Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Thursday, May 22, 2008

"Summit Fire" - Raging Out Of Control!! Run For Your Doomed Lives!!!

Okay, this is just completely dumb. Why do they keep saying the fire is near Hwy 17? They're just trying to curry hysteria. It's currently burning 10 miles West of Gilroy, and heading in the completely wrong direction to get to 17:
MapSummitFire
NOTE: FIRE IS NOT NEARLY AS BIG as the red circle on the map. At this point it's less than 3.5 square miles big. As it burns on through the night and into the weekend it's expected to get to about 10,000 acres or almost 16 square miles.

You can tell they're trying to get people all panicked when they express it in acres. Nobody really knows what an acre is. It's one of those old farm units that means "half again as big as the Jonsons' yard." But "10,000 acres!" sounds way worse than "almost 16 miles," so acres it is.

Anyway. Let's get a little calmness and factuality here. This blaze would have to switch directions and then burn through the entire Forest of Nisene Marks to get to Hwy 17. As it stands, according to the above map it appears to be heading out to sea, where the firefighters should be able to get it under control.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

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