I held myself from commenting on this one but I cannot let it slide.
“God is the real MD of any believing Bible church. If you get sacked, take your grievance to God not the media.
“Only he can compensate not the rabble rousers on social media,” her post on Instagram read.
A towering cloud of hot air, smoke and moisture that reached airliner heights and spawned lightning. Wind-driven fronts of flame that have stampeded across the landscape, often leapfrogging firebreaks. Even, possibly, a rare fire tornado.
The Bootleg Fire in Southern Oregon, spurred by months of drought and last month’s blistering heat wave, is the largest wildfire so far this year in the United States, having already burned more than 340,000 acres, or 530 square miles, of forest and grasslands.
And at a time when climate change is causing wildfires to be larger and more intense, it’s also one of the most extreme, so big and hot that it’s affecting winds and otherwise disrupting the atmosphere.
“The fire is so large and generating so much energy and extreme heat that it’s changing the weather,” said Marcus Kauffman, a spokesman for the state forestry department. “Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do.”
The Bootleg Fire has been burning for two weeks, and for most of that time it’s exhibited one or more forms of extreme fire behavior, leading to rapid changes in winds and other conditions that have caused flames to spread rapidly in the forest canopy, ignited whole stands of trees at once, and blown embers long distances, rapidly igniting spot fires elsewhere.
It’s kind of an extreme, dangerous situation,” said Chuck Redman, a forecaster with the National Weather Service who has been at the fire command headquarters providing forecasts.
Fires so extreme that they generate their own weather confound firefighting efforts. The intensity and extreme heat can force wind to go around them, create clouds and sometimes even generate so-called fire tornadoes — swirling vortexes of heat, smoke and high wind.
The catastrophic Carr Fire near Redding, Calif., in July 2018 was one of those fires, burning through 130,000 acres, destroying more than 1,600 structures and leading to the deaths of at least eight people, some of which were attributed to a fire tornado with winds as high as 140 miles per hour that was captured on video.
Many wildfires grow rapidly in size, and the Bootleg Fire is no exception. In the first few days it grew by a few square miles or less, but in more recent days it has grown by 80 square miles or more. And nearly every day the erratic conditions have forced some of the nearly 2,200 firefighting personnel to retreat to safer locations, further hindering efforts to bring it under control. More than 75 homes and other structures have burned.
On Thursday night along its northern edge, the fire jumped over a line that had been treated with chemical retardant, forcing firefighters to back off. It was just the latest example of the fire overrunning a firebreak.
“This fire is a real challenge, and we are looking at sustained battle for the foreseeable future,” said Joe Hessel, the incident commander for the forestry department.
And it’s likely to continue to be unpredictable.
“Fire behavior is a function of fuels, topography and weather,” said Craig B. Clements, director of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center at San Jose State University. “It changes generally day by day. Sometimes minute by minute.”
Source: NYTimes.
