So I'm on KMUD Saturday morning 9:30-11:30 am. I can see fires burning in the coast range as I drove over Pratt Mountain coming in to Redway. When I get to the station, Dana, the dj before me, tells me she's been getting calls for several hours telling her about wildfires all over the area. We have reports of up to 40 fires from lightning strikes overnight. There is absolutely no news from those who are paid to know about this stuff: the CDF doesn't answer its phone on the weekends it appears. Their website is full of outdated info about fires in other places. Perhaps I'm just a bit frustrated, but it does seem that the county emergency services should have some sort of plan for getting emergency information out to the radio stations who can broadcast the information to people who can use it. This business with no one answering the phone on the weekend just doesn't cut it. They should be contacting us, actually, and should be appreciative of the fact that we are willing to reach out to them.

When we had a spate of lightning wildfires in 1990 we lost thousands of acres, and had an officialdom that was unable to accept or make use of volunteers whose work might have saved some or much of that land. We had earthquakes c 1992 that showed our information system didn't work (it was centralized and the main transmission tower was damaged). Meetings were held to fix the system.

Now its 2008, 16-18 years after these failures of the emergency information systems, and KMUD is still not getting notifications or news about fires that anyone who goes outside can see are going on. Perhaps its time to get things together?

FOLLOW UP 5PM. The WIllits News online posted an article about 4:40 pm about the 100 fires in Mendocino county. The Times-Standard has nothing on Humboldt County.

FOLLOW UP SUNDAY 2PM: The T-S has an article posted today. Of course so does the Associated Press so I don't know how to apportion the credit. The air was thick with smoke here in the valley of the main Eel late evening, and the sunlight seems filtered today. Most of the out of county press is focused on out of county lightning fires, with the AP worried about wine country.

FOLLOW UP SUNDAY 9 PM. I drove from Alderpoint to Santa Rosa this afternoon. Coming over Pratt Moutain I could still see the smoke plume from the fire on the east side of the Lost Coast range. The further south I got the worse the smoke in the air was. In Ukiah where I stopped for dinner at the Safeway (sandwich) I could smell the woodsmoke as I left the Safeway, and the air was densely hazy. It reminded me of China, but as the sun was still too bright to stare directly into, Ukiah was not quite as bad as X'ian (you have to be there to believe it). It is worse here in Santa Rosa, a large fire west of 101 around the Russian river (I think) is really pumping out smoke.

I saw two convoys of fire engines heading north as I drove south. i hope some are going to Sohum.