When there's smoke, there's fire

For the past few days, strong winds have been stoking the Camp and Woolsey Fires in California. The smoke from the Camp Fire was blown towards the Bay Area, blocking the sky and giving people a view of fiery sunsets. Although it's a pretty sight, it makes me think just how bad the fire up north really is... and how many lives have been lost or displaced.

An hour before I took this photo, a classmate of mine was musing that this must be like what a nuclear winter probably looks and feels like. I responded that I don't know but the closest to it probably was the winter after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which is probably a disproved hypothesis because the technology to make weapons powerful enough to start a nuclear winter probably wasn't available in the 1940s). My classmate further mused that this might be what the aftermath of a volcanic eruption looks like. Because my family's house in the Philippines got covered in ash after the Mount Pinatubo eruption, I responded that this smoky sky we were observing didn't look like what I saw in 1991 at all; in fact, it resembled the sky after the sugarcane was harvested and the stalks were burned.

Rains finally fell, helping stop the fires. Once again, the skies are blue and the sunsets aren't as dramatic (but they do come early).