I live near downtown Sacramento. We are currently at 403 AQI. My kids’ schools have all been canceled and we’ve been wearing masks for a few days. It’s pretty scary. I think California’s new reality will be, instead of snow days, there will be fire days where the air quality is so bad that they have to close schools regularly.
So sad.
Ditto WA. 
Our summers have been pretty hazy.
Looks like classes at UC-Berkeley, well at already all of my kid’s classes, have been cancelled.
The fires up north have been devastating. My heart goes out to all who were impacted. Those N95 masks and minimal outdoor activity are very important. In addition to the toxic particles in the air, there is also the threat of Valley Fever. A friend’s husband had it 25 years ago and is on meds for life.
@lilmom glad to hear that you and your home are safe. Your community has been through so much.
The masks are great. During the Thomas fire they were handing them out free of charge throughout the community. I was surprised that more communities don’t pass them out. @“Cardinal Fang” thank for the link. My D lives in an area where the AQI is over 200. Her fiancé works in a town with an AQI over 400. My D has been having migraines all week. They have decided to the entire week off next week and will head down to my area to breathe some better air. We are north of the Southern Ca fires but our air while a bit hazy is pretty decent.
It was confirmed that my D’s future Grandmother in law lost her house in Paradise. My D also has a friend whose parents lost their home in Malibu. My friend in Malibu hasn’t been able to return home but thinks both her house and business are standing.
The AQI on the Cal campus this afternoon was 232. As far as I know they are still planning on having the Big Game on Saturday. My S, Cal class of 2015, is going unless the game is postponed.
Why is Sacramento so high on the AQI and they are a long way from the fires? The area around them is lower values. SIL lives in one of the outer suburbs which is at 216 on the purpleair map, although a sensor 10 miles away is at 444.
The wind, and the mountains. Go to Purpleair and scroll out so you can see all of Northern California. See how the smoke is blowing right down from Paradise (506, 486) through the Central Valley to Sacramento (446) ? See the line of the mountains between the Central Valley and the SF North Bay and South Bay, that’s containing the smoke? See how the smoky wind is rushing down the Sacramento River, to the Delta and then to San Francisco Bay? You can trace the wind and the mountains by looking at where the air quality is worst, and where it is not so bad.
^^^ It’s a valley, the smoke just sits on top of it like a lid on bowl. Just like San Jose/Silicon Valley, driving in from Santa Cruz, there is this point coming down the mountain on 17 where the entire valley is laid out in front of you in a glorious view, but today that view is a solid lid of smoke, with no SJ/SV in site. It’s really just a giant bowl with lingering smoke as a lid. It is just stuck there till some good winds push it up over the hills and out. Same with Sacramento Valley, it’s actually a much bigger bowl with the smoke sitting over it. And 80 miles (distance from Paradise to Sacramento) is nothing in California miles and fire distance. The Bay Area is 200 miles away and we are socked in.
My kids’ school was cancelled for tomorrow (on the peninsula). AQI hit nearly 300 here today depending on which station we were looking at. My middle kid is meant to be singing in a regional honor choir (practice today and tomorrow, concert Saturday). Practice tomorrow was cancelled. Concert Saturday was moved and we are hoping it won’t be cancelled.
That said, so many people in the state have it so much worse. It’s been a terrible week and a half. It’s frustrating watching the weather report… a few days ago it looked like it was going to rain on Monday… then it got pushed back to Tuesday… now it’s looking like it won’t rain until probably Thursday next week.
Here’s a satellite picture of the smoke: https://fsapps.nwcg.gov/afm/imagery.php?op=fire&passID=418676
It’s a California geography lesson! When you look at the @“Cardinal Fang” smoke photo above you can see how it just overlays the big valley bowl in the photo below that is the center of California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramento_Valley#/media/File:Map_california_central_valley.jpg
C’mon rain!
CNN says 66 dead, over 600 missing. Horrific.
That is just staggering.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-sell-off-continues-as-wildfires-rage-1542304152?mod=hp_lista_pos4
They are looking at PG&E.
Looks like Stanford has also canceled classes for today. We’re trying to fly S back (for Thanksgiving) on an earlier flight. Airline is waving change fees juts need to find a seat…
I thought the forensics teams might get to my parents’ neighborhood yesterday but they did not. There are still a lot of structures gone that are not yet counted.
Calfire has a link to the destruction. You can zoom in, click on a house icon, and get to an individual photo of most of the places they have visited so far.
No way they play football in the Bay Area if the air stays the way it is. My parents have been told to wear their masks indoors in SF.
My daughters job let them work from home, she says the air is awful.
Another note about the timeline of the Paradise evacuation: my mother said the emergency alert came at 8:38 am, same time as all the rest. Her neighbors each grabbed a set of car keys and a cell phone and went outside. The fire was less than half a mile away. They were the first ones off of their street and they still had to drive through the fire to get away.
There are three roads that head west out of Paradise. Pentz Road follows the West Branch of the Feather River that was the main corridor for the fire spreading and was blocked by police. Clark Road follows a ridge out toward the airport and was also blocked by police. That left the entire town to be funneled north to Skyway. People were gridlocked on those N-S streets, tires exploding, cars catching on fire and being abandoned. They had to get bulldozers to push some of the cars off the street to let people through.
Bottom line is they won’t be quite so slow in pulling the trigger on evacuations in the future.