Reading the article below by Julia Olson made me cry.
One of the big memories of my childhood is a one-month vacation trip my family took when I was 14 years old, driving from Lancaster, Pa. to Colorado and staying in Manitou Springs, just outside of Colorado Springs, for two weeks. Now, Manitou Springs is burning.
Between 1970 and 2003, the average length of the active wildfire season (from the start of the first reported fire to the day the last reported fire is controlled) increased by 64 percent, or 78 days. Wildfires between 1987 and 2003 burned for an average of 37.1 days before being controlled
The following post was written by my dad, Paul Douglass, who is on vacation in Coronado, a town in Southern California…
The wildfires that sweep through Southern California this week, blackening over 400,000 acres and displacing a half a million residents from their homes, may be cited correctly as evidence of global warming, all right. But the well-organized response to the disaster by local authorities, firefighters, volunteers, and ordinary citizens in San Diego County may signal that people here have crossed a milestone in their thinking about climate change.
San Diegans remember the Cedar Fire that devastated the county only three years ago. San Diegans know that more fire-related disasters are sure to be coming their way living in this arid corner of the country because they know what climate change is likely to mean for them. The increasingly frequent wildfires in recent years seemed to have taught San Diegans to be prepared when the next fires hit.
They were prepared this time. Fortunately for my wife and me, we were staying at a house on the beach in Coronado, a quiet village located on the narrow finger of sand that forms San Diego Harbor, when the fires raged in the hills to the east. Watching the local TV stations’ non-stop coverage of efforts by firefighters and air tankers to stave off the advancing walls of fire burning everything in its path only a few miles away was surreal.
Comparisons of the response to the wildfires with Katrina by the media were inevitable. By all accounts San Diegans did a superlative job of dealing with the thousands of evacuees, saving homes, providing supplies to those in need, even arranging live entertainment for the kids at the county’s central relief station, Qualcom Stadium, home of the San Diego Chargers. Continue reading
