Mother Nature vs Coastal Commission

In Southern California, brush fires are a way of life. This year the fire season has started early and looks to be bad.

The Castle of the Willetts is close enough (a half-mile or so) to some open brush and parkland areas that we’re occasionally packing the critical documents, computers, and irreplaceable items and making sure that the cars all have a full tank of gas should we get the order to bug out.

There’s currently a big fire burning up north of the Santa Clarita Valley, about twenty miles due north of us. Here’s how it looked on Thursday afternoon at 1,000 acres (from the KTLA helicopter):

And here’s a picture of the smoke cloud going up to about 40,000 feet, as taken from our front yard this afternoon, now that the fire’s up to 3,600 acres (and it’s over 100 F out there):

Note that those aren’t normal, water vapor clouds – it’s all soot and smoke and ash. Billions of cubic yards of it I would think, if not more.

On a related note, a controversy here in Southern California surrounds the beach fire pits that have been iconic landmarks for decades here in Southern California. Several cities, particularly Newport Beach and Huntington Beach, are trying to get the beach pits shut down. The reason given by the California Coastal Commission is that the smoke from the beach fire pits is a source of pollution.

Does the Coastal Commission want to know why the average Californian think’s they’re a bunch of freakin’ idiots? (I’m sure they don’t know and really don’t care, but let’s go through the math anyway.)

Look at those pictures of the natural brush fires. Look at all of that smoke for days and days and days, and multiply it by the dozen or two dozen or three dozen or more fires per year.

Now let’s think about how much smoke can ever possibly come from the beach pits, even if every single one of them is used (they aren’t) every single day (they aren’t) for six or eight hours a night (in reality it’s less).

As an order of magnitude comparison, the total amount of “pollution” by the beach fire pits has to be a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of the 100% natural “pollution” being caused by the brush fires. It’s a drop in the bucket, a teeny-tiny squiggle in the data, a blip lost in the noise, statistically insignificant.

So why are our tax dollars being spent on this political kerfuffle?

Buried in the articles are comments from the local beach residents about how they are being exposed to the smoke from the beach fires. The people complaining to the politicians are the multi-millionaires who live along the beach in Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Santa Monica, Malibu, and Santa Barbara. The people who will be unable to enjoy a BBQ on the beach are the middle and low-income families who occasionally get to visit the beach for a day.

Obviously the Coastal Commission can’t get any support for banning the beach fire pits base on that obvious truth, so they spin the argument into one of “pollution”. Yet they do it while clouds of smoke from brush fires rise up over the horizon and think that we can’t or won’t notice.

How stupid do they think people are?