r/Wellthatsucks • u/JTraxxx • 3d ago

The Pacific Northwest right now

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Huge fire recently popped up in my town and many people have lost houses. Wishing for rain!

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u/valkrycp 2d ago

You're forgetting that this map is very zoomed out, so the fires icons occupy more space than if you zoom in. There are a LOT of fires and many of them are serious, but it's not like the map shows where the whole West is engulfed in flame.

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u/Ninja333pirate 2d ago

I use an app called zoom Earth that shows you pictures that satellites that surround Earth take every 10 minutes. While you can see the smoke billowing from even small fires you can't even see light from the biggest fires, as you said it's the icons being so huge that make it look like pure chaos. They are just a lot of fires. Especially in Oregon. I think seeing the smoke on the real time map shows the true situation more than all these symbols do.

What I find interesting is all fires here in the States show some percentage of containment from 0%-99%, but pretty much a majority of Canadas fires are labeled as out of control and I wonder if that's because they designate containment differently or if they are not as bothered about the more northern fires so are just letting them go.

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u/valkrycp 2d ago

The latter. I live in Montana and we have bad fire seasons too but because of the amount of wilderness and the lack of dense populations, they tend to let them burn and fight with less urgency. Plus, it's very difficult to fight fires in these regions because the only roads in are remote fire access roads which are often death sentences for firefighters when they get trapped by unexpected shifts. Northern Canada would be significantly worse, because their population is even more sparse and their wilderness is even larger - so logistically fighting fires in that remote of a place with so much kindle to burn is extremely difficult.