"This house will become a base for all of us"

Just one thing:

Sometimes it feels like the rumblings in the great halls of power don’t influence our lives very directly, but sometimes it really, really does. In Canada, when time was essential as people faced evacuations and rapidly-changing wildfire conditions (like road closures and fare hikes), communities had to quickly develop shared vocabulary and workarounds to blocks put in place as a result of legislation called the Online News Act which requires news agencies to be compensated for their content when posted on search engines & social media.

“It is so inconceivable that a company like Facebook is choosing to put corporate profits ahead of ensuring that local news organizations can get up-to-date information to Canadians. Instead of making sure that local journalists are fairly paid for keeping Canadians informed on things like wildfires, Facebook is blocking news from its sites.” —Justin Trudeau

This week in the news:

• Climate ??
• Starry nights, what we can save, Joshua trees ????
• Fires ??
• Maui, it has to be Maui: the house that stood, ????the birds that were saved, those still missing ?? and those that made it out
• Firefighting ??
• Urgent salary action needed from Congress (sigh), crash reporting, father-daughter firefighters, prescribed burns and Greek firetrucks
• Firetech
• This week it’s us, Rain, in the News ???
• What’s burning?
• Fires we’re monitoring, and Pyrocumulonimbus ??

Climate

Starry nights, what we can save, Joshua trees

• You know how people say they feel small when they look at a starry night sky? For me, I think that trying to contemplate the age and endurance of Giant Sequoias, which can live for 3,000 years, does that. This radio piece on saving giant Sequoias—or not —also kind of had that effect.?????
• I don’t think I’ve given nearly enough attention to the fire in the Mojave and its impact on the Joshua Trees, but we can make up for it by reading this LA Times article , and in the good news department that fire, at least, is 100% contained
• David Wallace-Wells’ piece The Age of the Urban Inferno felt frighteningly relevant this week. “Increasingly, fires emerging hotter and more intense from the natural landscape are burning human structures not as collateral but as fuel.”

As firefighters battle a massive wildfire in the eastern Mojave Desert, national park officials and ecologists are preparing for habitat losses that are likely to alter the landscape forever. —LA Times

Fires

Maui, it has to be Maui: the house that stood, the birds that were saved, those still missing and those that made it out

• Victim tally is at 115, and over 1,000 remain missing as searchers continue to comb through the wreckage
• Time magazine covers the origin of the Maui fires
• Researchers acted heroically to save endangered bird s from the fires on Maui
• Stories of some of the history that has been lost
• The banyan tree receives as much love as it is possible to give a tree, including its own story in Scientific American
• What saved this home in Lahaina (a lesson in fire prevention for homes) with hat tip to Michael Wara , who is quoted in the story

“Let’s rebuild this together,” he said. “This house will become a base for all of us. Let’s use it.” —Trip Millikin

• The New Yorker and The Guardian cover the fire’s effect on the local economy, which relies heavily on tourism

The state’s economic agency estimates that, each day, Hawaii is seeing thirty-six hundred fewer tourists—worth more than a million dollars—than would normally be expected. —Jack Truesdale / The New Yorker

“What we’ve seen from this disaster is that we are perhaps far more vulnerable than anybody wants to admit.” —Trisha Kehaulani Watson , vice-president of the Native Hawaiian advocacy group ?āina Momona in The Guardian

• Maui’s emergency services chief has resigned after criticism over the failure to activate the community’s emergency sirens
• Speaking of sirens, here’s a read on why they failed to sound
• Biden visited Maui. His response to the disaster in Maui has been strongly criticized but I appreciated this perspective on it from historian Heather Cox Richardson in her Letters from an American substack

Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) said, “We in Hawaii have been through hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions—but we have never seen such a robust federal response. Thank you.” ?—Letters from an American

Firefighting

Urgent salary action needed from Congress (sigh), firefighting aircraft crash reporting, father-daughter firefighters, prescribed burns and Greek firetrucks

• A temporary pay increase for wildland firefighters is set to expire September 30th , an urgent matter for those laying themselves on the line to protect life and property all over the American West right now
• Early notes on the cause of the fatal crash in San Bernardino, CA August 6th indicate that one of the helicopters did not have a transponder (a device that communicates with other nearby aircraft and alerts pilots when other aircraft are nearby)
• Sweet father-daughter volunteer firefighting team coverage from New Jersey
• European officials are giving scathing commentary regarding some nations having cut their firefighting staff just as climate change is making the role of these first responders even more crucial
• It’s not always easy to get side by side comparison of land that’s been treated with a prescribed burn and land that isn’t ← this tweet shows it well
• What Greek firefighters did between firestorms (laying down lines, protecting towns and cultural sites). Disclosure: my interest in this article may be mostly because I love European firetrucks ???

Firetech

This week it’s us, Rain, in the News

• Bill Clerico of Convective Capital, which solely invests in firetech (including an investment in us at Rain), talked about their strategy and a few of their portfolio companies on CNN (we appear around the 3:15 minute mark)
• Forbes has a piece on the state of firetech , highlighting the work of Convective Capital (a Rain investor)

“‘Wildfire is a big deal to most utility companies,’ [Bill] Clerico, the venture capitalist, told Forbes. ‘It’s not like you're selling them a piece of HR software. You’re selling them solutions to their biggest existential threat.’” —Bill Clerico in Forbes

What’s burning?

Fires we’re monitoring, and Pyrocumulonimbus

• In the US, Washington State (evacuations, fatalities) is getting the most coverage.?
• The US has shifted to Preparedness Level 4 (meaning many firefighting resources are committed). The list of states reporting large fires here at the National Interagency Fire Center and the sky is starting to get a bit orange in the Pacific Northwest as the fire season finally takes hold for us on the West Coast
• In Canada we are watching Kelowna and Yellowknife closely, where there are some harrowing accounts of evacuations
• Greece is experiencing another wave of fire (fatalities) "A 23-year-old resident who gave his name as Nikos, said: "The situation is tragic. All that is needed right now are prayers and rain."
• PyroTCU video on twitter that shows the power and speed of the shift of a fire when a Pyrocumulonimbus forms. A couple weeks ago I posted an LA Times story about why that behavior is especially frightening—strengthening & spreading fire even without windy weather. ?

Thanks for joining again this week. You can find a version of this with commentary on substack , where imo the fonts make it slightly more pleasant to read.