A fire that broke out in Griffith Park that the LAFD first reported an hour ago as 0.5-1 acre in size acres has grown to five acres according to the the most recent Twitter update 45 minutes ago from @LAFD on Twitter.

The picture of the fire as seen from the 134 overpass above the 5 Freeway comes from my friend Patricia (taken by her friend Monica) who posted it on Twitter around the same time as the LAFD’s last update.

UPDATE (10.01): LAist is reporting that it took firefighters 59 minutes to contain the blaze. There were no reported injuries or structural damage, and the cause is under investigation.

As the Station Fire still lingers over these last weeks, only now finally almost fully contained, I’ve pointed many folks to the dramatic images of the pyrocumulus clouds that have come out of it, especially the time-lapse images of these clouds developing.  Like many folks new to having such large fires quite so close, I only learned about the pyrocumulus mechanism with this fire.  One thing that is dramatic in this phenomenon (apart from the sufficiently dramatic itching eyes, headaches, and sore throats that all my friends seem to share) is its striking resemblance to an H-Bomb blast.

I am not the first to note this resemblance, of course.  Not even the first Metblogs author to do so.  Nor the first to think and write about the identity of the thermodynamic mechanism of the formation of an H-Bomb’s mushroom cloud over the course of seconds, and the fire’s formation of one over the course of days or weeks.

(more…)

The largest fire in LA history is expected to keep burning through the weekend. It has burned more than 160,000 acres (250 square miles). Here’s Joan Didion on living in fire country:

Station Fire photo by Brittany Bagheri and American Red Cross

People who live with fires think a great deal about what will happen “when,” as the phrase goes in the instruction leaflets, “the fire comes.” These leaflets, which are stuck up on refrigerator doors all over Los Angeles County, never say “if.” When the fire comes there will be no water pressure. The roof one watered all the night before will go dry in seconds. Plastic trash cans must be filled with water and wet gunny-sacks kept at hand, for smothering the sparks that blow ahead of the fire. The garden hoses must be connected and left where they can be seen. The cars must be placed in the driveway headed out. Whatever one wants most to save must be placed in the cars. The lights must be left on, so that the house can be seen in the smoke.

That’s from Didion’s essay “Fire Season.” You can get it here

With an About the Author bio that says, “If you don’t like what you just read here you can just get out of my country. Now how about that smart-alack. Follow me on twitters,” Christwire is such dry parody it almost passes for the real thing– a right-wing,  Bible-quoting site seeking to save America from The Gays and other “weirdos.”

And they are loving the fires here in California:

The lands were soaked with the combustible sins of perversions and marinated in the flammable juices of homosexuality! God is angry and his great power cannot be contained! …Fire falls upon California and great pillars of smoke shoots from his nostrils!

The holy pillars of smoke from his nostrils are filling up the lands of California! They are the harbingers of doom for the homosexual gay fornicators of Satan!

If you doubt this is satire (which is easy to do because Christwire has real ads for things like Ann Coulter books and a dating service called Christian Mingle,) a recent post called If You’re a Fantastic Pro-Family Republican, Does One or Two Same-Sex Encounters Really Make You Gay? asks, “If you have a great record fighting against the gays, doesn’t it cross out a few moments humping a younger man against the wall of some hotel room?”

Lightning has been ruled out as a possible cause of the Station Fire, according to officials from the U.S. Forest Service. That leaves humanity as the cause.

Investigators have yet to determine if it was accidental or intentional.

You are now a suspect. Have a nice day.

What can local TV stations learn from Stationgate? Should they be held more accountable when it comes to informing the public about its city burning to the ground? Yes. Were viewers, bloggers, journalists, and tweeters overreacting for calling out the networks on their non-coverage of the impending doom? No.

TV and radio are old media. But, they’re still the first place that people turn when something happens. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. 9/11. There is a responsibility for stations to serve the citizens when they need it most. This includes weekends when your back porch is engulfed in a ring of fire. It is more important than any car chase, funeral procession, or award show after party interview about a $20,000 dress.

Local network executives, who today defended their “coverage” of the “brush fires” should be embarrassed. They should be ashamed. They should probably be fired. Next time, at the very least, throw up an on-screen ticker with evacuation information. That way you can still show your precious Hanna Montana.

As for defending your coverage in light of viewer outrage… How dare you. We are the reason you exist. We are the customer. And we are always, ALWAYS right.

The picture at left is a view of the Station Fire, taken from Marina del Rey yesterday.  According to news reports, the fire is still threatening the communications facilities and the observatory atop Mount Wilson.  It has already burned its way through and past the fabulously scenic Angeles Crest Highway.  Just three months after a major stretch of the Highway was opened after having been closed for over four years, the Highway is closed once again.

I am reminded, however, of the great day I spent on top of Mount Wilson and driving the Angeles Crest Highway last Thanksgiving weekend.  It was the last weekend before a portion of the Highway was to be closed for the winter.  We took a gorgeous drive up the Highway, and took the side trip to the Mount Wilson Observatory for a picnic lunch with dizzying views.
Tour the Highway and Mt. Wilson, after the jump

Certainly the timelapse video footage screencap’d on the left that I caught of the Station Fire late Sunday afternoon from the roof of my Silver Lake house is neither as compelling nor as dramatic as others made much closer to the devastation being wrought.

But it immediately reminded me of the timelapse video screencap’d on the right that I made a couple days shy of two years ago from the exact same location of the exact same landscape, only this time the billowing clouds were strictly meteorological in nature, not pyrological.

Both videos are available after the jump, and it’s interesting to see them play out together from a then-and-now perspective.

(more…)

As of right this moment the Mount Wilson Observatory is still standing though flames are very close and people are extremely worried. This webcam shows the Observatory and surrounding areas (though the cam is going down frequently due to overloaded servers) which as you can see are fairly flame covered. As you probably know the MWO is over 100 years old and extremely important in the history of Astronomy including much of the observations and discussion that formulated the Big Bang theory. On Twitter, Xeni Jardin has been posting constant updates on this specific structure and the fires nearby. Keeping my fingers crossed.

You may have heard that the Station Fire doubled in size last night and continued getting worse today, but until you look at this map it’s hard to understand just how big it’s gotten. The smoke plume was easily visible today all the way in Venice. This one is getting scary, stay safe everyone.