One could kinda get the feel of what it’s like living in California. Maybe not the whole state but certainly a lot of it. With winds whipping somewhere around blowing your cap off and never seeing it again to some level of hurricane force, the entire Natural State got blown away last Wednesday, with dozens of fires and not a little damage.
Around here, the freeway to Little Rock was abruptly closed, which was a hassle but a well-needed one if the charred landscape tells an accurate story.
On one side of I-530, it’s black, and even now, several days after the big blow, there are still places where roots and snags are still smoldering.
On the other side — meaning the winds blew hot stuff across four lanes of traffic, the median and the two buffer zones — there was more charred earth, although it seems the fires there were finally outmatched by the firefighters who came from all over to help put out the blazes.
In the city, Pine Bluff crews were out at Hestand Stadium. The city burns brush out beyond the stadium property, but the wind got what was probably a mostly dormant fire at the site and woke it up but good, burning several acres to the south of the property. One firefighter — he’d come in after his shift ended to help out — said the blaze was about to get into a horse barn, but they got the upper hand on that one before it did any more damage.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
We can only imagine that if these areas were as densely populated as some of the suburbs of Los Angeles that burned recently, well, the wind-driven fire would not be stopped. There, it seems, the winds blow hard for days and days, while here, things had quieted down within 24 hours or so. Can you just imagine?
California will do what California wants to do, but it seems absurd for the people who lost homes there to wildfires are allowed to rebuild structures that continue to be as vulnerable to fire as they were 40 to 60 years ago when they were first built. Surely, materials and technology could be brought into the conversation to make these structures fire retardant. Ditto people living in hurricane-prone areas. Insurance companies can only take just so much.
The risk here is less for a variety of reasons, but the changing weather is creating more violent, more destructive storms, so who is to say how long it will be before we are just as susceptible?
In the meantime, kudos to the firefighters who came fast and worked hard and no doubt were able to mitigate the damage that could have been caused.
And do we even need to mention that there’s a burn ban in effect? Probably, given that there always seems to be a few folks who ignore such pronouncements and start something that they can’t stop. So don’t do that, people. Not until some rain comes and things green up a bit.