, another smaller observatory with a 60-inch telescope; a pair of solar observatories, and a small astronomical museum detailing the massive discoveries made up there on the mountain during the previous 100 years.

The facilities, however, were threatened in 2009 by the horrific Station Fire, which burned throughout much of the San Gabriel Mountains for two months, and burned an area roughly equivalent to the size of Chicago, a situation not helped by the fact that many of the pine trees up there have also suffered desiccation because of drought and bark beetles. Firefighters made a hugely successful effort to keep that holocaust from incinerating the mountain, as they are doing with this current fire as well. But a lot of these fires, both up in northern California and down here, are being driven as much by the terrain as they are by climate change conditions and the Diablo or Santa Ana winds, the latter of which are all too common at this time of the year, just prior to the first rains of the fall and winter.