Mt Whitney Zone Forums General Discussion Rim Fire near Yosemite

Here's a picture of Main Street (Hwy 120) through Groveland. My sis lives there, but has evacuated with their travel trailer to a place north of Sonora.

I've been seeing that atomic blast type of cloud way up north from here in Fresno for the past week. The fire has now burned over 125k acres (195 square miles)!





Here's a video from MAFFS 6 air tanker doing a retardant drop. The "Betty in the Box" starts repeating "Landing Gear" as they come in low for the drop @ 4:30





A few more pics gleaned from the web:




DC-10:

"MAFFS 6" is a "Modular Airborne FireFighting System" loaded onto a C-130 cargo plane.

Several threads covering the Rim fire on the Yosemitenews.info forum

Bee, thanks for the link. This is one horrendous fire.

Is the smoke on the WZ camera from this fire?

Steve, wow intense picture of Groveland. I am glad your sis headed for safety. I hope things get contained..I have same question as was just posed by Wazzu. Is the smoke from Yosemite impacting Whitney web cam? You can see the smoke on Mt Williamson webcam as well. I had thought the wind was blowing northward.

Could be the Fish Fire in Sequoia National Forest:
http://www.inciweb.org/incident/3701/

The following link will always display the most perimeter of the Rim Fire straight from the GeoMAC server. This is the same server that also provides data to the crews on the fire line. Sometimes the data on the InciWeb site is not as current as the data that comes from the GeoMAC server. (The InciWeb site gets its data from GeoMAC.)

For more information about this map, you can follow the “About” link in the upper left corner of the map.

http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/fires/2013_rim_fire_map.html

Joseph, the Gmap4 guy

I can see the Rim fire smoke line from the foothills, and the smoke line does not spread south beyond the localized fire area (can't say the same for the north, though, because the smoke line travels for miles)

I doubt the smoke is from the rim fire. I drove over sr 108 today, and the smoke was very thick in that area. By the time I got down to hwy 120/395 the air was clear.

Joseph's Gmap4 site is pretty doggone amazing. I sure like using the site, Joseph!

Blue Grouse, I think you were correct about the smoke being from the Fish Fire. Since the Mt Williamson webcam showed more clear skies, the Whitney smoke had to be coming from the southwest.

In fact, playing with Joseph's Gmap4 fire link, I can zoom out, and there are arrows showing the prevailing wind direction, and it shows the Fish Fire directly upwind of Owens Lake. The Rim Fire smoke is blowing northeast over to Nevada.

I hope mother nature will bring showers to the fire to help the fire fighters. I think about all the animals of the forest trying to survive. I also think of all the plant life going up in smoke.

I added the current hot spot data to the online map link that I posted earlier. This likely shows the areas where the fire is trying to expand.

See the "About" link in the upper left corner of the map for more information.

http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/fires/2013_rim_fire_map.html

Joseph, the Gmap4 guy

Here are pictures from a Perth newspaper.

PS. A fortnight is two weeks...

Yosemite National Park has announced today that they will be closing Tioga Road due to the Rim Fire. I heard today that the fire is the largest ever recorded in the Sierra.

From the Yosemite NPS website:

And a furlong/fortnight is 0.000372 mph.

Kurt has a photo of sprinklers used to protect the Sequoias.

Here's a picture from Sonora posted on Facebook today:




I read today that the fire has now burned 200,000 acres. That is 315 square miles. It is reported 32% contained. What a monster.

I vote for this from now on: Every fall, before the first big storm is due to hit, fly crop-dusters over the forest and drop fire-starting "bombs" all over the place. Then the storm could move in and put them out. Small fires would clear the forests of the century of fuel, preventing future catastrophes like this.

Here's a Yosemite N.P. time lapse video

Rim Fire Time Lapse, August 2013

A Predator UAV is gathering data on the fire.

Report here.

sad when government agencies start using facebook and other services that force users to sign up and give up personal information to be able to access resources such as this video.

This video does not play unless you have a facebook account, or something is broken here today.

All in the name of saving money, but hell will freeze over before I sign up with Zuckerberg's voluntary personal information donation service.