California: Bobcat Fire Burns Through More Than 106K Acres; Flames Again Threaten Mt. Wilson

The Bobcat Fire in the Angeles National Forest in California continues to burn into its 16th day. The blaze has grown aggressively in recent days, driven by strong wind gusts. The fire surpassed 100,000 acres over the weekend, making it one of the largest wildfires in Los Angeles County history. Mt. Wilson was again under serious threat from the fire, after several successful efforts to hold the flames back.

Residents near Camp Colby were ordered to evacuate as the western front of the blaze advanced toward them. The fire remained about two to three miles east of that area. Firefighters are hard at work in the northern section of the fire, which has threatened homes and forced evacuations in the foothill communities bordering the Antelope Valley. Some homes have been lost, though a precise number was not given pending damage assessments.

It is too soon to report on damage done. Critical water drops were delayed when a firefighting aircraft was grounded for about a half hour after a drone was spotted close to its take-off area. The fire started the day most active around Mt. Wilson, Chilao, and Little Rock Creek. Firefighters will work to slow westward spread using defensive strategic firing, line construction, and aircraft drops.

To the east, the blaze continues to threaten containment lines north of the Ranch 2 Fire, as well as Highway 39.

The cause is under investigation. The Bobcat Fire has been fueled by growth that has not burned in decades. The Red Cross has established a temporary evacuation point at Palmdale High School, 2137 East Avenue R. Accommodations for 300 large animals are available at the Antelope Valley Fairgrounds, 2551 W. Avenue H, Lancaster. Shelter for small animals is available at Lancaster Animal Care Center, 5210 West Avenue I, and Palmdale Animal Care Center, 38550 Sierra Highway.

A shelter site for up to 300 horses and cattle has been established at the Pomona Fairplex, 2201 N White Ave. Humidity will be in the low, though higher mountain areas could see drier conditions. Wind gusts are expected to be about 20 to 30 mph. The South Coast Air Quality Management District has issued a smoke advisory for the region. The impact from the Bobcat, El Dorado, and Snow fires is creating unhealthy air quality across parts of Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Riverside Counties.

The fire erupted on September 6th 2020 near the Cogswell Dam and then spread rapidly amid an intense, record-breaking heat wave, prompting evacuation orders for Mt. Wilson Observatory. The fire was burning dangerously close to the facility, which is arguably one of the world’s most important spots for scientific discovery. Firefighters have used a variety of tactics to protect the observatory, including carving out lines by hand and with bulldozers, setting strategic backfires, and using aircraft to make water drops.

The Mt. Wilson Observatory houses 18 telescopes, many of which were used to make some of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the last century.

They include the 100 inch Hooker telescope that Edwin Hubble used in the 1920s to prove that our universe is still expanding. The fire also threatens a seismic station that has recorded earthquake activity for 100 years. Numerous television and radio stations have transmitters in the area. On September 13th 2020, a team of archaeologists from the University of California, Berkeley, have published a new research paper in the journal Scientific Reports, which presents evidence that unglazed ancient ceramics sometimes retain microscopic food residues which, after chemical analysis, can reveal not only what had last been cooked in a pot, but also what was cooked over a pot’s lifetime.

The co-lead author, Melanie Miller, a researcher at Berkeley’s Archaeological Research Facility and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Otago in New Zealand, explains that the new data enables better reconstructions of the specific ingredients that people consumed in the past, which sheds light on social, political, and environmental relationships within ancient communities. Over the course of a year Miller joined forces with Berkeley archaeologist Christine Hastorf, to observe a team of seven chefs preparing fifty meals with different combinations of venison, corn, and wheat flour. The meals were all cooked in original black clay La Chamba ceramic pots from pre-Columbian South America.

According to the paper, in addition to cooking with donated deer road kill, they used large quantities of whole grains which they milled and developed into six ancient recipes. Unfortunately, the mushy meals were bland, explains Miller, and so the researchers did not eat them. The chemical residues of the meals cooked in each pot were analyzed to ascertain whether the samples found on ancient cooking vessels reflected only the last foods cooked within any given pot, or also from previous meals.

Hastorf, a Berkeley professor of anthropology and food archaeology, says these particular foods were chosen not only because they were available across the ancient world, but specifically to assist the scientists in identifying their chemicals traces within the pots.

