The Highway Fire Photographs

CORONA - Little rain, a major, historic drought, very dry vegetation, a gentle wind and a spark has brought about a major brush fire where Orange County, Riverside County and San Bernardino County meet in what is the explosive start of a dreadful fire season.

Monday Update: According to the Riverside County Fire Department, the fire is holding at 1020 acres with 35% containment, and all evacuations have been lifted. No homes or structures were damaged or destroyed.


A massive brush fire has broken out in the Corona/Chino/Norco area with flames rapidly moving in a northeast direction being driven by light-to-sometimes-gusty winds, which has prompted evacuations in what is being called The Highway Fire. The fire is burning in the Prado Flood Control Basin, which has thick, tender dry brush that has not burned in many decades.

By day smoke could be seen throughout much of Southern California and by nightfall an ominous orange glow could be seen for many miles around.

At least 300 homes have been threatened by this fire. As of this update no homes have been lost. There was a rumor going around that two homes had been destroyed, but Cal-Fire says NO homes have been lost.

The American Red Cross has established an evacuation center for residents at Riley’s Gym, 3900 Acacia, in Norco, while those who have animals can evacuate them to Ingalls Park on Sixth Street in Norco. UPDATE: The evacuation center has been closed, because apparently nobody needed it and had another place to go.

By midnight the breezy and sometimes gusty winds had tampered off giving the 800 firefighters on the scene the much needed upper hand in fighting this conflagration, which at 12:20 a.m. is at 30-percent containment. Rising humidity levels and cooler temperatures are also helping.

The Riverside Freeway and Chino Hills Freeway are open.


The scope of this massive fire. This photograph was taken around 10 p.m. on Saturday on Green River Road in Corona. From this angle the fire was about five miles wide. Photograph by Jason C. Rosenthal.


The Tombstone and dead, dry palm tree still stands as the fire was being driven by on-shore winds pushing flames in the northeast direction away from this location off Serfas Club Drive in Corona. Photograph by Jason C. Rosenthal.


See if you can make out the eerie eyes in the smoke. Photograph by Jason C. Rosenthal.


The Riverside Freeway will do anything to avoid being an effective freeway. Photograph by Jason C. Rosenthal.


One of many dark smoke plumes. Photograph by Jason C. Rosenthal


Mr. Tree shaking his arms in fear seeing the danger ahead. Photograph by Jason C. Rosenthal


Taken about a half-hour after the fire started, and by this time had already put out an enormous amount of smoke that could be seen throughout much of Southern California. Photograph by Jason C. Rosenthal. 

In the past week as dry, warm weather gripped Southern California a handful of small brush fires broke out. Earlier Saturday a brush fire burnt about 12-acres in Fullerton. Earlier in the week a brush fire destroyed one home in Jurupa Valley.

As well, earlier in the week two small brush fires broke out in Malibu, but were quickly put out. Also, firefighters quickly fought a small brush fire in Whittier.

Even though it seems like every year we are told, "it is going to be a bad fire season," in an April 11 interview with the Los Angeles Times a Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist says this year is a particularly "incendiary situation," and we should treat every day from here on through next winter as fire season.

It seems The Highway Fire has driven home the point just how serious this fire season will be, because this fire took a lot of people by surprise on just how fast it moved and grew.

[Feel free to share these photographs. Sure, these are not the best, but still, just give credit.]

Why This Warm Winter Is Not a Good Thing!

LOS ANGELES - As the Midwest and East Coast freezes again Southern California is yet again the envy of the nation with its warm winter weather. However, as you have probably noticed much of this winter it has been unusually warm, even by Southern California winter standards. The dreaded Santa Ana Winds, which usually blow between late September and November, have been hanging around much longer than usual blowing havoc as evident by the recent destructive Glendora brush fire.

Brush fires aside many people have been enjoying this warm winter, but there is real cause for concern that this warm winter is not a blessing.

The reason being, according to Weather West, California is under what is being called the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, or just RRR. Now it may have a ridiculous name, but the RRR is a very serious problem for California, because, simply put, it is preventing rain from coming into much of the state, and causing Santa Ana Wind events when typically there should be no major wind events.

According to Earth scientist Daniel Swain at Weather West,
  
[The] Ridiculously Resilient Ridge [is a] region of strong and incredibly persistent anomalous geopotential height ridging is centered over the Gulf of Alaska but extends across much of the northern and eastern Pacific Ocean, and has been a coherent and distinct feature of the large-scale atmospheric pattern for over a year (beginning in early December 2012). This persistent ridging has resulted in a flow pattern that has deflected existing Pacific storms well to the north of California and suppressed the development of other systems closer to the state. Persistent ridges that disrupt the prevailing westerly winds in the middle latitudes are often referred to as “blocking ridges” because of their propensity to impede and deflect typical atmospheric flow patterns, and the RRR is no exception.  

This has not been receiving the wide attention it should be receiving, but with Governor Jerry Brown recently declaring a drought emergency, and what is leading to be possibly the worst drought in California history, hopefully people will start receiving this warm winter weather with concern.

Now the RRR is nothing new, but the RRR in the last two years has been cause for concern.

As Mr. Swain goes on to report,

[The] RRR has behaved in a manner not typical of most North Pacific ridging events. Since December 2012, large geopotential height anomalies have been observed in approximately the same region of the North Pacific. While the spatial structure of the ridge itself has varied somewhat over that interval (and even broken down in a couple of instances), the RRR keeps re-building itself in essentially the same place each time an atmospheric event–such as a surge of low-latitude westerly winds with the potential to “undercut” the ridge or an invasion of a cold/high potential vorticity Arctic airmass with the potential to disrupt the anticyclonic circulation–might otherwise act to displace or collapse it. This resilience is extremely unusual, and I don’t find evidence that persistent North Pacific ridging of this magnitude spanning two consecutive winter seasons has occurred previously in the observational record. 
  
Full report from Weather West.

With state reservoir levels sinking and dry air with no rain in site this warm California winter is not a good thing that it may be made out to be, and in the end we could all end up paying for this in more ways than simply higher water bills.