The researchers monitored how the pots reacted to the isotopic and chemical values of the different food combinations. At Berkeley’s Center for Stable Isotope Biogeochemisty the pots were tested in different cooking environments and every eighth test meal was charred in order to recreate the types of carbonized residues that are so often sampled by archaeologists inside ancient pots. Adding to the real-life variables present at ancient hunters campsites, the pots were cleaned with water and branches from an apple tree.

The researchers noted that they were surprised that none of these ancient scrubbing tools broke during their experimentation. An analysis of the fatty lipids that were absorbed into the clay cookware was performed at the University of Bristol in England. This showed that different meal time scales were represented in different residues. For example, charred food samples taken from the bottom of pots was loaded with particles from the last meal cooked in the pot, while in the upper-patina, and in the lipid residue that was absorbed into the pottery itself, the remnants of prior meals were also discovered.

The paper argues that this new method of observation not only reveals hitherto inaccessible data pertaining to ancient diets, but it also provides information relating to food production, supply, and distribution chains of past eras. The reason the pottery samples were sent from California to England is because it was a team of scientists from the University of Bristol that announced a breakthrough in food detection on ancient pottery. At the time, this was the Holy Grail of dating techniques in an Ancient Origins news article.

According to the paper which was published in the journal Nature, the new archaeological dating technique was applied to shards of pottery uncovered from a dig in East London’s Shoreditch which contained traces of meat and dairy products, made and consumed by descendants of Europe’s first farmers around 3,600 BC.

This groundbreaking new dating technique, known as Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Analysis, analyzes samples of fatty acids, rather than traditional radiocarbon testing methods which only examine the radiocarbon found in all organic matter. The effectivity of this system was tested and approved when it correctly dated pottery samples from archaeological sites of known ages. When married with the new observation methods coming out of California, there is no question that the transatlantic collaboration, between the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and the University of California in Berkeley, is leading the charge when it comes to exploring our ancestor’s ancient diets and the methods used to prepare and cook them.

On September 10th 2020, researchers from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and their colleagues at the University of Washington documented an unmistakable uptick in patients seeking treatment for coughs. Some of those patients were treated in outpatient centers. Others came to emergency rooms, and some were ultimately admitted to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center or other hospitals operated by UCLA.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first recognized that covid had reached American shores in mid-January 2020, when a man in Washington state who had traveled to Wuhan tested positive for an infection. By then, UCLA doctors may have treated dozens of covid patients without realizing it. The researchers did not conduct any diagnostic tests, so they can not say with certainty when doctors first encountered anyone infected with the virus that came to be known as SARS-CoV-2.

But if covid had indeed been spreading under the radar since around Christmas, the pattern of patient visits to UCLA facilities would have looked a lot like what actually happened.

A significantly higher number of patients with respiratory complaints and diseases starting in late December 2019 and continuing through February 2020 suggests community spread of SARS-CoV-2 prior to established clinical awareness and testing capabilities. To look for signs of early covid patients, researchers searched through more than 9.5 million outpatient visits, nearly 575,000 emergency room visits, and almost 250,000 hospital admissions going back more than five years. Medical records that said a patient complained of a cough were included in the analysis.

The researchers counted a total of 2,938 patients who went to a clinic seeking help for a cough in the 13 weeks between December 1st 2019 and February 29th 2020. That was about 1,047 more than the average number of cough patients seen during the same three-month period in the previous five years. It was also about 739 more than the number of patients seen in the winter of 2016-17, which until 2020 had been the busiest cough season for clinics since 2014.

In emergency rooms, the researchers tallied 1,708 cough patients December 2019, January 2020, and February 2020. That was about 514 more than the average for the previous five winters, and about 229 more than in 2018-19, the busiest of the five prior winters. Finally, the search of medical records turned up 1,138 patients who were hospitalized in December 2019, January 2020, or February 2020 and treated for acute respiratory failure.

That was about 387 more than the average number of acute respiratory failure patients admitted over the previous five winters, and about 210 more than the number admitted in the winter of 2018-19, the worst of the five earlier winters.

It is possible that some of this excess represents early covid disease before clinical recognition and testing. Breaking things down week by week, the researchers found that the number of cough patients coming to clinics this past winter was higher by a statistically significant margin in 10 out of the 13 weeks analyzed. That was also true for cough patients in ERs in 6 of the 13 weeks.

And inside hospitals, the number of patients with acute respiratory distress was significantly higher in seven out of the 13 weeks. Even if only some of these excess visits were from patients with covid, it could still be a sign that the virus was silently spreading in and around Los Angeles. As became clear later in the pandemic, about 40% of those infected with SARS-CoV-2 never develop any symptoms of illness, and those with minor symptoms might not bother seeking medical treatment.

That means the patients who did go to a clinic or hospital probably represent just the tip of the iceberg. To be sure, some of these extra cough patients probably had the regular seasonal flu, especially since flu cases peaked earlier than usual this winter. It is also possible that the 2019 outbreak of a vaping-related respiratory illness contributed to the excess. But the idea that covid was circulating in California even before December 31st 2020, when the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission first announced its cluster of unexplained pneumonia cases, might not be far-fetched.

We now know that seven patients treated at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center in mid-March for a flu-like illness actually had covid.

The fact that they all felt well enough to leave their homes and had no clear ties to anyone who had recently visited a covid hotspot suggests they became infected through sustained community transmission, another group of researchers wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Similar cases seen in Santa Clara County around the same time suggest covid was at large in the Bay Area by then as well. We may never know for sure exactly when covid arrived in Los Angeles, or anywhere else in the United States.

Still, the results of the new study show that data gleaned from clinic medical records can provide an early warning to emergency departments and hospital intensive care units of what is to come. Lessons learned from this pandemic will hopefully lead to better preparation and the ability to quickly provide warnings and track the next pandemic. In August 2020, the fast-moving Sonoma–Lake–Napa Unit (LNU) Lightning Complex fire raced toward Vacaville in California from the northwest, prompting frantic evacuations as flames swallowed homes and other structures.

Officials in Vacaville ordered evacuations for all residents of Pleasants Valley Road and all connecting streets and English Hills Road as walls of fire surged across roadways. The Solano County Sheriff’s Department ordered evacuations for residents west of Blue Ridge Road to I-505 in Vacaville and north of Cherry Glen Road to Highway 128. Emergency radio dispatches suggested firefighters were rescuing victims, including some with burns.

The LNU Complex is a cluster of lightning-sparked blazes burning in Napa, Sonoma, and Solano counties that firefighters are struggling to contain.

An update from California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) showed 0% containment for seven separate fires. Many evacuees fled with only their nightclothes, forced to rush from their homes with only minutes to spare. A full accounting of the damage done so far in the region was not immediately available. Police officers and firefighters were racing door to door in the outskirts of Vacaville to alert people of the fire racing toward them.

It was extremely warm in Vacaville after the National Weather Service (NWS) had predicted overnight temperatures would barely dip below 80. The forecast called for highs in the 90s in the area, nearing 100 every day. More than 32,000 acres of Northern California was on fire. The LNU Lightning Complex burned one structure and two outbuildings and was threatening 1,900 homes in Sonoma, Napa, and Lake counties.

Among those threatened were an estimated 400 residents of Berryessa Estates in Napa County, and communities along Highway 128 below Lake Berryessa. Many of the wildfires were caused by the extreme heat wave accompanied by unusual thunderstorms, leading to lightning touching down hundreds of times in the North Bay, all while the ongoing pandemic has complicated efforts to shelter displaced residents. A fire that started near Guerneville, dubbed the 13-4 Fire, forced evacuations along a 50-mile stretch of coastal land, ranging from Bodega Bay to north of Sea Ranch and well inland. Mandatory evacuations were also put in place for parts of Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Napa counties.

In Marin County, a fire started at Point Reyes National Seashore, sending smoke south along the coast into San Francisco in California.

Outside the Bay Area, residents were evacuated or told to prepare to evacuate in parts of Butte, Nevada, San Joaquin, Santa Cruz, Stanislaus, and Monterey counties. Governor Gavin Newsom responded to the two dozen-plus fires across the state by declaring a state of emergency, allowing California to receive mutual aid from other states and secure federal grants. The Complex included the Hennessey Fire, the Gamble Fire, the 15-10 Fire, and the 13-4 Fire west of Healdburg in Sonoma County.